Running With the Dogs of Neo-Liberal Imperialism

"News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment" is the name of the new book from Daya Kishan Thussu. And Daya Kishan Thussu is the name of the University of Westminster professor who spoke yesterday to the Reuters Fellows. Just as one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, so one probably shouldn't judge a book by an hour-long seminar followed by an informal Q&A, and yet that's what I'm about to do.

Thussu isn't alone in his belief that television news--the main way the world finds out about itself--has become more concerned with entertaining its audience than informing it. It's a common trope. Thussu says that, owned by entertainment companies, desperate to hold dwindling audiences, eager to cut costs, news divisions have been lowering their standards, largely adopting the techniques of entertainment.

The world we live in is very different from the world that's depicted on TV news. "The world has very serious problems," he said. "Wars on TV are Hollywoodized. In the process we don't get the real picture." Thussu said that the "neo-liberal imperialism" of soft infotainment masks the reality of a troubled planet.

I had several reactions to this, the first of which was:
Mask away, baby! If what we see on TV news--which last time I watched included stories (non-Hollywoodized, in my opinion) about Iraq, global warming, genital mutilation, Darfur, dead dolphins and, yes, the occasional comic exploits of vapid celebrities--then someone's not doing a very good job of filtering out the death, despair and decay. I also wondered how his argument fares if audiences are still falling even though news executives have embraced softball journalism.

But what really confused me was that term "neo-liberal imperialism." I always thought imperialism was armies on a map, colonists on ships, administrators sweating in provincial capitals. I asked Thussu to clarify: Is neo-liberal imperialism the market? Does it mean allowing people to decide what they like to watch, whether it's a TV show on footballers' wives or a nature program about molluscs? Apparently it is the market.

I accept that global media has influence and that that influence may not always be a good thing. However, Thussu seems to be suggesting there is a specific mechanism by which western (mainly U.S.) media giants are seeking to pull the wool over the world's eyes. Bread, circuses, that sort of thing.

In his view, public service broadcasters such as the BBC are a bulwark against this creeping crapification. What's needed is global public service broadcaster, funded perhaps by a penny tax on each e-mail that's sent. How workable would that be? Here's your bill to support a Unesco-funded TV channel so we can bring you a program about unemployment in Chad.

The problem as I see it is that it's a short step from saying what people can watch to saying what people can't: No one's watching our story on Chadian unemployment! They're all watching "Hand Me the Defibrillator: TV's Funniest Onscreen Heart Attacks." Let's restrict their ability to do that.

What Thussu means, of course, is that there could be more, should be more, quality news programming. That's what he would like. I suppose I would like it too. But even a liberal like myself (I sometimes buy the Big Issue) believes that though the market may not be a perfect system, it's the best system we've got. Clunky as it is, it's preferable to a group of elites deciding what news would be good for me to consume.

And, lo! The market does seem to have hurled onto the beach something that would seem to fit Thussu's requirements. The web has made it possible for me to find news that, in his argument, the Rupert Murdochs of the world would like to hide from me. I can read foreign newspapers. I can sample foreign bloggers. I can access the fevered bleatings of various bloggers.

I agree with Thussu that journalism could be better. But I don't see its shortcomings as some sort of conspiracy. The media reflects the societies it covers while trying, in its imperfect way, to shine light into darkened corners. If some TV news program hasn't nailed down precisely how many Iraqi civilians have died in the war--80,000; one million; or something in between--could it be that this is a figure society (the market) isn't clamoring for?

It may be, as Thussu said, a chicken and egg argument: Do people become more interested in "important" news the more they're exposed to it? Or do we seek out that which we're interested in? Whichever it is, I'm uncomfortable with the notion that people make "wrong" choices and should be nudged in the "right" direction. I would call that neo-liberal totalitarianism.

The Aunt in the Attic
Well what about the BBC? The issue of whither the Beeb has felled more forests this year than a hundred Brazilian land barons. Thussu said he'd shudder to think what would happen to the respected current affairs program "Newsnight" if it had to compete on the open market, adrift from the safe bosom of the public service charter. I would say: Leave the BBC as it is. It may be a weird, anti-market anachronism, but you would have a tough time recreating its quality programming from scratch. Make it share its iPlayer on-demand technology with any other U.K. broadcasters who want it. (We all payed for it, after all.) But get it out of areas it seems to have no business being in. Travel books? Selling advertising on its international web site? What's that have to do with informing, educating and entertaining?

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.

German Engineering

One of the benefits of travel is that it makes you appreciate the place you came from. But another byproduct of travel is that it makes you question the place you came from. While it may be true that there's no place like home, it's also true that home can sometimes use a little improvement.

That's what I decided after spending the weekend in Berlin. Clean, efficient, cosmopolitan--the antique intermixed with the modern. A subway, trams and bicycle lanes. I think Washington could benefit from a bit of Berlin style.

It probably helped that the weather was great. All of Europe seems to be gripped in the throes of beautiful climes. Parachute anywhere from London to Gdansk and you'll find blue skies and warm temperatures. But it was more than that. I find Berlin incredibly art-directed, with an attention to style that stretches from the way its people dress to the typefaces of its street signs and posters. I suppose it might grate after a while--perfection can extract a painful price--but thinking of the room Washington has for improvement, Berlin definitely had some appeal.

I compared the shopworn and crowded Smithsonian museums to the tidy German History Museum. It was wonderfully empty, leading me to wonder if that's because the Germans already know their history, don't want to know their history, or just would rather spend a gorgeous spring day outside rather than in.

It was probably the latter. That impulse is the same wherever you come from. And after we'd returned to England and were on the coach back to Oxford, I was reminded how achingly green and beautiful this country can be. The verdant landscape rolled by outside the window looking like a ripe fruit begging to be bitten. That's what nine months of rain does. What am I doing sitting here?

