mediations

News of the What???

My level 3 Media Ethics class was looking at the News of the World's Gordon Ramsey "He's an F-ing Cheat" splash this week. .

The F-Word star—who revels in his family man image—began his affair with blonde Sarah Symonds seven years ago.

This week they met for sex at a London hotel. Hours earlier, she made a trip to Soho and bought legal sex drugs for their tryst.

There was a predictable split between those who though Ramsey was a hypocrite and those he thought he deserved a good shaming.

But there was complete agreement over one thing - not a single student knew what a 'tryst' was!

I wonder how many other words in the tablod lexicon mean absolutely nothing to the most of their readers?

We also looked at the activities of the NotW's Fake Sheik Mazher Mahmood. In My Trade, Andrew Marr says: "To many (Mahmood) is the epitome of what real investigative journalism is all about. To others, not only his victims but some judges, politicians and broadsheet journalists, he is a bugging, intrusive menace and a blot on the trade.”

One of his harshest critics is Roy Greenslade: read Why I am out to nail Mazher Mahmood 

In a vote at the end of sessions. both my groups decisively backed the Sheik. 

Privacy 2.0: Ethical journalism in a world without secrets

Here's the abstract for a paper I am presenting at the Association for Journalism Education's conference in Sheffield on Friday. Any thoughts, comments welcome...!

Debate around ‘privacy’ has long been a key theme in journalism ethics and regularly exercises bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission. Journalists are accused of intrusion when they employ tactics ranging from aggressive doorstepping, using telephoto lenses, or scavenging through  rubbish bins. The contested area is usually when information is made public that the complainant thought was private and for which no consent was given; today, the rapid rise of social media is transforming notions of ‘private space’ as users routinely and voluntarily offer up large amounts of personal information to a potentially unlimited audience, including journalists.

Drawing initially in the work of cyberlaw expert Johnathan Zittrain, author of  The Future of the Internet (2008), this paper seeks to examine whether traditional notions of privacy need to be re-examined in a world where ‘secrets’ are routinely put on public display. Soon, photo-recognition search software will automatically ‘tag’ faces in online photo albums, already websites can use GPS and online maps to give a real time account of the movements of celebrities. These changes are upon us and Zittrain argues that words like ‘public and private are no longer subtle enough to express the kind of privacy we may want’.

So how should journalists respond to what Zittrains call the ‘privacy mosiac’? What are the consequences for truthful expression in  a ‘hyperscrutinised society’?

Trust and Flat Earth News

Nick Davies seemed to surprise a few people with a scathing critique of modern journalism which he characterised as Flat Earth News. Certainly he highlighted some pretty shabby practices in a curate's egg of a book - one minute I was right behind him, the next shaking my head in frustration...

One of Davies's key messages was that modern news organisations lack the resources to do their job properly. Starved of cash, newpapers are filled with PR-driven 'churnalism' and even apparently decent journalists have little choice but to rush out a mishmash of half-baked, barely checked information. It is a sorry tale: "Journalism without checking is like the human body without an immune system."

In Can You Trust The Media?, Adrian Monck has a rather different take on fairly similar terrain. His answer to the trust question seems quite simple - a resounding No. And his reasoning is compelling: why should you?

His mission is to 'burst the trust balloon'. "We need to teach people to live in a world where trust is something that is withheld. People need to be sceptical as a matter of course. Then they won't be so disappointed."

How journalism used to be...

Thanks, Kristine Lowe!

Live fast, die young...

The Grey Cardigan's Dispatches from down table are more often than not the best bit of UKPG but even he would find it hard to top a gem contained in Tim Bullamore's obit on the doyen of obit writers, Hugh Massingberd.

Massingberd's relationship with (The Daily Telegraph) management was not always an easy one. After one 'ideas' meeting he was instructed to find some younger subjects for his page.

Chipwrapper is a must!

Martin Bellam has invented a really impressive set of Google-based tools which help you search UK newspapers. As well as searching for stories Chipwrapper offers newspaper buttons which give drop downs of the latest stories or launch searches.

I am trying to find time to write about the HSBC student overdraft climbdown and, thanks to Chipwrapper, all teh stories are laid out and just a click away. Brilliant. Thanks Martin B, (and thanks Martin Stabe for pointing me towards this excellent tool).   

