The immensely influential Arianna Huffington has decided to launch her own version of the 12 year old Webbys Awards (which are kindof like the web's answer to the Oscars, complete with star-studded red carpet).
The HuffPost Game Changers awards [are] to honor and celebrate 100 people who are using new media to reshape their fields and change the world.
Note the use of 'world'. Unfortunately and predictably it's extremely likely that, like the Webby awards, they're unlikely to feature many non-Americans in the eventual nominations.
But at least they're free to enter, you just add a comment to her post. So these are the ones which sprung off the top of my head (I know I've forgotten some) and I'd encourage readers to go there, add some more and get some US attention (and possible support) for some amazing non-American 'game-changers'.
The Iranian blog/twit-osphere - it seems a bit churlish to single out one person, although this may make it harder to pick.
MySociety - the UK geeks who, before anyone else in the world (yep!), have been liberating data from government, mashing it up and making it available to the public. Their work has inspired gov geeks around the world, including the US.
Ushahidi - an amazing African work, set up to monitor Kenyan post-election violence and now monitoring elections around the world (more).
Global Voices - an amazing site which brings together bloggers from every corner of the globe.
Committee Addiopizzo - young Sicilians using the web to fight the paying of 'pizzo' (extortion) to the mafia (more)
And some Americans:
Samasource - who team with tekkies in the third world doing socially responsible outsourcing using the rapidly expanding cell phone networks (more on this here)
Today Nico said on CNN that President Obama's selecting him for a question during a press conference was not orchestrated, as the MSM has worked itself into a tizzy about.
He debates MSNBC's Dana Milbank, who wrote what Nico called a "dishonest" column about the exchange (it ended up having to be corrected). He calls Milbank - and by extension most of the rest of the press corps - out for using their opportunity to ask questions for frivolous ones like why Obama gets photographed in a swimsuit.
This has caused quite a stir. The White House press corps seem mightily upset that some blogger upset 'protocol' and got in a question to Obama.
Only it wasn't just some question, or just some blogger.
Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who's been doing near 24/7 stellar work aggregating and blogging news from Iran, got a question at the press conference, delivering a query from an Iranian reader about whether Obama would ever now recognize an Ahmadinejad government
I tuned into the afternoon of the Digital Britain event on Friday. (I really don't need to hear Brown, Burnham and Mandelson's reading out the pat words written for them from the morning session - just any resulting talking points).
The online presence for the event was good. Live video and live blogging by the stunning Mr Briggs. But the real action was on Twitter where #digitalbritain managed to hit no.5 trending hashtag on all of Twitter as the afternoon ploughed on.
There has been very little blogging about the Digital Britain event (which really says something) but Donald Clark has the goods here. He's responsible for the "too many old guys in suits and ties" line I've pinched and his point that "the debate has been hijacked by the BBC, BT, Virgin, Universal, Mirror Group and some irrelevant London web companies, who are really TV production companies in disguise" was correct too. The panelists really were almost exclusively a bunch of badly briefed no-nothing's with the odd scary one (the head of Universal music, who actually said "we're at the beginning of cultural and creative global warming" and, urgh, Sly Bailey spring to mind) and some shockingly ignorant lines from other panellists.
Apart from one guy who co-wrote the Digital Britain report, Andrew Chitty, the most origial and useful stuff came from the audience such as this great line "the #1 threat to creatives is not piracy but obscurity" or about how the UK digitech industry grew from the "unintended consequences" of BBC Micro.
The event reached it's significant low point right at the end when a very bored looking Stephen Fry finally got to speak and blew open the whole event by slamming the idea of 'digital skills'. Finally some smartness, finally some original thought, finally some wit. The Twittosphere lit up.
And then it was over. Thanks to the BBC's Nick Higham, Fry got to add one more point in but was otherwise unable to speak. Their loss. Our loss as well I guess but the quality of 'debate' was shown by just how many panelists played the man (Fry was 'out of touch' by being smart, by being a geek) or the analogy he used rather than addressing his actual point.
Fry was right. We have always had the need for 'media literacy', to be able to read-between-the-lines of TV reporting and newspapers to get to the truth. This is as true online as off. This isn't new.
