WordblogJournalism in a changing world

There is a smell of revolution in the air and it gives British journalism its biggest challenge for a very, very long time. With parliament devalued to Zimbabwe dollar levels the debate about our constitutional future has to be conducted in the media.

Will a media which has long been a part of the Westminster village be able to act as a moderator of the debate? In the age of the internet it is much better placed to do so than before as most now have areas where readers can join in debates.

We are at a  critical point in our history following yesterday’s ousting of the Speaker. The public is disillusioned with politicians. It goes back a long way, but one pivotal point was when a million people marched against the Iraq war in 2003 and Tony Blair took no notice whatsoever.

We wondered why all the Queen’s horses in the Palace of Westminster tried to patch up the banking system rather than change it. Our legislators regarded the bankers’ behaviour as venial: how could they do otherwise knowing how they filled in their expenses claims.

The word “revolution” — and I hope with the prefix  “peaceful” — is strong but look at the headline on the Telegraph’s leader today: Speaker Michael Martin’s downfall: Only the start of a very British revolution.

The Telegraph with its exclusive access to the expenses database has shown mastery of handling a story of this magnitude in the internet age. Every night the tickers on the news channels treat the newspaper’s coverage as breaking news.

The rapid spread of information to the public and the ability of all to respond has changed the landscape in which this debate is taking place.

The Sun’s leader does not use the “R” word but has something of that about it saying:

They should take an AXE to the number of MPs, cutting them from 646 to 450, CREATE an elected House of Lords and ALLOW voters to recall and sack bad MPs.

They should END the lunacy of MPs spending 700 hours debating an unworkable anti-hunting bill — but only SEVEN hours discussing the invasion of Iraq.

In measured tones, the Daily Mail says:

There is a great deal to be done, and the concern remains that the current crop of MPs are not the ones to do it. They chose Mr Martin in the first place.

They got the Speaker they deserved. Which is why his departure does not address the profound moral and political failure of the House of Commons as a whole.

The republican Guardian’s leader is fairly muted using “reform” rather than “revolution”. But the headline on a Jonathan Freedland column is: The Speaker exits with revolution in the air. I say, bring it on

The Guardian has seized the opportunity, introducing a new section of its hugely successful “Comment is free” web debate called “A New Politics” – “An open forum on how to renew our politics.”

If we are to have a real national debate much of it will be on the internet. Bloggers as well as mainstream media will provide the platforms on which everyone can join in.

The regional and local must play a big role in the debate, reaching people others do not. It is much less intimidating for many people to write a letter to their local paper or post a comment there.

There should, of course, be city, town and village meetings up and down the country, but who is to organise them? I thought of Charter 88 which seems to have been incorporated into something called Unlock Democracy. Its website has nothing on the current crisis, which says something about the state of the reform movement.

It is clearly up to the media to conduct the debate we must have.

I was encouraged last night by the enthusiasm, at a Debenham Arts Festival meeting, for the idea of wider community involvement in the creation of of content for the festival website.

In the run-up period people who are participating in the festival are being encouraged to write, upload pictures and embed videos related to themselves and what they will be doing at the festival.

And during the four days of the festival we are planning to have a team covering the events, making videos and writing reviews.

The festival is very much a community event, reflecting local talent and skills. We want as many people as possible to be involved and opening up the website in this way will enable people to be more closely involved.

You could call it a citizen journalism project, but that sounds a little pretentious. Certainly it is widening the access to a tiny bit of the media. And it will give me a better idea of how a longer running news site could work.

The Joomla contents management system has been designed to facilitate participation with front-end submission of stories and editing, again from the front end, by volunteers. The site is live but still under construction and will develop as we discover how people want to use it.

My hope is that it will demonstrate that there is a real appetite for community involvement in providing the news as well as reading it.

Looking at other festival websites I see that most are very much based on the print tradition of from the few to the many. In Debenham we have a strong tradition of community events and I hope the festival website with help build on that.