Mother of an Invention
In honor of Mother's Day, The Washington Post Magazine yesterday published my story about Daisy Breaux and W. Clark Noble, a pair of wacky characters from the 1920s who attempted to build a memorial to America's mothers. The final design looked like something from Batman's fevered imagination and the whole thing ended just the way we journalists like it: in recriminations and lawsuits. I'll be answering questions about the story online today at noon Washington time; that's 5 p.m. England time. Click here to join the conversation at washingtonpost.com.

Citizen Bane
Kyle MacRae founded Scoopt, the service that pioneered putting citizen photographers together with newspapers and magazines. Now he blogs about citizen journalism for the Frontline Club. I provided a guest post last week outlining some of my thoughts on the issue. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that the whole thing is becoming less consequential to the mainstream media, not because it isn't important but because so many things are battering newspapers, for example, that they barely have the time or energy to think about it.

New Media Killing Journalism: Yes or No?

Up early and down to the Frontline Club in London Friday for a World Press Freedom Day event sponsored by UNESCO. It took the form of an “Oxford Union-style” debate. OU-style means a gimmicky sort of thing where participants must argue for or against the motion, in this case “New media is killing journalism.” Wow, killing journalism. That’s pretty severe. Whoever could they get to speak in favor of that?

How about the self-described "antichrist of Silicon Valley”? That’s what it says on Andrew Keen’s business card. I’d been wanting to meet the author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture." His book is an entertaining polemic, though in the margins of my copy I kept scribbling "So what?" Also arguing for the motion was Kim Fletcher, a former editor of the Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday. Against the motion were the BBC’s Robin Lustig, host of “The World Tonight” (with a blog of his own) and Nazenin Ansari, diplomatic editor of Kayhan (London), a weekly Persian language newspaper.

Keen spoke first. A bit of a slow starter, one of the points he wanted to make was that journalism is a collection of facts “for which one is paid.” Web 2.0 threatens that. People no longer put a premium on content from brand-name providers. They’d rather rely on the recommendations of their friends, as information is passed around endlessly online.
The future, he said, belongs to things like the Huffington Post, the unpaid blogorama which he says gets as many page views as the New York Times. (Can that be true?)

Lustig celebrated the ubiquity of journalism thanks to new media. Not only can you find him everywhere (courtesy of the web), you can find little snippets of information that would have taken days to unearth before. Fletcher admitted that it seemed crazy to think anyone could be against new media, and yet it was undermining the economics of journalism. He hates the term "user-generated content," since it calls to mind a "bucket of stuff" that can be slapped online. Ansari said that online newspapers such as hers, and the work of courageous bloggers living under repressive governments, show the power and necessity of new media.

I was among the “named speakers.” These were people salted in the audience who prepared remarks in advance to deliver when called upon by the moderator, in this case William Horsley, former BBC broadcaster and chair of the Association of European Journalists. I'd been instructed to start my comments in Oxford Union style, thus: "Mr. Chairman, I oppose this motion... because I hate to see my fellow journalists fall prey to the same sort of victim mentality that we quite rightly criticize when it's adopted by other industries that have failed to keep pace with changing times." Then I blathered for a couple more minutes.

LES's Charlie Beckett (below right) got to take a few swings at the motion too, noting that it isn't journalists that need to be saved, but journalism. And that means sharing the power to create something more valuable. Ashley Norris (below left), a former Guardian writer who founded a stable of blogs, said it's no wonder new media rose up to threaten journalism: People became fed up with a journalism that acted superior and non-responsive. Magazines are especially bad, he said. Before long it looked like the motion might have been "New media should kill journalism."


One audience member said journalism could be saved if corporate directors weren't so intent on lining their pockets and those of their shareholders, rather than reinvesting in the product. Someone else noted that new media helps facilitate a race to the bottom, as mainstream news organizations ape the tabloid styles of blogs and celebrity-obsessed web sites.

Keen tried to turn the discussion away from notions of free speech and the exploits of brave bloggers. He is essentially focused on the West and, like Fletcher, sees the issue as an economic one. There are also questions of authority. New media means that the "expert" is no longer valued and Keen urged journalists to "liberate yourselves from humility." He added: "I guarantee we will lose this debate. You will see new media as a good thing."

He was right. When the votes were counted, 13 people had voted for the motion, 43 against it and five had abstained. The motion was a bit of artifice--baby, meet bathwater--and I don't know if anyone there had his or her mind changed.
Changed, probably not. Broadened, perhaps. I have some sympathy for Keen's position (he warmed up eventually). And when he talked about how everyone is an expert these days, picking and choosing their "news" and their "facts" from their Facebook widgets and their world wide avalanche, I had a thought: Will that put even more of a premium on knowledge and "the truth," creating an ever-more Darwinian process by which those who can access, process and understand the news will prosper, while those who can't don't. I can sort of see it going either way: The web democratizes and educates so much that you needn't subscribe to the New York Review of Books or sip cherry coke with Warren Buffet to prosper. Or the web throws so much garbage into the atmosphere that only those inclined to hunt and peck--by dint of their education or elite status--are rewarded.

There's a much better write-up of the debate at Nico Macdonald's blog and the video will eventually be up on the Frontline Club's website.

'SuperMedia': Can Charlie Beckett Save Journalism?

I was at a gathering the other day where the host asked for a show of hands: "How many of you read blogs?" The audience numbered about 30, including many worthy journalists. Four hands, including mine, went up. Twenty-six people glared at us as if we'd just confessed to an unhealthy infatuation with donkeys. "Blogs," they were thinking. "Ugh. How can you read those sleazy digital compendia of slime and vitriol?"

It's the sort of attitude that drives me crazy and makes me want to storm the battlements of the mainstream media, pitchfork in one hand, flaming torch in the other. Then I remember that sitting at a desk on the other side of the battlements is, um, me. I like me enough that I don't want to set me on fire.

Eight months ago I came to Oxford to study citizen journalism and while I've learned a lot I'm not sure I've decided anything. I'm disgusted by the sclerotic worshippers of journalism's "Golden Age" who see nothing but rack and ruin in digital technology. But I'm equally disgusted by the techno-evangelists who keep promising a glorious future automagically assembled from the "wisdom of the crowds."