The constantly restated 'need' to train people in this 'digital literacy', with 'digital skills', to feel the need to constantly restate a policy fear of the net as being a (unique) source of untruths, misses the point and is disconnected because, as usual, the people pushing it laregly exist within a back patting egov walled garden. (There's also an unmentionable self-interest at work.)
Digital development for all, for the great unwashed, is about easier to use tech Fry said. About meeting the problem of finding stuff through better designed search. Yes you can train people on mouse use but development will have to (does) address those barriers otherwise its shit won't sell.
Most stuff still isn't that easy to use (cf Nielsen), but it is getting better: there's another Moore's law here maybe? Fry's analogy related to learning to drive - these days it's much easier. I've pointed before to the now 40-year old and still going development of ATM usability.
Breaching the digital divide is about content people want and stuff they can use: we're getting towards a true tipping point where people will both want and need.
In Africa a majority now use mobile phones - because they need to. If you want a day job in Kenya you can only find them through notification on a mobile. UK industry hasn't thought that far yet! That's not government's fault but it is government's fault if it thinks the 'digital divide' (or 'accessibility') for that matter is simply about better access to public services!
The lowest point of the event and the one which stopped me in my tracks ('wtf?') was the keynote by Sly Bailey, who runs the Mirror Group (and Donald reminds me is "a non-exec at EMI, known for its inept response to the digital music revolution"). Introduced like she was going to focus intelligently on the demise of local newspapers, she provoked a flurry of tweets from me as I have seen her in action.
During the dotcom boom she headed magazine behemoth IPC Media whose 'digital investments' as they now would be called crashed losing at least £35m. So many of them were oversold propositions along the lines of the infamous boo.com, the unusable, trendy clothes retailer who burnt £125m of investor money before going - entirely predictably - tits-up.
I sat in countless meetings where she listened wide-eyed as sales people sold her something (always looking - literally - just gorgeous on - literal - paper) so obviously overworked and useless I wanted to scream. But she wasn't interested in the thoughts of little people, her own paid staff, these sales guys knew exactly how to press her buttons (beggar the thought) and so ridiculous site after expensive ridiculous site was built.
A quater of a million was blown on the (god preserve us) Flash driven (because flash designers were expensive I ended up concluding) corporate site - this was 2000 remember. After it's 'launch' the mega-design firm responsible took staff to one of London's most expensive restaurants, I thought of that as getting some of the massive, innapropriate overspend back.
Notably, the big survivor from this mess was NME's website. They had resisted the Group's digital interference and the site was driven by passionate musos.
After Bailey was poached by Mirror Group she presided over Fleet Street's worst newspaper web site for years before giving it a far too late overhaul last year.
Like most newspaper bosses she's laid off countless actual journalists, including lots in local papers. Now she comes as someone someone thinks knows what they're talking about to Digital Britain to state a line undoubtedly pinched from the likes of Jeff Jarvis that newspapers will only survive on their own unique content - their own journalism with its "deep and intrinsic value". Not the recycled PR and celebrity news done better by the TMZs etc. Which she like most newspaper bosses have staked their paper's current 'business model' on.
Well, doh!
Her business model solution to save newspaper corps? Allow mergers.
So, not only did the event organisers keynote invite to her sum up all that was wrong and patronising with this 'summit' but her inclusion I suspect as a woman when someone realised practically all the speakers were male made it even more patronising.
As I tweeted, I recommend watching the debate between the head of Associated Press and Arianna Huffington on American public TV's Charlie Rose rather than listening to a dinosaur like Bailey for a real thoughtful contribution on the future of news organisations and of journalism. I've embedded the show below, the debate starts at 15 minutes in.
Someone tweeted the (missed) need for an 'unconference' paralleling this sort of doggedly 'top down' dinosaur event. Ab-sa-bloody-lutely. The 'fake' Digital Britain report wiki, which some of the people who should on panels at any future Digital Britain event have set up, is a good start.
My night started with a really special all-women's dinner on top of the Davos mountain, hosted by Wendi Murdoch and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, to raise awareness, pledges, and support for improving maternal health and infant mortality around the world.