Am I alone in smelling a red herring being dragged through London newsrooms? The revelation that an ex-SAS officer, John Wick, was the man who hawked the MP’s expenses data just seems too contrived.

The story first appeared on Friday in the Wall Street Journal. It is all too easy to start developing conspiracy theories, but it does look as if someone wanted this information to come out.

The Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday followed-up with stories yesterday. Both referred to discs but today in the Guardian it has become one disc (a portable hard drive), a significant difference.

According the The Guardian there was one terabyte (1,024 gigabytes) of information. A CD-rom has a maximum capacity of 900MB (Wikipedia) while while DVDs have capacities of up to 18.08 gigabytes (most half that or less).

Of the four stories mentioned, the Mail on Sunday is alone in pointing a tentative finger at the original source of the Telegraph’s scoop. It says: “The House of Commons has recently employed former soldiers as ‘data controllers’ to prevent MPs’ personal information being leaked. It would be ironic if the decision to beef up security in this way led to information being passed to Mr Wick.”

What all this means, I have no idea but the pattern so far suggests someone is seeking to get information out. Whether it is accurate or a red herring is another matter.

Every day, while some MPs caught caught trousering dubious expenses compete to sound as if they have just completed time in a soviet re-eduction camp, others mouth ritual condemnation of sensational media.

Yet the most cogent criticism of the of the media’s role in the current crisis comes not from and MP but a journalist. Martin Kettle writing in the Guardian yesterday blames the failure to pay MPs a proper wage. He writes, in a piece headed “The true patrons of this greed are an over-mighty press”:

Why did Thatcher and the rest hold off? Not because MPs didn’t need the money or wouldn’t vote for it. They held off because they were afraid of the newspapers, particularly the Sun. They were not prepared to risk the wrath of Rupert. It was the press who stood between MPs and a sensible income. So the true patron of the expenses system against which the press rages today is the press itself.

He acknowledges the argument for fewer MPs and writes:

The cases that MPs take up today used to be dealt with by local councillors. If we want to spend less on MPs we should restore effective local government. Unless we do that, the current vogue for having fewer MPs is mere angry populism.

Finally, his argument is that of a London journalist seeing the media in purely metropolitan terms. The centralisation that has afflicted British Government is evident also in the media.

Kettle concludes his argument thus:

In the end, one has to confront the following serious question. What aspect of the restoration of trust in politics would be in the media’s interest? The answer is no part of it at all. A media that have become progressively less engaged with serious political argument and progressively more focused on personal frailty, foible and failure is one of the shapers of the nation’s political problem, not the deliverer from it.

He asks a question and answers it from a metrocentric position. From outside London the answer should be that all aspects of a restoration of trust in politics is in the interests of the media.

Strong newspapers, broadcasting and web journalism require strong local government. That means returning powers to town and county halls and finding a way to create a  regional layer.

For Westminster MPs this has seemed to me to be a no-brainer. At the moment they are expected to have responsibility for every case of poor treatment of an ingrowing toenail, pothole in the road and the failure of Susie to get good GCSEs.

The restoration of local power would bring democracy back closer to the voters and give the local press something to get its teeth into. At the same time Westminster could concentrate on doing the truely national and internations things better. So reform which restored trust in politics would give a debilitated local media something to get its teeth into.

Until today I had not noticed that the Guardian put on the web a month ago mapped data from the earlier, and limited, release of information about MPs expenses.

Charles Arthur in the Technology section today alerts us to the item he put on the Datablog on April 3. And his suggestion that there should be an immediate XML feed of of approved MPs expenses is not far-fetched — David Cameron suggested it in the Commons yesterday, if Simon Hoggart was not joking.

The power of mapping as a tool for journalists has been woefully under-used in this country, in part because of the difficulty in obtaining data. Not that it is always easy in the US as this report from the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press shows

The map in the Guardian has been produced with the help of Tony Hirst of the Open University, who tells us more in the OUseful.Info blog.

Data on these maps relates to travel expenses in 2007-8. It quickly showed me John Gummer was the cheapest Suffolk MP by a large margin with a total travel expenses claim of £1,361. So I am a little sorry that yesterday I poked fun at his £100 for mole clearance.

