Monthly Archives: April 2006

Bridgehead for Montgomery

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The Observer profiles David Montgomery, who reportedly is one of the candidates to buy Orkla Media. He is now the rather unpopular owner of Berliner Zeitung, among other titles:

The logic underpinning those deals is simple: the continental market is fragmented and ripe for consolidation. But few expect Montgomery to spend the rest of his days ensuring the sums add up at Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende. The continental acquisitions are a bridgehead back to the UK market, and the next time Montgomery walks into a British newsroom, it may well be as a proprietor.

Bloggers, corrections, credibility

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Facts unchecked, swift judgments based on rumours and misinformation. Smear campaigns. Blogs can supply all these things, and they will. Maybe it’s time to talk more about that. The occasion is Jill Carroll’s release and subsequent soul-searching among some bloggers – or lack thereof. Right Wing Nut House:

In people’ls haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

The advantage of the media principle of editing becomes clear here: With no editing and free supply of “printing presses”, it’s inevitable that there will be more cases like this one. But since it’s impossible and undesirable to lock up the presses again, the media ecosystem will have to find a way to deal with such issues. An effective mechanism would be that bloggers who do not respect basic ethical standards, simply lose their readership. As Bloggers Blog asks: “Can these bloggers really expect to continue to have a readership beyond this incident?”

One of the reasons why some people have trusted blogs more than traditional media has been the perceived honesty of bloggers: Always correct mistakes, don’t hide the mistake, explain why you did it, be transparent about your own biases and assumptions. Many bloggers have shown that credibility can be built with individual voice as well, an alternative to the institutional credibility of hierarchical media organisations. Now if the bloggers who made wrong accusations against Jill Carroll – and then refused to apologize – were left reader- and link-less, that would be the new, richer and more chaotic public sphere self-correcting.

(see also: Bloggers own Jill Carroll an apology. And the Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll update blog.)

This weekend # 8: Web narratives

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The next time someone tells you that in-depth journalism on the web is nearly impossible, just show them two new examples that help shatter that myth.

  • The Desert One Debacle tells the story of the failed attempt to rescue the hostages at the US embassy in Teheran in 1980. This is the cover story of The Atlantic’s May issue, and on the web it has been enhanced with video, audio, photos, maps and documents. Though I haven’t seen the print version yet, I would guess that the web version conveys a richer understanding and experience of the narrative’s different aspects. Even so, it’s possible to suggest some further improvements: Actually it worked better to read the whole text virtually uninterrupted, then go back to view photos and maps afterwards. That’s probably because the different pop-ups and formats aren’t seamlessly integrated with the main narrative; one idea would be to use more of the screen’s width and embed, if possible, all the different elements on the main page.
  • Faces of the Fallen is a database from Adrian Holovaty and the team at the Washington Post, of US military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (actually a new version of an existing database). If the Atlantic story is a classic narrative with a beginning, middle and end, in Faces of the Fallen the user has to construct a narrative of his or her own from the bare facts of name, face, age, incident, home state, military branch. Importantly, each soldier gets an own page, personalizing the war and its consequences. Actually, the database is so optimized for the web of today that you can subscribe to a feed updating you on forthcoming casualties… One comment to the database on Holovaty’s site is relevant: what is missing is the other – Iraqi dead, be it insurgents, soldiers, civilians, foreign terrorists. But one will, of course, encounter them in the WaPo’s general Iraq coverage and analysis.

Trip(pi) to Sweden

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The Swedish Social Democratic party and the labour union federation LO have invited Joe Trippi to a seminar in Stockholm on May 20. I would think that both left, right and middle could learn from him, so here’s a challenge to Norwegian political and media organizations. On his own blog, Trippi discloses that his company assisted the Prodi campaign in Italy (but not how).

Meanwhile, there’s no reason not to recycle Ed Cone’s The Marketing of a President from 2003.

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Friends tell me that Rojo runs circles around my dear Bloglines as feed reading tool. So checking the red one is on the to do-list.

A good investment

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The “Leipzig Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media” for 2006 has been jointly awarded to Moldavian journalist Alina Anghel, Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti and the German journalist Dr. Volker Lilienthal. The prize is 30.000 euro and is awarded by the media foundation of the Sparkasse Leipzig bank (via Netzeitung). An excellent investment by the bank in the health of democracy and an example to follow for other banks and corporations.

Threat from the middle

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The BBC reports based on exit polls that Prodi will get 50-54 percent, Berlusconi 45-49 percent in the Italian election.

Why that would be good news for Italy and Europe? Start here: Berlusconi’s system has post-democratic features, argues Die Zeit’s editor. Berlusconism shows that democracy can be threatened from the middle, not only from extremists.

For an earlier, in-depth analysis of the Italian media system, see John Lloyd’s A European media manifesto.

This weekend # 7: The Daily Me

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In debates about how the internet affects the health of media and democracy, the idea of The Daily Me usually is presented as a dystopian scenario. From a common public sphere guarded and produced by the mass media – Benedict Anderson wrote about the daily mass ceremony of newspaper reading – we are headed towards fragmentation, ego-worshipping and general disintegration of society. Ouch! Dystopia!

But instead of despairing, try looking at the different ways people piece it all together again. Thomas Frostberg notes a piece of advice from the ongoing Innovation Journalism conference in California: Red Herring’s editor Tom Murphy says that we are “in the middle of a transition – it will take 20-25 years for a new medium to mature, the public to get used to it and journalists to adapt to it.”

A great Daily Me service is Netvibes (belatedly discovered). Go ahead and play – dissect and assemble your 24-hour-Me from a variety of sources. In light of the coming fragmented dystopia, it’s interesting to note that so many new services are tracking what others are reading and viewing – ferociously searching for The Daily Them? Consider popurls, a meta-roof over del.icio.us, digg, Flickr and the like (via Stattin).