I walked to take the funicular up to the mountain with Baroness Shriti Vadera, the Business Minister in Gordon Brown's government. I noticed that one of her fingers was bandaged, and asked her what had happened. "I cut it," she said, "and then did nothing about it for ten days, until it got really bad."
"Wasn't it hurting?"
"In what I'm doing," she replied, "I'm dealing with so much pain every day that I didn't notice mine." Maybe because we were going to an all-women's dinner, I wondered if that was a comment that would only be made by a woman business minister! In fact, the whole evening had a confessional air, mixing the personal and the political -- including the CEO of Pepsi tossing her prepared remarks and talking about how haunted she has been by the image she had seen of a hungry child rummaging for food. And that came after she had confessed that after years of always wearing the same suit in different fabrics and colors, she got out of her comfort zone for the first time as she was dressing for the dinner and wore something completely different that she had bought years ago and had left languishing in her closet. To much appreciative applause, she did a turn to show us her sleek black-and-white dress and coat. Then she went on to tell us what Pepsi is doing to alleviate hunger.
Sarah Brown, Britain's first lady, who spoke, called it the "new face of feminism," while Melinda Gates spoke passionately about the fact that "at the end of the day, what matters is not how much money I gave, or how much I cared but what kind of impact I had... how many lives did I lift up?"
The evening, which began on a personal note from Wendi Murdoch, recounting how her grandmother had died while giving birth to her mother, ended on another personal note when Sarah Brown turned to Cheri Blair and, from the podium, lauded the work and example set by the woman she succeeded at Downing Street. There was a hush in the room, as many of those present were aware of how the two women had barely been on speaking terms. So altogether a great evening, demonstrating both the need to take action to help women around the world and the value of setting aside grudges closer to home.
Whilst, as predicted, former Obama online strategists can name their price, election losers, the Republicans, are now seeing the web as the foundation from which to rebuild. (So, Repub online strategists can also cash in!)
George Bush's former senior advisor, Karl Rove, (aka 'Bush's brain', caricatured right in 'rap' mode) reckons that:
The political Web 2.0 is about networking and Democrats grabbed the lead. The party that figures out where Web 3.0 goes will grab the decisive high ground in high-tech warfare.
Ya think?
In the UK, despite some well received development of the PM's website, only right now does his party seem to have woken up to how far behind the Tories (and the LibDems) it is online — and how damaging that could be.
(Last year I argued that if Ken Livingstone had got his online act together in the London Mayoral election he could have potentially closed the gap).
Gee, that Obama effect reaches everywhere ...
The best of Labour's online responses thus far has come from the unlikely pairing of John Prescott and Alastair Campbell.
Their effort has even received the blessing of top Tory blogger Iain Dale.
This was the same Dale who welcomed the online competition from the more highly publicisedLabourList, created by Derek Draper, the NuLabour insider and star of 'Cash for Access'.
Founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, has also been lending a hand - well advice - to NuLabour's efforts (lunch with Draper). Says Dale, Montgomerie:
did a piece [on the BBC] critiquing Labour's online strategy this lunchtime. Sitting in the studio listening was the old bruiser himself, John Prescott. While using some pretty garbled internet language, it's true to say that John Prescott knows more about campaigning than Derek Draper will ever do. If he can transmit that knowledge into an online environment I suspect his Go Forth website will outdo the disappointing Labour List.
Prescott has started his own BLOG and this afternoon has even taken to commenting on ConservativeHome to thank Tim for his well meant advice. You can view Prescott's response to Tim HERE.
Here's Prescott's first - yes - sweet'n'endearing Vlog:
There seems to be something terribly significant about the attitude and personality of the people behind the two sites: Prescott is humble, Draper is arrogant. The UK political blogosphere's conclusion seems to have already lined up against Draper's enterprise.
For one, Draper's LabourList employs the services of the legal firm Schillings:
Without the first clue about what this might mean to other bloggers. I seriously suspect that he chose them on the basis that his wife has hired them in the past.
Schillings are libel lawyers well known for harassing bloggers who question the big and powerful.
