He Shoots, He Scores: The Brave New Web

I am happy to report that after nine months at Oxford studying citizen journalism I have decided absolutely nothing.

No, that's not entirely true. I've learned a lot and arguably even formed a few opinions. (I sketched some of them out recently in a guest post at Kyle MacRae's Frontline Club blog.) But the main impression I have is of an industry--journalism--in a state of flux that is, depending on your particular outlook and constitution, either nauseating or exhilarating. Or a bit of both.

We're making the rules up as we go along. And how else would we do it? I'm reminded of James Naismith and the game he refined over years: basketball. Here's a great video re-creation of what that process may have been like. Naismith started out with peach baskets nailed to the wall rather than string nets around stiff metal hoops. The baskets still had the bottoms on them, until someone had the idea to cut them off. (Thus depriving some poor unskilled worker of a job: the ladder-climbing basketball basket-emptier.)

I know I'm stretching the analogy past the breaking point--traveling, you might say--but journalism today
probably hasn't cut the bottoms off its digital peach baskets. ("Digital Peach Basket": the new album by Moby.) That we're still finding our way is evident in two stories in today's Guardian. Reader' editor Siobhain Butterworth writes about altering, updating and correcting the paper's stories on the web. I don't completely understand the genesis of the column--something about a freelancer wanting to add material to an already-published piece--but I buy her central argument: You can't go around "invisibly" correcting/changing web stories, even if technology allows you to do just that.

Another issue is raised in a story about newspaper-sponsored blog sites. The Daily Telegraph allows anyone to start blogging under its umbrella (even me; I did it to test the process). Some 20,000 people have signed up and the Guardian points out that a few Telegraph readers have used the forum to promote the racist British National Party. What responsibility does the newspaper have? The Telegraph's Shane Richmond stirs up plenty of debate in his blog posting on that issue.

The irony is that the Guardian's Comment Is Free section is chockablock with vituperative backbiting of a most disagreeable nature. The Guardian points out that those sorts of comments are posted by readers in reaction to sanctioned bloggers and that the remarks are moderated (as are MyTelegraph's; and both sites allow readers to report posts they find beyond the pale). I suspect the Telegraph thinks this is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

But, see, this is us experimenting to see what works. Years from now we may look back and think it was crazy to host reader blogs, or we may wonder what all the fuss was about.

Video Killed the Internet Star
I was curious what sort of video quality my Canon compact digital camera was capable of, so I shot a couple of events this weekend. And, being the compleat digital journalist, I stuck them on YouTube. Here's some of the Summertown Street Festival (the fast-mo, slow-mo is an "arty" effect I added in iMovie):



And here's a bit of the Oxford Town & Gown 10K:




While I wouldn't want to use the camera to shoot an Indiana Jones movie, the quality's not too bad. And note that as of 9:30 this morning about a dozen people had watched each. True, that's not very many, but it's amazing that anyone watched them at all, given that I just slipped them into the great vat of YouTube content. There's probably a Long Tail point to be made here.

Stop Your Sobbing
Don't forget: "Flat Earth News's" Nick Davies, speaking in Cambridge tonight. I'll be there too.

I'm Sorry, So Sorry, Please Accept My Apology...

But journalism is blind, and I was too blind to see....

That's an updated version of the Brenda Lee song that the owner of the Daily Express and the Daily Star is singing today. This morning press baron Richard Desmond's two titles printed "unprecedented" front page apologies for their coverage of Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old British girl who went missing last year in Portugal. Her parents had sued the papers, arguing that the Express and Star had basically convicted them of killing their daughter then covering up her death.

Of course, it's still possible that they did exactly that. But what both apologies say is that Kate and Gerry McCann are "completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter's disappearance."


The papers' apologies sound like one of those "corrections" in Private Eye: "Like every other English paper, The Daily Bastard may have given the impression that Kate and Gerry McCann were necromancers who had killed their child in a fit of Satanic bloodlust and supped upon her still-warm corpse. We now realise they are, in fact, wonderful, loving parents who only wanted the best for their daughter and that they should be hosting a BBC family holiday travel program. The Bastard regrets the error."

When the rest of my family saw the apologies this morning (after first berating me for buying those papers) each one said, "Oh, so they found her then?" They assumed there had been some resolution to the case. How else would the papers feel so confident to go to press with such a statement (completely innocent)? After all, according to Portuguese authorities the couple are still official suspects.

I'm not saying the McCanns did it, or even that I think they did it. Just that a newspaper should only say as much as it's confident it can say. Of course, if the Express and Star had done that from the start they wouldn't have had to shell out $1 million in damages, money that is going to a "find Madeleine" fund. I don't know what the specific articles that the McCanns complained about said, though I can imagine. There are parts of the British press that exist almost in another universe, newspapers that take a tiny shred of reality and construct a fantastical carapace around it. I admit it's entertaining, and I don't want to sound like one of those prudish press critics who writes as if afflicted with permanent heartburn, but the downside to such sensational coverage is apparent from what is on the front pages of those tabloids today: a total about-face based on no evidence due to the fact that their earlier stories were based on no evidence.

Shaned and Named
I'll write some time soon about a trip I took last week to the impressive offices of the Daily Telegraph. Impressive because of the total integration of Web and newspaper but also because of the physical layout of the newsroom. It's a bit like a zeppelin hangar combined with a Bond villain's lair: huge video screens display the web site, the top Telegraph web stories and various news channels. Desks are arranged in "hub and spoke" fashion. (Here's a YouTube tour.)

Shane is the Telegraph's communities editor, which means he keeps track of the multitude of reader contributions to the web site. The Telegraph has gone into this in a big way and on his blog Shane describes how he got his title.

Let the Sun Shine In
A bunch of great stories today about the McCartneys' divorce settlement, in which we learn that getting $50 million hasn't made Heather Mills any less crazy than she was before she got it. The best headline is in the Sun. Playing off the facts that Heather "Mucca" Mills once posed for nude photos and that the judge called her a liar, the Sun offered an elegant one-word head: "Pornocchio."