keeping the bastards honest

if this is the only thing that you remember about the australian democrats, etch it fast.

a democratic society exists in a state of fluid contention. one side can never have too much power, because what we do know about power is that it corrupts. to this end, most of our power structures are such that there is always a counterpoint, hence:

• a bicameral system of parliament
• separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches
• government and opposition
• prosecution and defence
• mcdonalds and kfc (i might be joking here)

if we didn’t have this system, power shifts to one group and then we have a problem.

public opinion

public opinion, and consequently consent, is where all our human institutions derive their power. much of that opinion is informed by the media (old or new). the media is where we tell our stories, and stories are told of us. these stories over time form reputation, credibility and ultimately for a basis for power. be that market power, social power or governmental power. power influences consent.

the hacks

we rely on the hacks to watch our institutions and ensure that the public are informed on what they are doing, so that we, the people, can give our consent. we rely on them to be honest, accurate and fair. as humans though, their stories will be coloured from their experiences and biases. this is often not a problem because often an experienced journalist with have insights that add value and interest to a story.

unfortunately, this is not always the case. bad news sells better than good news and a scandal is always titillating. coming at a story from a negative angle is always juicier.

the flacks

as flacks, we are the advocates for our clients. we tell our client’s stories from a positive angle and always with our best foot forward. this is neither a secret nor is it an earth shattering revelation. for us good news is always better than bad news, and a scandal is a nightmare. besides telling everyone anytime we have good news, we try to limit the damage of bad news.

this hack/flack contention, hopefully draws us somewhere to the middle of the road, and as close to the perception of truth as humanly possible. this system of story telling gives us as a society a balance of power.

the decline of good journalism

advertising revenues are drying up and media houses flounder trying to find an online model monetisation model. money is not being spent on good journalism and funding longer well researched pieces, rather journalists are being asked to churn out x number of stories per day.

this skews the power balances and this is not a good thing. In the long term, this means that the power starts to shifts to one group, the flacks.

i’m sure we’re a wonderful bunch but we are we are human and definitely not the untouchables. we are part of a symbiotic system that ultimately only works when there is equal representation on both sides.

i’m not sure what the strategy to monetise will be. there are ideas floating around. i do believe that with every media downsizing the checks stop balancing.

you see where i’m coming from is…

my father is a newspaper man, i’m a p.r flack, who gets to talk to alot of editors over the course of a working week. sometimes it’s just day to day work stuff, but other times we get to catch up and just chew the fat about where the media business is headed. we talk about where the whole “print thing” is headed and there seems to be a fairly good consensus that print’s never going away. at least not anytime soon.

times they are a changing

the publishing industry is going through a big shakeup. that’s not a bad thing. some publishers are going bust, but others are adapting. others are working how online and print are going to work lockstep.

a conversation with an editor

i had the chance to spend some time with the editor of one of australia’s top tech pubs and he spoke very frankly about how his publication took a massive hit. what it made him do was cut out all of the fat in the business, almost halved his staff and had to look at smarter ways of doing things. he then had to work out who was still buying his magazine and why, and then gave them more of it. he’s arrested the downward fall in sales, and the coming quarter he thinks he’ll have an upward trend again.

it’s horses for courses

i think malcolm gladwell did a good job at ted when he tells the story of spaghetti sauce. watch it, but the gist of what he says is that because we’re all different, there is no one perfect flavour for everyone. some people plain despise reading from a screen. they like to have a paper in front of them and when you talk to some people, they describe reading from a page as an engagement of all the senses. the feel of the paper, the sound it makes, the smell of the ink, the sun on them as they read an in-depth feature about darfur or the latest production of rent on broadway.

online changes the media mix

people like to consume news online. why? because it’s the fastest and most efficient way of consuming that product. it’s like drinking water. water is water. you drink it because you have to and then it’s over. when i sit down with the a magazine on a saturday with a coffee and bacon and eggs, i want features and i want them in print.  i want to scribble on the page, i want to take as long as i need to and not worry about battery life or hotspots or any tech. i just want to slowly digest 10,000 words and enjoy it. it’s my equivalent of a scotch or a nice red wine. it is a slow process to enjoy.

it’s about the best medium for the message

or the best tool for the job if you’re old school. it will always be this way. news by print is not the best tool for the job anymore. but when people sit down with a novel, or a features mag, what need are they fulfilling and does sitting in front of a pc best fulfil that need?

“the end is not nigh!” is not as sensational

of course. the headline is not as great, but i for one am glad that online has come into its own, but give me a copy of the good weekend and a double macchiatto.

i was not conscious of this until i saw a Tweet by blogger @longzheng:

it’s a shame it takes an accident to “show off” the power of Twitter and community journalism. let’s just accept it works already.

first and foremost, let’s stop using disasters to sell and justify social media – it’s verging on ambulance chasing now: denver plane crash, mumbai terror attacks and most recently usair crash in the hudson to name a few.

furthermore, having had some time to watch all of these events unfold and evaluate what’s being said, i don’t think that citizen journalism is really journalism. i think at best they’re eyewitness accounts at worst they’re complete fabrications. the fact that someone captures something on their camera phone or tweets something doesn’t make it journalism.

do we call it cctv journalism when cctv footage is captured of a robbery by cctv?

it becomes journalistic when:

• someone takes that footage;
• interviews witnesses;
• interviews police;
• interviews the victim(s);
• writes / records a meaningful story and
• someone verifies the facts quoted.

i don’t dispute the value of social media tools in recording an eyewitness account but let’s not engage in social media jihadism about it. twitter and twitpic are certainly useful for feeding information back in real time about an event. a journalist or blogger can then go back over this information and use it as part of the steps above to write a piece of journalism.

the intelligent consumption of media means that you constantly evaluate what you are reading and not merely accepting it as fact. this is less likely to happen if you are reading an established publication that you already trust because of their reputation. Calling a hashtag news does not fall into the “intelligent consumption” category, in fact I would call it indiscriminate gluttony of the social media variety.

finally, just from a purely consumer perspective i don’t want to consume my news in a fragmented piecemeal fashion over 50 different social media sites. i want a cohesive account – a story. i may read several stories to get differing viewpoints but i don’t want to read my news in 1000 140 character chunks.

eye witness accounts will always have a place – as will “citizen journalism”. will it replace the millions of talented individuals who pore over the information and tell us a story? not in the next hundred years.

journos as i have discovered come from all walks of life. some of them went to school, some of them did not (like my father). starting life out as a journo is hard work, if you’re good enough and lucky enough to land a cadetship for a major publication you get put through the rigours of the newsroom and start writing your first pieces. along the way you are mentored, fact checked and edited. eventually, you automatically do all those things yourself (and still get mentored, fact checked and edited).

when readers read your work they trust that the publication you are working for, by their reputation – the reputation they have worked hard to earn and maintain – means that your work is as factual as possible. when that journo has established a body of work that is credible, their reputation stands on its own.

what about a blogger?

putting aside the well worn path of tips and tricks, a search for “blogger credibility” will yield an enormous amount of results. Darren has a great series on this topic over at his blog.

the long and the short of is it has to be built up over time from a body of work. in the end, if your output is good (could mean interesting, factual or offer insight) you build a reputation. the difference is, unless you are already have an established reputation elsewhere, you have to work much harder. you don’t have the implied reputation of a major masthead earlier on.

of course, if you’ve made a name for yourself elsewhere because you’re already an established expert in another field and you blog about that field, you also bypass the extra time at the beginning.

once this reputation is established though, whether you are a blogger or a journalist is purely semantics.

it was this train of thought that led me to agreeing with @renailemay in the end.

the debate has happened before and has even made it to court. my reason for disagreeing with renai was that there was a difference in the standard of credibility. journos are required to fact check and research or some editor somewhere unload an ugly red pen, whereas bloggers could be anyone churning out any kind of rubbish.

i’ve been mulling it over and examining my position a little closer and i now agree with renai. the heart of the issue for me was credibility. if credibility was not an issue are both not the same? i.e, is the function the same and only the medium different? both are writers breaking news or discussing current affairs, one writes for a newspaper and one writes online. journalists can be bloggers also. at the end of the day they’re still both writers.

it’s like saying a driver of a car is a driver, but a driver of a van is not.

the difference between a journo and blogger is therefore just the medium.

next post: what about the credibility issue?

his posting today, on mccain cancelling an appearance on letterman at the last minute is amusing and raises an interesting point.

letterman gives mccain a ten minute bashing in return.

dk makes a valid point, in the social media landscape, can organisations and pr practitioners treat bloggers and journo’s badly?

the gang over at boing boing posted the photos of two dead soldiers.

the catch? the u.s military has doctored the images. eagle-eyed chief photog over at the San Antonio Express-News spotted the photoshop shenanigans.

it seems that for one reason or another they have chosen to cut and paste different faces onto the identical body.

without getting into conspiracy theories, the lesson from this is in the media 2.0 world, be transparent. don’t have a photo of the soldier patriotically standing in front of a flag? just say it, or release what you have.

that soldier didn’t need a flag behind him to be patriotic, he died serving one.

dutifully, i set about the task of seeking out these bloggers over the weekend. what i started to notice was, that the people who were talking about my client were not necessarily in australia.

this then begged the question: “do borders impact influence online?”

i am starting to come to the realisation that perhaps for some subjects, the significance of borders and nationality are being rapidly diminished.

obviously, where localism is key to the post the theory would not apply. if for instance the blogger of baghdad was in the united states, it clearly would have changed its effect!

however, in subjects such as technology the country from which a blog originates has a much lesser bearing on its influence.

in my past life as a technologist, my media consumption was a steady diet of:

• wired;
• zdnet (a cnet networks publication);
• scobleizer;
• jason langridge and
• others.

there is some localised content there. zdnet was localised for australia, but other than that, the others were based in the u.s or u.k.

i think the key thing here is that technology is universal in the developed world. most of the same technology is used across the globe. if communication is the reciprocal creation of meaning, then two people discussing the same technology topic on either side of the world would be able to understand each other because of their similar experiences with these technologies.

to bring this back to point, the next logical question is then if you are a tech company looking at your digital influence strategy should you draw your demarcation points around borders?

we are no longer talking about old media now where the local paper boy comes around to deliver your newspaper with local news. the internet respects not these boundaries.

do we as social media people now have to start revisiting how we divide work in terms of regions?

are we in fact trying force an old world model onto new world media that clearly does not fit?

i am starting to think that we are.