On the travel front the next lowest charging Suffolk MP was Chris Mole of Ipswich with £4,343 — more than three times that of Gummer in the neighbouring Suffolk Coastal constituency. The biggest claim by a Suffolk MP was £7,734 by David Ruffley at Bury St Edmunds.

Mapping makes it much easier to find and compare data from a huge file. But its real power comes when one set of data is overlaid on another. For example if a pig farm was thought to be responsible for polluting a watercourse, a reporter might overlay a map showing pig farms with another of watercourse pollution incidents.

This would immediately show if there was a correlation. If there was it would be a much bigger story.

If I remember rightly this kind of technique was used by the Miami Herald in winning its 1999 Pulitzer prize for exposing voter fraud in a mayoral election.

Mapping has become on of the most powerful tools for investigative reporters in the US. In the UK it is much harder to obtain databases but there is also a lack of skill in using the techniques.

In the Guardian’s new maps, it has depended on skills at the Open University. With the financial problems of newspapers it is difficult to see where the money, or will, for this training will come from.

This is one area in which university journalism departments could take the lead, provided the media is supportive: students want to know that what they are learning will help them get a job.

Its odd that members of parliament who approve of the police paying informers cry foul when a newspaper pays a supergrass for information that reveals their own misdeeds.

They moan about journalists who are paid more than they are, being gleeful about the revelations of the details of their expenses. Well some journalists may be paid more but the vast majority of reporters and subs subsist on low wages. MPs should get out into their constituencies more often (most have second and even third homes to go to) and meet some journalists other than political hacks.

Journalists on most publications — trade press and regionals in particular — have pretty tightly controlled expenses. Backed into a corner of their own making MPs are trying to categorise a whole craft as overpaid expense fiddlers.

And they portray the Telegraph as the wrongdoer for paying for the copies of their expenses claims, which allowed them to moonlight as property developers. Not all of them, of course.

Well, as any policeman would tell them sometimes you have to pay for the information that will bring miscreants to book.

I don’t much like chequebook journalism but have always accepted that it is sometimes necessary. Roy Greenslade makes the case well in his Standard column today as did Andrew Neil Radio 4’s Media Show at lunchtime.

Now I think I will take a walk up the hill to peer into John Gummer’s garden to see if his expenses financed mole control worked. I doubt it, they are persistent creatures. I had them in my garden once and had to learn to live with them.

Viewing this post, I find Google has put up some “mole control” ads on the page. One offers a machine to kills the pests at about £2,000.  The others  relate to the removal of facial disfigurements. Both relevant!

Henry Porter has a nicely evocative piece in the Observer today about life on a regional paper in the 1970s and some important things to say about the importance of local papers. He writes:

All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an inquest or badgering the local bobbies, democracy and accountability in Britain would not be possible. Local news, effectively local newspapers and their websites, is essential to our society and don’t let anyone tell you that the propaganda rags produced by local councils are a substitute for independent newspapers that can run campaigns, concentrate their fire on a council or simply cover the local sheepdog trials.

In the paper’s media pages, Peter Preston is also writing about the local press and supporting the idea of regional monopolies.

“Let Archant keep East Anglia safe,” he writes. I am not sure I agree. In the ten years I have lived in an area where Archant already has a near monopoly I have seen a decline in quality even before the latest cuts.

According to a rather unscientific looking poll in the Atlantic, media insiders say internet hurts journalism. It may be hurting great swathes of mainstream media but journalism is empowered by the internet.

We need someone, another King Canute, to convince these naysayers that the tide of the internet cannot be turned around. Even if all the providers of news were to lock out Google and put up “Robots keep out” signs around their sites it would not take us back to some golden age of print media.

Nor is it much more helpful to tell the old print barons “You blew it” as Jeff Jarvis does in his Guardian column (link goes to two related piece) today. He writes:

Newspapers looking for fault in their fall need look no farther than the buttons on their bellies….

