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The British National Party once posted my email address on their website.
I got 400 emails of varying degrees of unpleasantness - my favourite being the one that described me as a “nigger-loving, Jew.”
Yes, it takes a lot of imagination to work racism against black people and anti-semitism into one easy epithet.
Now the BNP says it isn’t a racist, thuggish party, but I’m certainly glad they didn’t know where I lived, given the nature of the material.
And I’m very glad I now know where they live. [more…]
The Columbia Journalism Review takes on a familiar trope - the scarcity of attention - and riffs on it in relation to journalism.
Attention—our most precious resource—is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.
Attention, with respect to Herbert Simon, is not scarce. It is a constant.
It’s just managed in ways that readers of the Columbia Journalism Review may find disappointing. [more…]
My chums - the Carnivores of Journalism (read in tooth and claw) - are ripping apart the lessons for the news media from the online electoral campaigning of President-elect Barack Obama.
Here’s my message for the old news media. You missed a revenue stream. Auction endorsements.
Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Facebook wrappers. This is not the Paypal public sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twitter his way to the White House. [more…]
In a post entitled Want to Hear What Katie Couric Said Yesterday? Don’t Read Portfolio, the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka points out that Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici had to pull down a story obtained under Chatham House rules.
Some MediaMemo readers have asked me to reprint all of Bercovici’s story, but I don’t have access to it.
How could Kafka have accessed it? [more…]
Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s micro-mogul, usually has a nice line in online media business analysis. But here, alas, he disappoints [my italics]:
1. Get out of categories such as politics to which advertisers are averse.… media groups cannot afford in the current environment to fund their most noble missions; they should leave that to public-spirited non-profits such as Pro Publica. [Typical Denton starter - except, of course, that he loves the less profitable parts of his own micro-empire.]
[more…]
The Economist has a proud tradition of anonymity. But in case you wondered who wrote the piece on the death of blogging - it was this gentleman, and he has a very entertaining blog.
Like Prof Jarvis, I’m heading to Dubai today for the World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda.
I’m on the council considering the future of the media, which - I predict - will be one of the most parochial, since media, despite its pretensions to globalism, is still so profoundly tied up with culture and identity.
Will twitter/blog as tech/circs permit.
(Flight/accommodation are paid by the airline and the government of Dubai.)