But then newly minted 'cyber-warrior' Draper has written "I am building a site for 60 million people, not 60 bloggers", has raised the middle finger to Iain Dale's very generous and correct advice, thinks three days a week's work commitment is enough and is enhanced by stupid PR claims that his site will be like the UK's version of the Drudge-beating HuffingtonPost —he obviously already knows everything about blogs and websites because he's a work of staggering genius. Not.
Pissing off key people when he's in 'beta' launch like he - stupidly - is just says it all. It's precisely the opposite of how HuffPost built itself. Snide comments isn't how Arianna Huffington has conducted herself. She put the hard work in to learn her trade, Draper seems to have nothing but contempt for the way this stuff actually works.
And it's partisan contempt - which is the entire problem with his approach thus far and why Prescott is far more likely to suceed. Despite all the rhetoric and colum inches just look at the content, the product. Where, for example, is the anti-third runway article?
"60 million people" aren't going to visit a clearly partisan (and dull) website. If Draper thinks otherwise he has everything left to learn. Which he appears to have no interest in. Because he already knows it all ...
Over the pond, the key difference is that it's not like the Republicans (GOP) are starting from nothing. (Which is my sad characterisation of Labour's position).
As with conservatives here, they have some very smart webbies, like Patrick Ruffini, who have been helping them for some years now. But they've been way outgunned by the Democrats for a while now on all online fronts, most importantly in the lack of enthusiasm and lack of smarts expressed in online by the party itself.
This is changing. On websites like RebuildtheParty.com, directly inspired by Obama's efforts, more than 1,300 people have submitted ideas for using online social networks to modernize how the party raises money and mobilizes supporters. Five of six candidates in the 30 January election for Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman have endorsed the coalition's plan to make "winning the technology war with the Democrats ... the RNC's number one priority in the next four years."
The conservative wing of the American blogosphere in pretty large - and influential, they perpetuated a lot of vote winning memes in the election - and they are supporting the politicians about-turn vis online campaigning.
The problem left to be dealt with is that - like Labour - the GOP has always had a top-down approach to the Internet, using it primarily to deliver campaign messages rather than mobilize supporters.
At a conference last month at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Mike Connell, a longtime GOP web consultant and leading member of McCain's Web team, listened to Obama's Internet gurus tout their use of online organizing. He was skeptical. "Conservatives are more likely to look for information online than look for a group they can join," he said.
The other half of McCain's Web team, Rebecca Donatelli, agreed. "Our users are not using the Internet in the same way," she said. "You're reaching different audiences." She admitted, "there are a lot of opportunities for us to grow," but defended the campaign's approach, insisting that it was simply "out-resourced."
But it may not just be a question of the right vendors (or consultants) it seems to be about a more basic understanding of the interactive - and somewhat anarchic - nature of the Web. A joint examination by the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Berkman Center during the 2008 presidential campaign revealed a fundamental difference in the candidates' approach to blogging.
The study found that while the Obama campaign reached out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, the McCain campaign took a top-down approach to the horizontal network of blogs and used it as an echo chamber for its ideas.
This approach is partly explained by the fact that McCain's blogger outreach coordinator, Patrick Hynes, heads a firm that advises corporations on how to use the blogosphere as part of their public relations strategies.
In 2006, he was accused of masquerading as a 20-year old blogger to promote the telecom corporation Verizon's position on cable regulation. That same year, he blogged in support of McCain without disclosing that he was on the payroll as a political consultant for McCain's political action committee, Straight Talk America. Not long afterward, Hyynes was outed by the National Review's Jim Geraghty.
As president of New Media Strategics, Hynes touts his understanding of "how bloggers receive and process information... what energizes them and, just as important, what turns them off." One of the company's services is "alliance building," which makes use of its existing relationship with bloggers to "create powerful alliances to deliver your brand message and reputation through the New Media."
When McCain became the GOP's lead candidate, Hynes reached out to "top-tier, right-of-center bloggers" such as Red State's Erick Erickson, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, Jim Geraghty at National Review Online and Glenn Reynolds - aka InstaPundit - at Pajamas Media.
We pitch stories to folks online in much the same way a campaign pitches to talk radio journalists. We give them our information, and try to give them our angle [aka 'talking points']. Usually when I'm talking to them its not a big stretch to write something that would agree with our world view.