An overview of the UK press

Handily for new journalism students, Peter Cole gives a useful (and fairly subjective) overview of the mid-market (Mail, Express), the red tops (old tabloids - Sun, Mirror and Star) and the qualities (he calls them the serious papers - Telegraph, Times, Indy and Guardian) in a Media Guardian 'this will fill a few August pages' series. There is no better prepartion for those about to start studying journalism than actually reading newspapers - especially the ones you wouldn't normally read.

Citizen journalism - or PR?

Right at the beginning of our PR degree I ask students to think about the difference between a news release and a news story. I expect this to begin with an idea of who writes them and for what purpose, and to progress towards a consideration of style, tone and content. As we also teach them journalism, some students find switching from one mode to the other something of a challenge.

I was thinking about this when reading a fascinating post on citizen journalism by Kristine Lowe. Her report on a debate that marked the launch by ABC Startsiden of what she believes to be the first commercial Norwegian news site to feature a mix of citizen and traditional journalism. 

It is well worth reading, but my attention was drawn to the very end.

One of my favourite 'citizen' articles from ABC Nyheter so far is a 50-year-old who writes a letter to the business life which has made him redundant due to his age. It's a very eloquent and moving piece I doubt would have been published by mainstream media. On the other side of the coin, I also found a story on ABC Nyheter which clearly was a press release for a fair trade shop.

I asked (ABC Nyheter's community editor Heidi) Nordby Lunde, (aka Norway's blogging queen, Vampus) about this, and she told me yes, they had spotted it and taken it down, but when she had tried to explain why they had removed it to the person who posted it, he simply couldn't understand it and said: "All the other media published it uncritically, why can't I publish it on ABC Nyheter?" That, I think, sums up some of the challenges, both for citizen- and mainstream journalism.

It is indeed a challenge, and neatly summed up Kristine.

What should journalism education be about?

Meanwhile, here are some thoughts from Jim McClellan, of publish first, edit later who has also been musing on what the future directions of journalism education (cited on Martin Stabe's excellent blog, which should be required daily reading for journalism educators!). AJE delegates will be interested in another of Martin's links, this time a post by John Robinson, editor of the News Record, Greensboro, North Carolina, which sets out his version of What a journalist needs to know.   

Teaching online journalism

How should universities which teach journalism respond to the online revolution? With caution and scepticism, if yesterday's Association for Journalism Education meeting is anything to go by.

The weather played havoc with arrangements and I was the only one of four speakers would actually made it to the University of Huddersfield. I was expecting to do a short slot on what I have learnt from my Sunderland blogging module but ended up trying the patience of delegates by covering for the others, including Paul Bradshaw, from the University of Central England, who has a couple of interesting posts on how academics should respond to changes driven by social media.

I think, like me, Paul would have been surprised by the number of delegates who who were unfamiliar with tools like FlickR, YouTube and RSS, or, more importantly, had spent time exploring The Sun's impressive and extensive online presence.

There was pretty much total agreement that the online offerings of many regional newspapers range from the weak to the embarrassing, and some spirited defences of "proper" journalism. There was also a consensus that it was simply too soon to tell where the influence of social media would take journalism. Whereas I broadly agreed with many of these points, it does concern me when academics are happy to stand aside and take a long view of important developments. Through initiatives such as Sunderland's Delivering the New PR conferences and Euprera's EuroBlog project, academics are working hard to develop and explain new concepts to PR practitioners. For my money, that's one of the most important parts of the job, to do research that directly feeds into practice.

Working journalists famously construct a first draft of history, which is almost by definition incomplete and sometimes wrong, but vitally important nontheless; for the academics who teach journalists and journalism to wonder if blogging is 'a fad' and to want to reserve judgment on the social media until its impacts are more clearly observable is, to my mind at least, a little worrying.

Anyway, it was a good day with some lively debate and some very interesting perspectives. And it would have been much, much better if Paul, Jonathan Hewett, of City University, and Kathy Hilton (London College of Communication) had been able to make it north.

It would have been interesting to know what Mindy McAdams would have contributed... Her evangelical take on what journalism education should embrace goes beyond what I would advocate for the UK in 2007, but it is certainly worth thinking about.

In the event, thank goodness for Epic 2015....