Undercurrent

This week I finally got the chance to write a story (in Norwegian) I’ve been intrigued by for a long time: How the Norwegian-owned, Bangladesh-based company Somewhere in… pioneered blogging in the bengali language. I interviewed Arild Klokkerhaug (photo above), one of the founders/owners of the company, while he was staying in Oslo. Somewhere in… developed web-based tools that made it possible to type in bengali instead of just in English. The blog portal went online in December 2005. This is how Aparna Ray of Global Voices described the effect:

Somewherein’s tag line was “baadh bhangar awaj” which literally means ‘sound of the breaking of a dam’. And I feel that is what it did. As soon as the platform was launched, there was a spurt in number of people who started blogging as the typing etc. was also very easy. This platform gave even those who were not fluent in expressing themselves in English a chance to start a web conversation through blogs.

Klokkerhaug’s idea is to develop web services that can function as tools for people in their everyday lives, and that connect with “real life”. His very recent example was the Chittagong mudslide on June 11. Klokkerhaug used his own blog to urge the community to help the victims, and travelled to the city to see for himself how the bloggers could be mobilized to assist. This approach can develop, he believes: “Next time a disaster happens, we may have to push (the community) again by going there. But we think that the third time somethingl like this happens, the bloggers won’t need to be urged to show up”.

If you want to read more about how blogging develops in Bangladesh, the Global Voices summaries are extremely helpful. Also very much recommended is the blog of one of the GV editors, The 3rd world view by Rezwanul Islam.

At the Association of Norwegian Editors conference last week, one magazine editor said that she was scared of letting users comment stories on the web. The new NRK chief was more positive, he said he “had heard” that there was a civilization “out there” on the web. And now Ben Hammersley. At his talk in Bergen yesterday, he strongly advised editors against letting users contribute comments. At the Guardian Comment is free website which he set up last year, 2.500 commenters have been banned for hate speech, he told us, and then he mentioned Godwin’s Law. The point seemed to be: people are deserting old media and embracing Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and what have you, but the media shouldn’t try to join this game. They should let the user participation formats evolve and concentrate on innovation in news storytelling. So are we really to give up the idea of civil debate on the web? If Hammersley is right about the universality of Godwin’s Law, then how do you account for all the debating arenas that do work? Could it be that the experiences at Comment is free can’t be generalized? Are authors at Comment is free nurturing the user debates there or just abandoning them? Because that is one recipe for debate destruction.

After this it was heartening to hear BBC World’s head of news talk about his own views and experiences with user debate. Richard Porter learned the new rules the hard way recently, when he investigated and blogged about his investigation of a “controversy” about the BBC’s reporting on 9/11. Conspiracies and 9/11, probably the most difficult topic of all to discuss with readers, and Porter was attacked in the comments and in countless emails. Porter said he wrote back to some of them and asked how they could say what they did about him without knowing him, and even invited one guy to come and get a tour of the BBC’s news facilities. But all this commotion hasn’t scared Porter away: Being open, and blogging is one of the ways to increase transparency, is going to a key element in building trust in the future, he said: “Even if that means I get a lot of abuse.” It will be one of the features of news media in the coming years that people can question what you do, Porter concluded. Then he came to the role of blogs: especially in the US bloggers have hounded journalists for something they’ve said, and that can be unpleasant. But here’s the main lesson from Porter: “They have also forced some of us to be absolutely sure of our facts before we go on air.” And if you do a mistake, which you will do sometimes anyway, you should write about it on your own blog. Admitting mistakes also builds trust.

I don’t really believe that Ben Hammersley thinks the media should insulate themselves from their audience, it doesn’t fit with his overall message. And his ideas on news storytelling are very inspiring and spot on. More about them later.

Colleague Ben Schwan rejoins the profession of media blogging with his new im mediendschungel. Dschungel is the “easy” German way of writing jungle, the roots of which evidently lie in Sanskrit. Welcome, Ben!

“The source of information must, as a rule, be identified”, the Norwegian press code of ethics admonishes. This is one of the rules that are supposed to increase the public’s trust in the media. The web is the best medium ever when it comes to source transparency, but compare the practice of online media with blogs, and you’ll see that the bloggers are much better at quoting and revealing their sources. As Andrew Lih notes, here the media can learn from bloggers, wikipedians and citizen journalists. The hat tip becomes ever more important as stealing the ideas of others becomes ever easier.

Earlier, more or less exasperated posts on this topic:

Breaking news: Journalists discover links.

Online news: confusion and monologue.

Linking is just too risky.