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.

The Royal Maul, or: Please Mr. Postman

When I lived in England 30 years ago (cue newsreel footage and jaunty soundtrack) the mail came twice a day. The postman always smiled and he often took the time to prepare a five-course meal and give you a footrub. Today you're lucky if he even makes you a cup of tea. And what does the postman bring? Bills. Junk mail. A daily exhortation to switch electricity suppliers. (Electricity suppliers are like hairdressers over here. There's one on every corner.)

Yes, the Royal Mail, that once-proud institution, stinks. Or does it? The mail only comes once a day, around 10 a.m. in my neighbo(u)rhood. But come it does. And as I've switched much of my "correspondence" from paper to bits and bytes that seems entirely reasonable. Where the now-privatized postal service does seem to fall down is on the sending of mail, not the delivering of it. And the problem is that there simply aren't enough post offices.

The trim little Oxford suburb of Summertown used to have a post office but it closed a few years ago. We have to go to Wolvercote or down into Oxford proper. And now the Wolvercote post office is going to be closed, one of 22 in Oxfordshire getting axed.

It might be hard for an American to grasp the notion of these post offices. They are typically just a window or a counter in some other business: a pharmacy, a convenience store. But the workers are knowledgeable and they'll weigh your packages and sell you stamps. There have been rumblings about closures for the last few months. The Oxford Mail launched a campaign: Save our post offices! Make your voice heard! They had a petition drive, gathering the signatures and sending a reporter (and photographer) to Parliament to deliver them. (In a Primark shopping bag, it looked like.)

It was totally ineffectual. Every post office on the original list will close this summer. I get the feeling there was never a chance to affect the outcome. I blame the Oxford Mail for doing what it often does: taking the easy route of mounting a splashy campaign without taking the time to delve into the root causes of the problem. Why are the post offices being closed? How were they selected? How does Oxford's distribution of post offices compare to other cities'? And if there was no possibility of the decision being altered, why did the paper string readers along with a silly, self-aggrandizing campaign?

The subhed on today's story is "Campaigners fail in battle to get reprieve." Campaigners? How about "The Oxford Mail fails in battle to get reprieve"? There isn't even a leader on the subject, as if the paper's editors have just dropped the subject and will now move on to the next outrage, scratching the surface of the next issue.

I'm halfway through Nick Davies's "Flat Earth News" and he would say that the Mail's reporters are overworked, having to churn out six to 10 stories a day. That may be the case and I empathize. But surely the newspaper in a town like this could provide coverage that shines a little more light and produces a little less heat.

On the Street Where We Live

To understand the cartography of North Oxford it's helpful to imagine a tuning fork. St. Giles in the center of Oxford splits into Woodstock Road and the Banbury Road to the north. Our house is between the tines of Woodstock and Banbury, in a neighborhood called Summertown. We're fortunate, though, that our street doesn't link those two arteries, and, thus, we don't have too much traffic.

But we do have some and we are often entertained from the comfort of our lounge by watching trucks try to negotiate our tiny lane. We'll be seated at the dining room table or on the couch when suddenly the sky will darken and a lorry from Argos will ease slowly by. It reminds me of a ship passing through the Panama Canal. It's a tight squeeze. You can park on both sides of our street and the space that remains is about as wide as a double bed:


That white box truck has just navigated the road. They don't all make it. Europeans know that when they parallel park they should fold in their wing mirrors, but even that won't help if the lorry is just too big. Occasionally a massive truck will turn down our street, its driver desperate to leave the warren of lanes in this part of Summertown. Hoping to find the sweet release of the Woodstock Road, he instead discovers that he just won't fit. He throws it into reverse and searches for another way out.

When we arrived here last September it was in a rented VW Transporter. It was the biggest vehicle they had at the airport and the only thing that would accommodate our ragtag traveling circus (children, suitcases, dog, dog's wooden crate, family of Latvian aerialists). With my heart in my throat, and my own wing mirrors tucked in, I carefully threaded the needle, silently cursing Volkswagen for putting three coats of paint on the van instead of two. There's nothing like going 24 hours without sleep, flying across the ocean, going through passport control, retrieving your luggage, retrieving your dog from the quarantine facility, and then driving on the wrong side of the road in a vehicle that has the steering wheel on the wrong side of the dash.

I pride myself on my driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road skills. We hire a car every few months and I can go from motorway to hedgerow-sided lane with ease. The only thing I can't do is parallel park on our street. Doing it is like trying to do a Rubik's Cube while looking in the mirror with an eyepatch on.

14 Minutes Left
I'm supposed to be on Sky News tonight around 7:30, talking about things on the web. It means going all the way to London for about 3 minutes of air time. But who was it who said one should never turn down the opportunity to be on TV? Gore Vidal? Paris Hilton?

Human Nature Loves a Vacuum

This is our new vacuum cleaner. I guess here in England you would call it a "Hoover." (Like Kleenex, that word comes from a brand, Britain's best-known electric floor-cleaner. The art deco building where they were once made was celebrated by Elvis Costello in his song "Hoover Factory." I pass it on the bus into the Big Smoke [the building, not the song]: "Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue....")

Oddly, the best thing you can say about a vacuum is that it sucks. Our old one didn't suck. Its hose also had the irritating habit of popping out of the canister when you tried to pull it across the room. This made vacuuming even more of a maddening chore than it normally is, since you had to walk over to the canister and push it along as if it was a quadriplegic. It was such a pain to vacuum that we hardly did, leading to the build up of huge drifts of black dog hair. Sometimes I couldn't find my house keys in the mess.