A new book by the LSE's Charlie Beckett falls into neither camp, though I'm not sure it's a total success, either. "SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World" starts by sketching the tale of economic woe that faces the news media these days. Losing money (or not making as much as we once did), losing audience, losing respect--these are bad things. But they're counterbalanced by advances in technology that in some ways make journalists' jobs easier, make us able to reach more people. And these people--famously dubbed the "former audience" by proselytizer Dan Gillmor--want to get involved. Involving them is part of what Beckett calls "networked journalism." He writes:

Networked Journalism is a description and an aspiration. It reaffirms the value of the core functions of journalism. It celebrates the demand for journalism and its remarkable social utility. But it insists on a new process and fresh possibilities. It means a kind of journalism where the rigid distinctions of the past, between professional and amateur, producer and product, audience and participation, are deliberately broken down. It embraces permeability and multi-dimensionality. Networked Journalism is also a way of bridging the semantic divide between Old and New Media.

Beckett is vague on exactly how networked journalism can be applied. He admits he's more interested in "the dynamics than the details." Thus "SuperMedia" is more manifesto than instruction manual. Because of that, it's sometimes hard to assess the claims he makes for networked journalism. The phrase is invoked so often that it starts to sound like a miracle drug or an all-purpose stain remover. News media losing its way? Try networked journalism! Citizens don't care about politics? Try networked journalism!

I worry about some of the practical considerations of networked journalism: How, on deadline, can a reporter involve an audience? (Especially if, as Nick Davies claims in his new book, "Flat Earth News," that reporter is being pushed to produce ever more stories.) What's to stop elites from dominating the conversation once they're invited over the battlement's walls? Have we, as Adrian Monck might argue, mis-framed the problem entirely?

Still, Beckett has made a valuable contribution to the dialogue. The message I decided to take from "SuperMedia" was this one: Journalism has evolved over time. There is nothing wrong with it changing again. It's a message I wish those 26 people who didn't raise their hands would take to heart. (In the year 2008 it's journalistically irresponsible not to cast as wide a net as possible for information. And it's stupid not to spread your product as widely as you can, however you can.) As Beckett writes:

Networked Journalism is a return to some of the oldest virtues of journalism: connecting with the world beyond the newsroom; listening to people; giving people a voice in the media; responding to what the public tells you in a dialogue.

As for whether it will actually make a difference, that remains to be seen.

Citizen Journalism and Barack's 'Bitter' Aftertaste

What is citizen journalism anyway? Maybe it's something more definable by what it isn't than by what it is. Clearly, my column in The Washington Post isn't citizen journalism. But does this blog--done with no support from or attachment to The Post--qualify as citizen journalism? Or does the fact that I am a journalist make it impossible for me to be a citizen journalist? And when people get upset by "citizen journalism" what exactly are they getting upset at?

A news story from over the weekend prompted these musings. Barack Obama's campaign scrambled to explain comments the presidential candidate made at a fundraiser in California. Obama had said that working-class voters in Pennsylvania felt abandoned by both Republican and Democratic administrations, adding: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The remarks were quickly pounced on by the Clinton and McCain campaigns and they dominated what is called the news cycle (as with a bicycle, once you learn to ride a news cycle you never forget). After having made up some of his Pennsylvania deficit behind Clinton, Obama seemed to sag in the polls.

The interesting thing from a citizen journalism point of view--and a detail that wasn't reported much at first by the mainstream media--was that the story was broken by a Web site called Off the Bus, a citizen journalism offshoot of the mighty Huffington Post. One of Off the Bus's amateur writers, Mayhill Fowler, had attended the fundraiser, as she had many others. She is a self-described Obama supporter, has contributed financially to his campaign and wants him to win.

New York University journalism professor, and Off the Bus co-founder, Jay Rosen has a very good description of what happened. He doesn't shy from asking--if not answering--the many questions the whole episode raises. (The New York Times has a good story, too.) Some of the questions being pondered: Should Fowler have been at the fundraiser? Were Obama's comments off the record? If Fowler is an Obama supporter, should she have reported his comments, comments that damaged his campaign? If she is an Obama supporter, should she be reporting on him at all?

Good questions, but I think they sort of miss the point, or at least confuse it. I'll get to why I believe that down below, but first I want to chew over some of the citizen journalism issues. First, for better or worse we are approaching a time--if we're not already there--when it will be nearly impossible to do anything in private. It is simply too easy to capture an image on a camera or some words on a recorder and then spread them around the globe. I suppose we could have something like the cone of silence from "Get Smart" but that seems impractical. Comments don't lose their sting just because they were said with the expectation that no one else would hear them. (Whether they actually sting is another matter.)

Second, when push came to shove, Mayhill Fowler acted more like a journalist than a supporter. She knew her story might hurt Obama but she went ahead with it. This is a powerful argument against those who see in citizen journalism nothing but rack and ruin. I'm sure that information can be mistreated--fabricated, manipulated, choked off--but so-called citizen journalists don't have a monopoly on that. Sadly, journalists do it too. What I find encouraging about Fowler's actions is that she weighed her options and made the choice that most journalists would make: She decided the ampule of information she could inject into the campaign discourse--Obama said some voters were "bitter"--was interesting.

It's my belief that many of the flaps surrounding citizen journalism--or the uneasy union between professional journalists and amateurs--could have been avoided with transparency. The controversy last year over the Cleveland Plain Dealer's bloggers springs to mind. A left-leaning blogger tapped to contribute to the paper's political blog was found to be a donor to a Democratic candidate. Wrote the Plain Dealer's reader representative: "You can't contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online." To which I would say, Uh, yes you can, if you're a freelancer hired for your political opinions and you tell readers about your donations so they can judge for themselves how to weigh your blog postings.

Citizen journalism makes special demands of editors--they must be very clear how one snippet of copy on their Web site might be different from another, from a different source, created by a non-journalist--and it makes special demands of readers. All of us have to be more media savvy as we filter the information that flows into our lives.