Doesn't this sound just like how NuLabour might approach 'new media'? Like something Draper might say?
Hynes touts this service on the New Media Strategics website as a "blog release" - conceptualizing, drafting and delivering "blog-friendly content (including podcasts and vodcasts) for placement on friendly or relevant blog venues."
It was all about getting information down from the top of the campaign to individuals. That's why we started the McCainNow.com and LetsGetThisRight.com and... social networking sites so that supporters could build a network.
Marston said his groups received no financial support or direction from the McCain campaign, but were so involved among online activists that Meghan McCain (John McCain's daughter) misidentified Marston as the "McCain e-campaign coordinator" on her blog.
Now he is working to register Let'sGetThisRight.com as an educational foundation and political action committee. "Adversity is a terrible thing to waste," said Marston.
Says Karl Rove's IT guru, Mike Connell:
The blogosphere is not just another communications channel. It is an activism channel, a fundraising channel. We're getting caught up on that point of view.
Many conservative activists have looked to groups such as MoveOn.org for inspiration. MoveOn was formed in response to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, it has been cited in some accounts as a factor which helped propel the Democratic Party to power in the 2006 midterm US Congressional elections.
"I believe we should be looking at the left as the model," said David All, founder of TechRepublican.com and Slatecard - a website modeled on ActBlue.com, which provided important fundraising infrastructure for Democrats.
All acknowledges that MoveOn.org was organic in its growth, but says the left structure is actually "very top down, even Barack Obama. They just do a good job at making an illusion that people are connected through others. You get an email from someone who lives in your zip code and you think that's bottom up, and its really just a very smart directive from within the top campaign structure."
Some of this is true - staying 'on message' had a certain resonance during the campaign because the fear of an electoral loss remained so great amongst Democrats. This may not remain true if Obama pisses off the netroots. There's already been signs of this over the choice of Rick Warren for the inaugural and through some dodgy manipulation of contributed priorities on the handover website, change.gov.
But all the new technology won't help Republicans unless they have a message that appeals to the grassroots - a very key point in understanding why and how Obama's online tactics worked as well as they did (compared to - say - Hilliary's).
"I get frustrated with all this talk of what technology we need to build," said Jon Henke, formerly New Media Director for the Republican Communications Office, and co-founder of TheNextRight.com.
Unless you have an idea of what you want to do with it, it doesn't matter.
Ultimately, Henke argues the grassroots:
Needs to develop its gravitational pull with a compelling story.
Cue John Prescott.
Says All:
Republicans have to find a message, then we need a messenger, or vice versa. And from there we'll start building the tools. Amazing tools will never build a house. You have to have a carpenter who can use the tools to build a house.
For NuLabour, this ain't Derek Draper. Shock - it might well be John Prescott.
McCain is running a textbook Rovian race: fear-based, smear-based, anything goes. But it isn't working. The glitch in the well-oiled machine? The Internet.
YouTube video's massive virality, blogging and fact-checking, email and web-based fundraising. This is part of the difference in 2008: the other huge part is the web's contribution to Obama's far superior 'ground game'.
But there is a diamond amidst all this dung: the lack of traction this Rovian politics is getting. It's as if Rove and his political arsonists keep lighting fires, only to see them doused by the powerful information spray the Internet has made possible.
The Internet has enabled the public to get to know candidates in a much fuller and more intimate way than in the old days (i.e. four years ago), when voters got to know them largely through 30-second campaign ads and quick sound bites chosen by TV news producers.
Compare that to the way over 6 million viewers (on YouTube alone) were able to watch the entirety of Obama's 37-minute speech on race -- or the thousands of other videos posted by the campaign and its supporters.
The Internet may make it easier to disseminate character smears, but it also makes it much less likely that these smears will stick.
Those following this stuff will say that once this is over and the books and articles written we'll be able to more clearly see the difference the internet has made. Frankly I think it's already blindingly obvious.
And I think this will hit the UK in, oh, two years time?
The fear of activating the residual racism provoked by the caricature of the "angry black man" should no longer hold sway. As John Cusack points out, over the last 40 years, popular culture has been "filled with images of strong, powerful black actors who have been able to express righteous rage and still capture our affection and respect. From Sidney Poitier to Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Morgan Freeman -- these are men who have the inherent dignity to express the kind of cosmic rage that comes from being human and responding to injustice. They are perceived as authentic and powerful precisely because they show us their anger as they fight for what is right and true and good. If they didn't, we wouldn't respect them."