We asked the rental agent for a new vacuum and she yes, we'd be getting a Henry. A Henry? Whatever is that?

Well isn't he the cutest thing? Those eyes. That smile. He looks like a character from a children's book. Henry comes from a family of vacuums that includes James and Charles. (Basil has evidently been discontinued.) Okay, it's a bit disconcerting that Henry cleans with his nose, sucking up dirt the way Kate Moss snorts lines of coke. But he gets the job done--he could suck the white off an egg--and he makes me happy.

Let There Be Light
Speaking of good design, Summertown--the Oxford suburb where we live--is getting new streetlights. Road crews have been using cranes to pull the old streetlights out, a process that looks like a doctor removing a nasty splinter. I don't know if anything was wrong with the old streetlights. I guess they looked a bit dated:



And here's what the new ones look like:


Snazzy, huh? So sleek and high-tech. Notice the smaller, secondary light that shines on the sidewalk. There also appears to be a yardarm jutting out horizontally from the main shaft. It's oddly nautical. Perhaps they will hang festive flags from it--or dangle British youth.

Good design is important, whether it's on a Hoover or a streetlight. A well-made, well-proportioned, well-thought-out appliance, vestment, piece of furniture, automobile or building pleases the eye and, subconsciously perhaps, lifts the spirit.

Disraeli Gears


The design on this can gets the job done (the cap is a nice touch), but what I love most about the product is the name: Squirty Cream. That's exactly what it is.

More on Anthony Lilley
There was one thing I thought I should add to yesterday's review of the third Lilley lecture: When Lilley described how he would structure a networked BBC, he was at pains to say: "Don't touch news. Don't touch factual." I believe those are two departments currently on the chopping block.

Paper Trail

As previously described, I start every morning here in Oxford by walking to the news agents. This accomplishes two things: The dog gets a walk and I buy the papers, always the Oxford Mail and usually the Guardian.

There must be a word to describe the posters that British news agents put outside every day, the ones that highlight the big story from that day's paper. (Street sheet? Paper poster? Perhaps an English newspaper vet could enlighten us.) These usually advertise a tabloid paper, the main story boiled down to a precipitate of eye-catching--and hopefully change purse-emptying--prose. Like a good tabloid headline, the ideal poster catchline pushes all the right buttons, whether they be fear, greed, joy, sex, or some combination thereof.

I spotted a good example this morning:


"Grieving," "tragedy"--the perfect combination of pain and pathos. Even better, though, was the poster on the other side of the sign:


I dare you to resist buying the Oxford Mail after seeing that line, just to find out what exactly a "volatile man" is. (Isn't that a Neil Diamond song? "I'll be what I am/ Volatile Man....")

The story is here. I suppose in a less enlightened era the poster would have read: "Crazy Man on the Loose."

In case you're wondering what I do with my dog, Charlie, while I'm inside buying the newspaper, this is what I do:


I lash Charlie to the bike rack as if he was a 10-speed Raleigh. He drops the tennis ball he's been carrying, since he knows as soon as I come out I'm going to give him a little doggie treat. Then we walk home, he reads the paper and I curl up for a nap. Or is it the other way around?

The Goings-On at Number 28

You never really know your neighbors, do you? When I saw a young woman with a latte in hand going into a house around the corner from ours a few weeks ago, I assumed she was a student. "Ah," I said to myself. "She must be going to a tutorial in the home of a kindly old Oxford don. Or perhaps she is an exchange student working on her English."

"Working on her English." Yeah, I suppose you could say that. The lack of books should have been a tip off. For the woman was apparently engaged in the world's oldest profession, and no, I don't mean Amway.

The tipoff came courtesy of an anonymous flier that blanketed the neighborhood last week: tucked under windshield wipers, scattered on the sidewalk. There is a brothel at No. 28 Middle Way, it announced. Perverts are coming into our neighborhood. Something must be done.

And something was done. Yesterday around 2 p.m. the police burst into No. 28. According to the Oxford Mail: "Inside they found three prostitutes and a middle-aged man who were all quizzed by officers. [An aside: 'Quizzed'? As in, 'Who won the 1977 EuroVision Song Contest?'] A woman was arrested on suspicion of assisting in running a brothel and was last night in custody."

"Sex for Sale in 'Much Loved' Suburb" read one of the headlines in the Mail, which, incidentally, carried an advertisement for the brothel. Sasha & Friends it was called. There was even a web address which I, die-hard investigative journalist that I am, checked out.
"The offers on this and following pages are for time and companionship only," the site says. "If anything else happens it is a matter of coincidence and choice between consenting adults."

What a coincidence! I gave you 70 pounds and now you're having sex with me!

My Lovely Wife was walking the dog when the raid occurred yesterday. We'd been surprised by the flier (this place is literally halfway down the block and around the corner from us) and so were extremely curious. We'd look at the recycling No. 28 put out as we walked past, trying to decide what it meant. Hmmmm, prostitutes drink a lot of bottled water. And they don't care to separate glass from plastic.

Yesterday Ruth called me from her walk and I rushed over there to rubberneck. I stood on the sidewalk across the street. There wasn't much to see. The employees had already been removed and a half-dozen cops milled about near three police vehicles. I watched as two elderly women walked down the pavement towards me. As they drew near one said to me, "Should we ask what's going on?"

A brothel's just been raided, I answered.

"Ohhhhh," she said, in that Monty Python-in-drag voice that all English old ladies possess. And then the pair toddled on.