Finally, though, I wonder how much any of this stuff really matters. There are, no doubt, bitter people in Pennsylvania, just as there are bitter people everywhere. Are we so sensitive that we flinch when someone says that? Are we so sensitive that just calling someone a "monster," as Samantha Power did, is enough to get you fired? I mean, come on people. Grow a pair. Modern campaigning has become a process of launching an attack whenever your opponent says anything remotely interesting, anything that seems to deviate from the simplistic bromides spouted in stump speeches, anything that suggests a candidate might not be likable, as if that was the most important quality in a leader. All politicians do it, Obama included. And that's a problem that has nothing to do with citizen journalism.

Journalistic Check-Up

If you are interested in the state of journalism in the United States and have a few hours to kill you should click on over to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's web site and dive into its State of the News Media report. Or you can just read my blog entry, in which I try to hit the highlights of the massive opus.

The report says a lot of things you would expect: "News" is less and less the product of a specific day's newspaper or evening's TV broadcast and more a sort of ubiquitous gas that can be plucked at will from the very ether. "Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know when they want to know it," write the report's authors.

While specific newspaper audiences--people who subscribe to or read a newspaper--are shrinking, thanks to the web total audiences are growing: "Seven in ten Americans have used the Internet for news — a number that has not changed in five years." You have to wonder about those last three Americans. What do they use the Internet for?

The PEJ's annual report is always a chance to chide U.S. news outlets for ignoring the rest of the world, and the group's content analysis bore this out. Iraq and the presidential elections comprised about a quarter of total news coverage but other issues garnered just a fraction of that: Afghanistan (0.9%), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (0.5%), nuclear negotiations with North Korea (0.4%), the violence in Darfur (0.2%) and deteriorating U.S. relations with Russia (0.2%). Those numbers are astonishingly low.

Pew criticizes the media for not writing more about foreign issues, then admits that the public isn't all that interested in them. Of course, might readers/viewers be more interested in those stories if there were more of them?

Interestingly, news web sites--or at least aggregators such as GoogleNews and YahooNews--have more foreign stories in the mix: "Not only did coverage of foreign policy and geopolitics make up almost half of the online newshole in 2007, but the leading broad topic category also featured international events that did not primarily involve the U.S." The World Wide Web: "World" is our first name.

Domestic stories don't do that well, either. According to the report, government was covered less last year than in previous years (just 5% of stories on the three nightly news broadcasts in 2007 versus 16% in 2003). Issues such as education, transportation, religion and development/sprawl also get increasingly shorter shrift. These are things that sort of muddle along without too much drama, able to be improved but never totally fixed. They are, say the authors, stories that "bend" rather than "break."

As for "citizen media": "Despite the proliferation of blogs, survey data suggest most Americans have yet to accept them as significant news sources. According to a winter 2007 Zogby Poll, blogs were the lowest on the list of 'important' sources of news, coming in at 30%, well after Web sites (81%), television (78%), radio (73%), newspapers (69%) and magazines (38%). More Americans, 39%, chose friends and neighbors over blogs as an important informational source."

Readers seem to turn to blogs for entertainment, not news. As for those blogs--and citizen journalism sites--most of them are just as stern gatekeepers as the traditional media, making it difficult, for example, for users to post original content.

Still, journalists who were surveyed see value in involving the audience: "The vast majority now see great value in having a place on the Web site where users can post comments. Smaller majorities say that citizen-started Web sites are a good thing. (Print journalists are slightly more accepting of the practice than TV and radio journalists.)"

And what does the public think of the press? Yes, many believe the press is venal, biased and inaccurate. In 1987 55% thought the media got facts straight and 34 percent thought stories were often inaccurate. Those figures have practically reversed in 20 years: 39% and 53%, respectively, in 2007. And yet what the public seems to dislike is "the media" as opposed to any specific newspaper or news broadcast. It's a little like the way many citizens think "all" politicians are crooks but they happen to like their own representative.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the public viewing the press with suspicion. You should probably view everything with suspicion. That's a healthy, useful attitude to have. It's one that journalists have, so why shouldn't our customers? We just have to continue figuring out ways to earn their trust--and their business.

From BBC to BNC: Anthony Lilley Part 3

The good ol' BBC. To an American such as myself--well, let's just say to me--it's a force for good, a provider of quality television and radio programming and the repository of beneficial notions of "Britishness." But to an actual Brit it's something much more complicated. The British Broadcasting Corporation is the 800-pound gorilla in the room during any discussion of the media here.

Which is important to know when considering Anthony Lilley's third lecture last night. (I reviewed his first two lectures here and here.) It was entitled "Network Media as Public Space" and it was an impressive and largely successful attempt to explain why regulators and politicians need to comes to grips with the changes digital developments are bringing, going forward. ("Going forward" is one of those Internet-era phrases, like "long tail" and "space" [as in "social media space" or "search space.")

The forces at work conveniently all begin with the letter C:
Choice: More channels on TV. More pages on the Web.
Context: We can access information and entertainment in more and more places--a mobile phone while walking down the street, a screen in the back seat of a taxi cab.
Control: It's passing from broadcasters to us, "the people formerly known as the audience."
Conversation: We're increasingly sharing media back and forth, be it photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube.
Put this all together and you get the fifth C: Community--bunches of people interested in the same things, able to find each other more easily. We're rooted in our common likes, not only by that old limiter of affinity, geography.

Then Lilley moved to the principle of market failure, explaining that governments only invest in things that the market won't provide. That's the main argument for the BBC: The cultural, social and democratic benefits brought by the BBC wouldn't otherwise come about without the license fee. (Briefly, each household in Britain pays about 140 pounds a year. That money totals close to 4 billion pounds and it is the main budget for the BBC.)