Picture Poitier as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Nightwhen Rod Steiger's southern sheriff mocks his "funny name for a nigger boy from Philadelphia" and asks, "What do they call you up there?"
Righteous rage drips from every syllable of his five-word answer: "They call me Mister Tibbs!"
My piece on 'Why Obama could be good for gays' has been republished by PinkNews, unfortunately the formatting fell through their template ;[
Arianna Huffington has been all over the UK media this week as she made a flying visit to London. I have been reading HuffPost since it started and am still waiting for it to do international news. It now has a green section and a 'living' section and, in London, much focus was on her move into local news.
The big, huge gap in American news reporting is international. It is very clear from reading HuffPost that even the liberals are plain ignorant. And why? Lack of decent reporting. It is pretty damming of Arianna's enterprise that she is putting local US news before developing a truly international section to her, now, very influential website — I just wish someone would say this to her and that didn't appear to happen on her flying visit.
One recent instance where HuffPost behaved badly was during the Burmese cyclone. They just reported and didn't link to donation sites — whereas the old school aka the New York Times did, and immediately.
Via Netimperative: Mobile advertising is the most unpopular ad format in the UK, according to new research from Dynamic Logic.
The study indicated that print advertising generates the most positive reaction with UK consumers and is seen as having the most relevance.
The Dynamic Logic ‘AdReaction’ study gauged consumer’s opinions of advertising.
His new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, develops the theme about how the commercial world's platform dominance will spike the sorts of developments which we need to drive the Internet further. I have always been queasy about the odd attitudes towards corps like Apple and their closed, exclusive partnership relationships. Zittrain nails why and I have to read the book.
I think that Tim Berners-Lee would agree. In a speech last week he said:
"How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There's no proof yet that for creative thinking we've done that," he said. "The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity."
The authoritative Pew Internet Project has released a report on the election campaign thus far and found:
46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.
35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos.
10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.
6% of Americans have made political contributions online.
39% of online Americans have used the internet to access "unfiltered" campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts.
5% of Americans have posted their own original commentary or analysis.
That's a lot.
One of the least reported aspect of the disaster that is Zimbabwe is the ecological crisis. This organization is trying to do something about it.
At Zimbabwe's Independence then Prime Minister R. G. Mugabe established a government of apparent reconciliation including Zapu leader, Nkomo. The apparent integration of former warring combatants, Zanu's ZANLA and Zapu's ZPRA, into one Zimbabwe National Army proceeded. But, behind what eventually was revealed as a continuing charade, the ruthless accumulation of all power by Zanu (PF) proceeded apace.
"The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)."
Rudd would not recoil in horror from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, one hopes, but that, too, is the image of an adolescent. For some months, travellers on the London underground have been unable to escape the image of a naked pre-teen, fully lit and meticulously detailed down to her faint cloud of pubic fuzz. But no child protection campaigners have picketed the Royal Academy.
Today's middle-class and wealthy lesbians, however, look mainstream. "I've certainly noticed a more glamorous element among lesbians," said Julie Bolcer, the news editor of Go magazine, a monthly based in New York that is this group's bible. Bolcer can be seen many nights prowling hot-girl clubs for news tips. She's surprised by how many women wear long hair and how "flagrantly feminine" many of her peers dress.
21st Century ad from Heinz:
Quote of the week 1, from Radio 4's The Learning Curve:
"Up to 20% of school pupils could be classed as disabled under the Disability Discrimination Act".
"Let's be clear: removing all the gay priests from the Anglican communion would provoke a serious staffing shortage; although they're better off than the Roman Catholic church, which would probably cease to exist if all the Hail Marys had to find alternative employment."
I've posted before examining the pretty shameless ignorance and bias in the BBC's coverage of the presidential election. It is clear that all the the BBC Washington-based reporters Matt Frei and Justin Webb are doing, and have been doing for months, is regurgitating what the US Networks decide is important.