Newspapers have had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 since the launch of the commercial browser and Craigslist, and 10 since the start of Google and blogs, to see the upheaval in the media and to reinvent themselves for a new age. But most didn’t and those that did change didn’t do enough.

A more thoughtful approach comes from Eric Schmidt of Google who is interviewed in the related piece by Maureen Dowd. He says:

The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.

Neither Waterstones, nor Borders, invented Amazon, and  they have been trying to catch up ever since. The British regional press did not invent Rightmove, more relevant in the UK than Craigslist.

It is, as Schmidt suggests, very unusual for established businesses to throw out their established business model and invent something new.  To say simply, “you blew it” implies that they had a realistic option to reinvent their organisations.

But this does not mean the internet is damaging journalism. Reporting at the BBC, with its licence fee, has thrived on the web. The Guardian’s ongoing investigation of police behaviour at the G20 protest has been enhanced by the internet.

The problem is not that the internet has damaged journalism although it has severely hurt the traditional revenues of most of mainstream media which pay for journalism. Peter Preston in his Observer column yesterday (on which I posted) suggested extending the licence fee approach —- we need to explore all the possible ways of paying journalists and stop blaming ofthers.

Peter Preston puts forward the idea of a broadband licence fee to pay for jouralism in his Observer column today. Whatever the initial reactions — mine is favourable — it is something which deserves extensive debate.

How to pay for journalism in the future in the UK has become mired in the similar but different debate in the US. As Preston says:

Put aside American notions of micro-payments for surfing the news or big dollops of cash from rich foundations to keep investigative reporters in business. We’re used to paying a flat annual fee for our entertainment. Plonk the money down up front and everything else comes without charge (unless we volunteer to help Rupert Murdoch’s pension plan). The difficulty isn’t that the system doesn’t work, just that what we pay for is morphing so fast and so bewilderingly,

Use a little logic to shape events, then. Split the licence in two. Lump conventional TV and radio into one package that, until a few years ago, would have been the only package around. Then create a second fee package for cyberspace.

It is very easy to find objections to the idea but it is one of the better ones around if society believes the journalism which exposes Downing Street’s sleazy blog ideas and unruly police behaviour is important.

Preston’s proposal deserves to be read in full — free on the internet for those who are not prepared to pay £2 for the paper.

The news today makes sorry reading for everyone in Britain who believes in freedom of information and that includes journalists.

There is the case of the German father and son tourists ordered by police to delete photographs of a a London bus station from their camera because photographing anything to do with transport is “strictly forbidden“.

A nurse has been struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for secret filming in a hospital for a Panorama expose of the neglect of elderly patients. If whistleblowers are in danger of losing their livelihoods, they are naturally going to think twice before approaching journalists.

While the Director of Public Prosecution’s decision not to prosecute was a clear victory for freedom, it raises serious questions about the Government’s attitude. In the face of this withering ruling, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was unrepentant saying: “My priority and the Home Office priority in this is to make sure that we maintain the protection of some of the most sensitive information in government. That is what we set out to do at the beginning of this.”

That is a worrying attitude and she is little redeemed by announcing a review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and its use for “trivial” purposes such as in the investigation of fouling dogs. The government was bent on this act is the face of opposition of many grounds including giving such powers to local councils.

The Guardian has a transcript of a YouTube video in which a police inspector refuses to give a protester his number. More chilling for press freedom is this You Tube video in which a police inspector orders journalists to leave an area during the G20 protests.

At one point a voice is heard asking: “You don’t believe in the free press?” The police inspector responds: “The only thing I believe in the paper is the date.”

The police have since apologised for for using Section 14 of the Public Order Act to move on journalists at the protest, but like so much recent legislation it is capable of wide interpretation. It was originally sold as a way of stopping “raves”.

Yesterday, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, whose work on DNA profiling revolutionised police detection, condemned the government for retaining the profiles of innocent people.

We can go on, but the picture quickly emerges of a state which has little regard for personal liberty or of the freedom of the press.