But just as my act of sunning in the nude to provide my body with much-needed Vitamin D can frighten and disgust the neighbors, so too public investment in media can have unintended consequences. It can stifle competition. One can argue that a sober and thoughtful current affairs program broadcast at 9 p.m. on the BBC is important, but why do you need a celebrity ballroom dancing show at 8? Wouldn't the market provide that? Perhaps, goes the counterargument, but it's important to capture the viewers at 8 so that they'll stick around for 9. Besides, if everyone's paying 140 quid, shouldn't they get some value for their money beyond dutiful documentaries about global warming and dead sea turtles?

There are many definitions of what public service broadcasting should do. Lilley offered this one, among others: It should inform, stimulate interest in arts and culture, reflect and strengthen cultural identity, make us aware of different cultures. And it can do that by being of high quality (a heavily subjective area), original, innovative, challenging, engaging and widely available.

And here's where Lilley neatly pivoted and asked the audience to open their minds a bit. Interactive, networked media can do all of the things public service broadcasting demands of itself. Lilley argued that interactive media--computer games, Web sites--are by their nature educational. What's more, we are moving towards a world where there isn't an 8 p.m. dancing show followed by a 9 p.m. current affairs show. There are only shows that you download at your leisure.

In other words: Is the BBC putting its money in the wrong place? Should it be--my words, not his--the British Networking Corporation instead of the British Broadcasting Corporation?

I didn't hear Lilley commit to that notion, per se, and he was a little vague on what a BNC would look like. (More investment in radio; definite investment in educational computer games, especially those the market isn't providing; explore advances in "non-linear comedy.") But I think he's right that the landscape is changing and will change further. The dilemma that the BBC is facing--and The Washington Post, come to think of it--is that we're on one galloping horse and we need to switch to another. But, frankly, our horse has served us well, and making the leap to the other one--blowing up the notion of "broadcasting" and "mainstream"--could go horribly wrong. So we try to do both. Lilley thinks that's a recipe for disaster.

The decisions we have to make aren't easy ones, and in the case of Britain they are political decisions. "We're coming to a moment where that political judgment must be made," he said. (He also said, ruefully: "Our politicians think the media is the newspapers. They aren't thinking about it.")

How do you translate Lilley's ideas into change? I don't know, but I'm glad I'm not the one doing it. Do you risk altering--even perhaps destroying--something that has worked well, in the hopes that it will work even better in the future?

By the way, Lilley didn't use the word "meme" once last night. And he reiterated that he would assemble his last lecture from the blog postings of his readers. If you've always wanted to lecture at Oxford--albeit through the black-clad, bewhiskered person of Anthony Lilley--now's your chance. Go here and make a comment or ask a question. Or just leave a comment on my blog.

Thanks for the Meme-ories: Gilding the Lilley

And so last night to the first of four lectures by Anthony Lilley, CEO of a U.K. production company called Magic Lantern Productions. Lilley is the News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media here at Oxford. He'll be pondering the future of media and, as expected from a 21st-century digital guy, he's inviting the audience to play along. He wants all of us to contribute to his blog so he can create a user-generated lecture, one that presumably comprises the points that the audience raise.

Have the students write the lecture? Nice work if you can get it!

But seriously, it will be interesting to see the direction Lilley takes over the next three lectures. Last night was a bit of a curtain raiser, as he stuck his standard in the ground and staked his claim for a networked future where the one-to-many broadcast model will be swamped by the many-to-many. The mass media of the last 100 years, he said, will be seen to be an aberration, a deviation, as we return to a culture defined by social networking, this time made possible by the Web as opposed to the face-to-face ties that flourished in the pre-mass media age.

Lilley lamented that no mainstream media organization has at its head a visionary. As he said this he flashed a PowerPoint slide that featured a quote from Ernest Hemingway: "Never confuse movement with action." Ouch.

Then Lilley went all memetic on us. Memes, he explained, are the basic building blocks of culture, the stories societies tell themselves. The media no longer controls the creation and distribution of memes. The internet makes it possible for anyone, anywhere, anytime, to slip some memes into the cultural bloodstream. In other words: Come on down to Karl's Kulture Barn! We've gone meme crazy! Buy one meme, get one free! Better yet: Make your own memes!

(This meme business, by the way, was evidently started by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor best known these days for doing all he can to ensure he doesn't get into heaven.)

The problem we face isn't a scarcity of memes (we suffer, Lilley joked, from "infobesity"), it's a scarcity of attention. We're hip-deep in memes and don't have the time or attention to sort through them all. In the past, brands served as attention filters. We know what to expect from a BBC1 comedy or a Channel 4 TV show. We know how a Washington Post story differs from a National Enquirer one. But now things like "search" (trolling for memes using Google) and social networking (sharing memes with your friends on Facebook and MySpace, presumably) are eroding those distinctions. The days of the mass media's brute control of stories--of being, in Lilley's words, "the bouncer at the door"--are over.

I think he's probably right, though of course it's impossible to know right now to what degree this will Change Things. And Lilley was short on specific, real-world examples of how he sees this all playing out on the ground. A point about broadcasters always paying a lot to transmit sporting events because of sport's inherent memeeness didn't quite satisfy. And a slide he threw up that proclaimed "The Novelty of the New...The Immediacy of the Now" left me scratching my head. Why not "The Nowness of the New...The Immediacy of the Novel"?

I did take heart in his supposition that storytellers will have a place in tomorrow's interactive, networked world. He didn't say what their role will be. But Lilley has three more lectures to cover that ground.

Citizen Journalism: Save Your Hay

"Save Your Hay"? Of course I mean "Have Your Say." Have Your Say is what the BBC calls the reader interaction area on its Web site. It's a delightfully British name: to the point, non-threatening, human. Though internally the BBC bandies about the expression "user-generated content"--aka UGC (one of the ugliest acronyms out there; just look at the way you have to twist your mouth to form those sounds)--to its credit it doesn't use that jargony term when inviting the public to participate. "Have your say," it says. And you do.

What does it mean that the public is invited to participate? All sorts of things, some of which were touched on last week in a speech by the head of the Beeb's newsroom, Peter Horrocks. Most noticeably, he said, the public can be quite nasty. Many of the comments in the Have Your Say forum after the murder of Benazir Bhutto were of the "Islam sucks" variety.