There are a couple of current major stories which those networks are deliberately ignoring and which Frei and Webb therefore ignore as well. I think both British license fee payers and Americans need to forget the idea - which is especially popular with Democrat Americans - that the BBC is somehow superior to the justifiably maligned US media in covering US politics, when in reality they have been reduced to being just another part of the 'beltway' circus.
On April 20th, the New York Times published an expose of how the Bush administration had a program of paid-by-the-government, Pentagon-approved "military analysts" to appear on TV to help sell the invasion of Iraq, and then put a positive spin on the occupation. Propagandists in other words.
"Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks," the newspaper said.
This is a good video excerpt.
Due to their refusal to comment, there's reason to believe the TV Networks were actually in on it. The analysts were sold as objective but were far from it. Not for nothing has the expose of this major propaganda operation been compared to the release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
Hillary Clinton said it raises questions of "credibility and trust at the Pentagon", Barack Obama was "deeply disturbed" that the administration "sought to manipulate the public's trust." A Senate investigation has started.
Needless to say the story got absolutely no mention anywhere on those same networks, Fox News, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC, nor in newspapers.
Whatever one's views are on the media's proper role and its obligations to its viewers and readers (if any), this is a major story by any measure. These media outlets were either duped by the Bush administration and their own sources into feeding government war propaganda to their audience, or were knowingly complicit in doing that.
The fact that they simply refuse to account for their behavior -- hiding behind "no comment" walls of obfuscation or issuing cursory, empty statements -- demonstrates rather conclusively that they are in the business of doing everything except revealing relevant news to their audience. It's really the height of hubris, and unmistakable proof of their core corruption, that not even a front-page, lengthy NYT expose can cause them to address their central, ongoing role in uncritically disseminating government propaganda about the weightiest of matters.
Do I need to spell out how the use of propaganda in relation to misrepresenting the 'surge' might be of interest to the BBC's UK audience, given our Iraq presence and how tied it is to American actions?
The next campaign issue ignored by the BBC is the endless recycling of the Rev. Wright story and how this will affect the selection of the next American President - again, not something irrelevant to UK license fee payers - Vs. the complete silence over McCain's own "crazy preachers". There are several of them. You will have heard and seen Rev. Wright's "god damn America" on the BBC. You won't have seen either Rev. Falwell or Rev. Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on America's "sins" or the others Reverands.
One is Rev. Hagee, a truly loony fundamentalist whose endorsement McCain sought, was "glad to have" and has refused to disown.
McCain needs, and therefore owes these people, to support his campaign, to send their flocks out to vote for him. That's why he actively sought Hagee's endorsement.
Here's a Montage of McCain's Reverends.
None of this is being replayed endlessly on US TV news. Therefore the BBC isn't telling us about Hagee et al. Most shockingly, even when McCain was, finally, asked about Hagee's attacks on catholics (because they'd understandably kicked up a fuss) on Network news - he's keeping the endorsement - the BBC didn't mention it.
The difference with Rev. Wright? These are white preachers who don't throw their arms around and yell in a way which the likes of the BBC's Justin Webb admit to having difficulty 'relating' to and which the American media is refusing to focus on, whilst Wright has now been a huge story for two months.
As Frank Rich explains in today's New York Times, there is a word for the sort of hypocritical double-standards we're seeing in US media coverage of the election - it's racism. And the BBC is unquestioningly bringing it to you.
Amy Gahran is a content specialist who I've been reading off and on for years. I starred a post of hers asking the question:
Is journalism a smart career path in 2008?
Short answer from her is yes, but not how you'd think.
Betting that you’ll spend your career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most cases.
Given this reality, it "bugs" her that most journalism schools aren't preparing their students for the future of journalism.
Schools are not teaching the sorts of skills which they'll need to compete. These include
content management systems (including blogging tools)
mobile tools and mobile media strategies
social media
business skills
management skills
economics and business models
marketing
SEO
community management,
She explains more about just how they could be taught these skills in a follow-up.
Students think that:
Their career path will lead them to writing big investigative or literary features for major magazines or newspapers.
She finds that most don't have a clue - unlike many of their non-aspiring journo peers - about how to establish their personal brand or how to create opportunities outside of mainstream news organisations.
