Monthly Archives: April 2007

Will security journalism show its teeth?

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How hard will secur­ity cor­res­pond­ents push MI5 on the issues high­lighted by the Fer­til­iser trial? The Sun puts the case for the pro­sec­u­tion. The Tele­graph’s Home Affairs editor, Philip John­ston (whose per­sonal advocacy on behalf of the secur­ity ser­vices is a mat­ter of record) has the case for the defence.

So will this be a use­ful test of whether or not the secur­ity journ­al­ists’ role really allows them to call the secur­ity ser­vices to account? Or will it simply be another oppor­tun­ity to repeat in pub­lic what’s told to them in private?

To me at least, the scru­tiny given to Britain’s intel­li­gence ser­vices seems woe­fully inad­equate. MI5’s web­site doesn’t even carry press state­ments. [Update! A little later all this appeared.] They are dealt with by the Home Office…


Report­ers need some pub­lic bench­mark on which to report (a select com­mit­tee with invest­ig­at­ory powers per­haps?), not just their per­sonal belief that sources wouldn’t lie to them. Still, sit back and see if things are dif­fer­ent this time around.

Dead journalists

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I hadn’t come across this poem before from former for­eign corrrespond­ent James Fenton. [HT: 3quarksdaily] It’s a trib­ute to dead journ­al­ists, but it doesn’t work for me. It reads like a cheap Auden pas­tiche. Per­haps there’s an appro­pri­ate irony there? I prefer Harry Evans’ vale­dic­tion for David Blundy. Still, you might have a dif­fer­ent view.

Memorial

We spoke, we chose to speak of war and strife –
A task a fine ambi­tion sought –
And some might say, who shared our work, our life:
That praise was dearly bought.

Drivers, inter­pret­ers, these were our friends.
These we loved. These we were trus­ted by.
The shocked hand wipes the blood across the lens.
The lens looked to the sky.

Most died by mis­chance. Some seemed honour-bound
To take the lonely, peer­less track
Con­ceiv­ing danger as a testing-ground
To which they must go back

Till the dry tongue fell silent and they crossed
Bey­ond the realm of time and fear.
Death waved them through the check­point. They were lost.
All have their story here.

Contextual advertising

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Becca Owen, 22, and Chloe Taylor, 19, died after being thrown from a packed car with an exhausted driver at the wheel as the vehicle plunged off a dark road into a remote rav­ine. A news story from the Guard­ian about the deaths of two young women on a gap-year in Mex­ico was inter­rup­ted by the pic­ture below.

Scan­ning, I caught the face of the young woman — was it one of the dead girls? Why show only one of them? Before these thoughts had really registered I real­ised that it was a Land Rover ad, extolling the exotic, off-road pos­sib­il­it­ies of ownership.

It would have been gen­er­ated auto­mat­ic­ally (an ad for Aus­tralia appeared when I clicked back), but its pos­i­tion and mes­sage seemed utterly inap­pro­pri­ate. Still, you can’t blame a com­puter — it’s only doing its job.

Playing business politics with TV news

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I own a few Sky shares so I wasn’t exactly thrilled when James Mur­doch decided to buy a chunk of ITV. Still, the fol­low­ing announce­ment had me chok­ing on my chips:

Ofcom’s advice is that there are pub­lic interest issues, in rela­tion to suf­fi­cient plur­al­ity of news pro­vi­sion for both cross media and tele­vi­sion news in the UK.

Wow. “Suf­fi­cient plur­al­ity of news pro­vi­sion.” The guys at Ofcom never wor­ried about poverty of news pro­vi­sion when news budgets were slashed at ITV and Five. But now they’re wor­ried about plurality.

The bot­tom line is a single inde­pend­ent news organ­iz­a­tion might just have the cash to com­pete toe-to-toe with the BBC.

Ofcom mean­while might need remind­ing that digital TV view­ers can get CNN Inter­na­tional, Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish, Bloomberg, France 24, Deutsche-Welle TV, Euronews and a host of other news ser­vices should they so desire. There might be good reas­ons to stop this deal, but Ofcom’s advice? That ain’t one of them.

TV news “of the future”

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Veteran blog­ger Dave Winer has turned his atten­tion to the tv news of the future.

I love think­ing about the future, not least because grow­ing up in the 1970s I thought we’d all be eat­ing our food in cap­sule form and wear­ing strange halter-necked outfits.

Dave could actu­ally get what he wants by TIVO­ing the news, or watch­ing it with a laptop to hand.

In the UK we’ve had red-button inter­activ­ity avail­able for news for quite a while, enabling people on satel­lite to decon­struct run­ning orders. The response has been utterly underwhelming.

In the mean­time, things that might help juice up TV news are:

  • bet­ter social book­mark­ing oppor­tun­it­ies to share stuff online
  • more soph­ist­ic­ated metadata with video
  • decon­struc­ted pack­aging, ie stan­dalone graphics
  • bet­ter online text support

Vegetable blogging

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The only non-journalism blog on my roll belongs to my friend Char­lotte. It details her efforts to get her son Fred­die to eat his veg­gies. The blog’s due to get some cov­er­age in the Tele­graph this week.

If con­tent cyn­icism and rev­enue mod­els are get­ting you down and you want a reminder of the charm and whole­some­ness of the Inter­net and its abil­ity to cre­ate con­nec­tions in far-off places, then check it out. (And if you have any sug­ges­tions on mon­et­iz­ing it …)