"The vehemence and the unanimity of these opinions against the Muslim religion were striking," Horrocks said, and the BBC briefly considered pulling down its comment board. If it had, it would have been accused of inviting free speech only to stifle it. Since it didn't, it could be accused of condoning intolerant speech. (The Washington Post has had similar debates about the propriety of its comments, as the paper's ombudsman wrote in a column last week.)

Horrocks is thinking beyond just what message the comments might send to those who read them, though. He's also concerned about what the BBC should do with them, that is, what are the news implications? Does the preponderance of negative comments mean more people are anti-Muslim than we think, or that BBC reporters should rethink the way they cover Pakistan or immigration or religion?

Not necessarily, he decided: "Rather than playing a numbers game to drive our agenda I instead encourage our teams to look for thoughtful or surprising views and opinions [in the forums]. In other words we still need to be journalistic with this material, as we would with any other source."

I think that's the right response. After all, "It's the journalism, stupid." But what are the journalistic implications of forums and, more broadly, of user-generated content? That's a vague question with a big, sprawling answer--or collection of answers.

The BBC does more than almost anyone in this arena. The Have Your Say portion of its Web site includes forums; it invites readers to send in pictures and raw video; it asks for input on specific articles that are in the reporting stage, in search of sources; it posts stories ("Your Stories") inspired by users. The UGC operation sifts through the comments and e-mails to see what should be sent on for use by other BBC journalists. There is a 20-minute weekly TV show, "Your News," that runs on the BBC's News 24 digital channel and is based on user-generated ideas.

More than two dozen people work in the BBC's interactive department, and at any one time a 13-person unit called the Hub is sifting through the tsunami of incoming submissions. E-mails are forwarded, images are categorized. Have Your Say editors set up and moderate forum debates. Some 10,000 items come in every day. Horrocks pointed out that though this number is impressive it represents fewer than 1 percent of the 5 million people who visit the BBC Web site every day. (That may not be strictly true; I understand Cardiff University will release some updated numbers soon.) It's a self-selecting group of BBC users with all the opportunity for bias that suggests.

One of the things I always wonder about the citizen journalism efforts of large, mainstream media outfits such as the BBC is: Why? What is the factor that spurs such an investment? Is it to wring some journalistic worth out of the torrent of submissions? Or is it to give the public the impression that they are wanted as more than mere recipients, that they are being taken inside the tent--to engage in conversation, not listen to a monologue, as Dan Gillmor might put it?

The BBC says it's the former. But, with 10,000 inputs day, this is journalism on the factory-farm scale. Many of the people who commented on Horrocks's speech pointed out that it's almost impossible to wade through hundreds of comments. Are those comments there to inform the people reading them or to please the people writing them?

Also, it's not always clear how readers or viewers should interpret UGC. What, for example, makes a Your Story any different or better than a Their--that is, a BBC--Story. Are these stories that might have slipped through the cracks if citizens had not sent them to the BBC? Are they not a subtle argument that even the BBC is infallible? (Not necessarily a bad thing.) Are they the journalistic equivalent of Dr. Johnson's female preacher/hind-leg walking dog: not done well but impressive for being done at all.

Still, I think it's right that the BBC has invested so heavily in Have Your Say. Even if it is the journalistic equivalent of mechanically-reclaimed meat, nuggets of value will surface regularly. It puts in place a structure that comes into its own when there is a big breaking news story: a natural disaster, a coup, a terrorist attack. And no less importantly it sends the message that a seemingly opaque organization cares enough about its readers (or viewers or listeners) that it wants to hear from them. This is vital at a time when the public's trust in the media is lower than the Marianas Trench.

Besides, the trash-to-treasure ratio of the UGC selected for display on a mainstream news site is probably no worse than that of the overall news site itself. Those who vehemently oppose citizen journalism would do well to remember just how bad some professional journalism is.

What of the future? Vicky Taylor, head of the BBC's interactive department, envisions a time when the Hub isn't processing only comments, photos and the odd shaky cellphone video. She can see the Have Your Say site hosting citizen-produced video of a more professional nature, a BBC YouTube, if you will.

"That can’t stand alone," she told me. "Everything has to work with everything else. But I personally have no problem if somebody can produce a really good form themself that has a piece to camera in it and there’s a narrative. Then you can run that as a film. Or we can give them the tools to do audio slide shows, that type of thing. And we run them on our site."

It would be the video equivalent of their message boards: blanketed with disclaimers that this or that video package doesn't represent BBC policy or adhere to BBC standards, but posted with the belief that a viewer somewhere will be interested in it.

"I don’t see a problem with that," she said.

There are some journalists who, having their say, would say that goes to far. I'm convinced, though, that you'll never know if you've gone too far until you've gone far enough.

Coffee-Blogging

Ah, that's better: off the bus, in a coffee shop at Gloucester Green, sipping a decaf cappuccino and about to join some fellow Fellows for a pint. Perhaps it isn't norovirus after all, just a bad bus driver. (He was the sort, and I've known them before, who can't keep a constant speed. He liked to speed up then slooooooow down, thenspeedup, then sloooooow down. I'm getting sick just typing that.)

I was in London yesterday to talk about my study topic with a few smart people. One was Martin Moore, the director of the Media Standards Trust. (Their web site appears to be down right this moment.) The MST is a relatively new outfit that is doing lots of things, but the most interesting to me is a project to come up with what amount to ingredients labels for news or comment web pages. They're working with Tim Berners-Lee to develop a system where users could search for information based on various criteria, ie: Show me news stories about the unrest in Kenya that rely on two or more named sources, utilize reports that are funded by impartial observers and include links to original source material. Or if you'd rather have first-person commentary, you could set your filter for that, too. I don't know much more than that, but it's an interesting approach, one that attempts to help deal with the avalanche of information that is being uploaded to the web every day.