This is the sort of thing the Andrew Keen's and other King Canute's don't talk about (doesn't pay I'd guess) but the New York Times highlights one 'investigative journalism' - Keen thinks this sort of journalism is doomed - website which is booming, The Smoking Gun.
Says NYT reporter David Carr :
Much has been said, here and elsewhere, about how the emerging digital economy has decimated the business model of journalism. But the same digital technology has made each remaining journalist several times more powerful.
As working reporters, we are able to get information — through the public and government Web databases and proprietary digital sources — that our ancestors in the business would not have dared dream of. I know because I’m one of the ancestors.
And that:
The Smoking Gun has demonstrated that if you obey the metabolism of the Web, not the journalist, you can land with significant impact in a hurry.
This impact is happening in the US Presidential elections, where some newspapers (Mainstream Media - MSM) have adapted and are in the conversation, online.
Arianna Huffington, part-owner of Huffpost, which just cruised past Drudge as the top news site, and has both broken news and run 'investigative journalism' said in an interesting roundtable (The New Media Moguls Talk Politics) at NYU this week:
What is happening online is actually reducing the power of the mainstream media to set the narrative. The New York Times and the Washington Post are doing great things, but they are doing them online.
Talking about the MSM's supposed objectivity and why online news users are flocking to sites like HuffPost (and Drudge), as well as a slew of blogs (fully half of all Americans now read some sort of blog), she said:
People are now beginning to accept, increasingly, that not everything is a mixed bag. Part of it has been the coverage of the war in Iraq, with all the [MSM] people following the John McCains, like John King on CNN talking about soccer games, and good things going on.
How can you call this a mixed bag? It's like going to the doctor and the doctor says: "It's a little of a mixed bag, on one hand your acne has improved, but on the other hand you have a brain tumor." That's not a mixed bag.
There is a soccer game going on, while the whole world is falling apart and 4 million Iraqis have left the country, and there is less electricity than during Saddam. Where is the mixed bag?
That is changing, different blogs have different passions, our passion is Iraq so we choose every day to put on our top page what we believe is the truth about Iraq.
Just who is ignoring that 'web metabolism' remains a lot of MSM, particularly late coming newspapers like The Mirror and Daily Express.
And just how badly they're all doing running their web presence was shown in a piece on journalism.co.uk. Research by Ernst & Young said bluntly to newspapers change your ad model and be more like Google (or die).
Their report looked at the potential wealth that could be created by newspapers online and concluded the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad model they commonly used wasn't generating 'the necessary growth'.
The report suggested that if top newspaper websites generated the same revenue per UK unique user in 2007 as Google, which uses a Cost per Click (CPC) ad model, they could have expected ad revenues of between £120 million and £250 million each from their domestic traffic.
Instead the report suggested that many nationals total online revenues barely reaching 'one fifth of this amount'.
They calculated that the top newspaper websites generated £15m to £20m in ad revenue in 2007, compared to Google's UK ad revenue of £1.26bn for the same year.
The report went on to criticise CD and other give-aways as having "only a short-term effect" and suggested that despite spending time and money upgrading the look and feel of newspapers, publishers were still struggling to attract young readers to their paid-for titles.
Given how much ad revenue they've already lost from print, particularly classifieds, and especially given print's declining political influence, the major loss making slow movers are just going to become too much of a burden for their influence-seeking owners. I reckon The Express will be the first to go.
A More Helpful Help Site The BBC, excellent on the waffly PR. Now if they only fixed the search ....
Not on Reader:
The New Media Moguls Talk Politics: With Jeff Jarvis moderating, Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Micah Sifry and Lisa Tozzi talked about how the 2008 presidential elections have evolved, and what will come next.
"If it were not for the internet, I think it would clearly be the case that Hillary would be the presumptive nominee today. It has made a huge difference for Obama’s viability."
IBM: Planning a Semantic Web site. This article discusses what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web. It starts with a discussion of the problems the Semantic Web tries to solve and then moves to the technologies involved.
dot.com decade. Excellent, More4 News's series by Ben Cohen. Featuring Chris Bryant MP on Gaydar and a warning from Sir Tim and others.
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