I also met with Vin Ray at the BBC. He's director of the Beeb's College of Journalism, an outfit started in the wake of the Hutton Report. Vin's shop has prepared hundreds of pages of material--both technical, nuts-and-bolts, how-tos and more reflective material meant to touch on journalistic ethics--to help improve the quality of BBC journalism. There's a robust section on user-generated content, which is what I'm interested in.

Then I spoke with Vicky Taylor, czarina of UGC at the Beeb. The BBC is among the most active media outlets in requesting content--comments, photos, videos--from users, harvesting it for the web site and passing it on to BBC reporters as possible source material. This is the sort of thing--user-generated content, citizen journalism--that drives some journalists crazy, akin to letting the inmates run the asylum. Best not to think about comparing my profession to the madhouse.

My friend Richard (and former fellow Fellow) showed me around his shop. It was nice to be back in a newsroom again: the energy, the intelligence, the gallows humor.

Most exciting of all, during my stint in White City (the name of the multi-building compound that the BBC calls home) was a glimpse of a couple pooches being walked out back by a minder. A gaggle of schoolchildren were taking a tour and almost as one they screamed out "The 'Blue Peter' dogs!" Ah, celebrity.

BuzzKill: Journalism, Schmournalism

God I pity any of you who, like me, have to read the various blogs and Web sites that dicker over the future of journalism. So much of them seem to be written by cranky, whiny babies. Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine is the worst offender, lacking even the ounce of humor that would leaven the pretentiousness or the shred of humility that might suggest Jarvis is not in possession of a crystal ball that tells him exactly what the future is going to be like.

And yet I read it every day, for despite his sour writing style, Jarvis is a mover and shaker whose blog crystallizes one school of thought. His posts draw two types of comments: those that mirror his polar thinking and those that emanate from the other end of the earth. There isn't much middle ground but it's fun to watch the fireworks.

Of course, the Bill Keller speech I praised earlier this week comes in for especial contempt. What struck me as a reasoned explanation of the importance of proper journalism (facts carefully acquired, even in dangerous settings) struck Jarvis and his crowd as a contemptuous slam on all they hold sacred. (Basically, Keller said that Jarvis said that blogging would replace the mainstream media, and Jarvis said "Oh no I di-unt." But really, Jarvis's main gripe seems to be that Keller didn't bow deeply enough in his general direction.)

It's that odd, Oedipal thing I've remarked upon before. For some reason it also reminds me of that scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where a peasant (Michael Palin) is swatted by an annoyed King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and then keeps shouting "Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!"

Keller and Jarvis have sort of made nice, in an exchange that ends with Jarvis trying to wheedle some sort of collaboration with the New York Times. I'm sure Keller would be thrilled at that.

What do I think of all this stuff? Not the petty bitching but the issues themselves? Well I'm still studying, aren't I? But so far I can see both sides of the argument. I take it as a given that the democratizing power of the Internet empowers citizens to gather more information and spread more information. I agree with Harvard's Yochai Benkler, who writes in his impressive new book "The Wealth of Networks" that "The networked public sphere, as it is currently developing, suggests that it will have no obvious point of control or exertion of influence--either by fiat or by purchase. It seems to invert the mass-media model in that it is driven heavily by what dense clusters of users find intensely interesting and engaging, rather than by what large swaths of them find mildly interesting or average."

Moreover, I'm intrigued by his argument that the mere possibility of being able to engage in communication with the public sphere reorients us: "The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication. This changes the relative power of the media."

But I also worry about what researchers call "filtering for accreditation." In a networked world we'll have to figure out whom to trust for our information. That may not be every schmo with a blog. And I don't buy the argument that some rabid MSM-haters make that there is something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy about the press. I think many citizen journalism efforts are just crappy or weirdly self-referential. Of course, so too are plenty of newspapers, especially when you get out of the East Coast orbit. And some efforts that harness the power of the Internet and the crowd are immensely valuable. Benkler describes how a mixture of bloggers, students and freelance software experts exposed serious problems with Diebold electronic voting machines. What they did sure sounds like journalism to me, without the need for any qualifiers.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer for this stuff.

And Furthermore
Here's something interesting: A while back Jarvis wrote about a report issued by Britain's National Union of Journalists that was critical of Web 2.0. Jarvis was typically cutting ("whiny, territorial, ass-covering" was one descriptor he used), though the bits of the report he quoted didn't seem so outrageous to me (stories shouldn't go online without being edited, for example; untrained writers make for poor online video). I said this in a comment, noting that I hadn't read the report myself.

Now I've seen a copy of the NUJ's monthly magazine, Journalist, and I think Jarvis was probably right. The magazine has that to-the-ramparts feel. But what floored me was that they quoted from my BuzzMachine comment in their December issue. I guess the anonymity of the Web makes that easy, but is that right? Should they have contacted me (my blog was easily findable from my comment)? And do they undercut their argument against new media by employing its tools?

Most amusingly, the NUJ report included this section: "The ease of copying and pasting leads to journalists under time pressure to 'simply lump text across without proper consideration of its quality or reliability.'”

Um, isn't that what Journalist magazine did? Pot, meet kettle.

Lest We Forget: What Journalism's All About

Like most people in my profession, I spend a lot of time these days thinking about how journalism has changed/is changing/will change. It's hard not to. As one journalist said last week: "At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, 'How are you?' in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce."

That journalist was Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, in London to deliver the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture. His lecture is worth reading in full, especially if you're a journalist.

Keller gave a candid, and rather scathing, assessment of the Bush presidency and the damage it's done to the United States and its standing in the world. He also devoted a large part of the lecture to analyzing where newspapers are going in this digital world. While accepting that the landscape has changed, Keller argued that newspapers must remain the great information accumulators that they have historically been.

"People crave trustworthy information about the world we live in," he said. "Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it because they want something to exchange over dinner tables and water coolers. Some want it so they can get the jokes on the late-night TV shows. There is a demand, a market, for journalism." (As long as "The Daily Show" is on, that is.)

Keller made a clear distinction between journalism and citizen journalism: "What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of newsgathering -- the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation."

That might be a point you could argue (in some cases untrained amateurs do "beat" the big guys, especially when, for whatever reason, the big guys are blind to certain stories) but while your Googles and your Facebooks, your NowPublics and your Diggs, may all have a place in how people access, parse and understand information, newspapers--online or in hand--must continue to be the bedrock upon which these other services are built. Or the factories from which raw materials emerge, to be refined in infinite ways.

Chatham House: It Rules
Keller's remarks were delivered at Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Many of the seminars I've attended here at Oxford operate under what is called the "Chatham House Rule." It's an actual edict, devised in 1927 and last revised in 2002, that basically ensures that speakers may talk in the knowledge that their comments will not end up in the next day's paper (or on a blog). Things are off the record.

Bill Keller obviously declined to lock his comments in such a straightjacket. There was nothing incendiary in his lecture, though I suppose rabid New York Times-haters might latch onto his raw view of the Bush presidency.

Are Reporters Doomed?

"Are reporters doomed?" That's the attention-grabbing headline of an essay by David Leigh in this morning's Guardian. Attention-grabbing if you're a reporter, anyway, or if you're married to one, parenting one, being parented by one, sleeping with one or blackmailing one.

Leigh, an investigative editor at the Guardian, argues that in the rush to adopt blogs, explore citizen journalism, embrace new technologies and cut costs, media companies are jettisoning their responsibility to do creditable long-term investigative work. He advocates "Slow Journalism," a practice which "would show greater respect for the reporter as a patient assembler of facts."

I think Leigh makes several good points and, to his credit, he recognizes that the future is coming, no matter what. (That's what the future does, after all. It comes. [And comes.] {And keeps on coming.}]) But I was struck by one sentence: "Too much competition leads to a race to the bottom." This comment crystallized for me something that's nagged at the back of my mind for a while: There exists a certain lack of faith in the market when it comes to some journalists.

To simplify an argument I detect in Leigh's essay: The public prefers crap journalism. Now that it can easily get crap journalism--cheaply produced and pushed at them 24/7 via myriad formats--it won't care to sample "the good stuff." If this is the case--if, when people are offered a choice, they choose wrongly--then what's the point of anything we do? The only possible response is to eliminate choice.

Journalists would never make this argument about any other industry or profession: "What really ruined the motor car was when more manufacturers started making them." "You know what I really hate? The fact that I have to decide between a PC and a Mac." "And have you seen how many types of baked beans are available?! It's not fair."

Saying that the only (or a major) reason that journalism has been heretofore successful is because it didn't have to compete, is like saying that the only reason most men shave their faces is because razor blades are available. (Actually, it's nothing like that, or maybe it is, but this being a blog I don't have time to properly develop that analogy.)

When it comes to the so-called "mainstream media," I'm not one of these Let's-kill-them-all-and-let-god-sort-them-out people. I like newspapers and the people who produce them. Sometimes I'm just as irritated as Leigh at the belief some hold that journalism is "easy." I may be naive in my hopes that Slow Journalism will succeed in the market--that readers/customers will value it the same way they value a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo Razor (no, still not working, is it?)--but I won't impose different standards on my profession than I would on any other. Yes, I think what we do is different--more important? more sacred?--than what General Motors or Toyota do, but the way we survive and thrive in the future (it's coming; see above) is by rising to the challenge: think of ways to make our product better, more relevant, more transcendent. We take the best of the old and the best of the new, trusting that if we do that correctly we can't help but succeed.

In other words, we compete.

Happy, Shiny People
Elsewhere in Media Guardian, Peter Wilby writes about efforts to put happier stories on front pages in the belief that readers are more likely to buy them. It reminds me of a statistic I once heard about The Washington Post. It used to be we sold something like 20,000 more papers on the Monday after the Redskins won. Just one more reason to dislike current owner Dan Snyder, who can't seem to field a winning team.

A Bright Idea

There has been a fluorescent explosion in Britain. Everywhere you go you see retina-searing articles of clothing: a sort of electric lime green color emblazoned on jackets, vests and bags. Apparently, these items are designed to keep the wearer from being flattened by a truck. (Or "lorry," as the British quaintly insist on calling them.)

Here's a construction worker in one of these "high-visibility" garments:



Here is an off-duty bus driver:


Where you mostly see them is on cyclists:



I bought my daughter a green and orange "tabard" for low-light cycling. (I love that noun: tabard. It was originally the sleeveless tunic a knight would put over a suit of armor. The English never really left the Middle Ages, did they?) I also bought a couple of safety patrol-style bandoliers for us to sling on when we take to the streets. And, of course, no cycling outfit is complete without a bicycle clip. When I lived in England as a teenager, a bicycle clip was just that: a metal anklet for keeping your trouser leg out of your bike chain. Now it's Velcro and it's reflective:



Alexei Sayle had a column in the Independent the other day about the phenomenon, and whether we will become inured to it. If everyone is in a high-visibility jacket,
will anyone be visible? Or more visible than anyone else?

I had the same thought when Canada mandated daylight running lights for its cars. Snowbirds pouring down Interstate 95 with their headlights burning certainly stood out. And now I see more cars in the U.S. driving with their lights on in the middle of the day. But if every car is like that, are we going to have to add sirens and Congreve rockets to our vehicles to make sure they're noticed?

I also worry about the environment: With all those high-visibility jackets being sold in England, surely the famed Day-Glo mines of Cornwall must be in danger of being depleted.

What's Going on in Burma?
Of course I'm not spending all my time here in Oxford snapping photos of workmen in green jackets. I'm pondering what's known as "citizen journalism," the movement to democratize the media via the Web. If you saw a shaky cell-phone video of the saffron-robed monks marching on the streets of Rangoon, or read a blog by a Burmese citizen, you experienced citizen journalism. Glenda Cooper provides a good overview of what's been going on there and how it may change the media equation.

Ad today many bloggers around the world are supporting the citizen journalists in Burma, and indeed the citizens, by posting a "Free Burma" banner on their Web sites.