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Wow, this is disturbing. I could have written this from my own experience, almost to the letter.
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A 12 week public consultation document published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that "seeks views on the proposal for a contained, contestable element to be introduced to the next licence fee settlement."
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Interesting article that dares to ask: is today's press and TV journalism actually worth saving, or just boring identikit press releases? IN other words – should we be worrying about the collapse of journalism at all, or releived at the end of quantity of press over quality?
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A place to bookmark and savour quality type-related images and quotes, to inspure creativity.
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Great piece about the impact of a TV programme on UK politicians: "when historians come to consider his period in British affairs of state, they may well note, with disdainful amusement, the degree to which a generation of politicians were influenced by Aaron Sorkin's television creation."
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Touching and very well written inside look at what it's really like to live with a son that has Asperger's.
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My first ISP back in 1995 … And I still had my email account with them. Sad to see it go, although frankly it was long overdue.
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The 'Other James Brown' finds Twitter too much noice to signal and thinks it will settle down to being a social network, where he wants a news/info-sharing one. Is that best provided by Yammer?
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Interesting thoughts on the design process, especially damning of focus groups: “We don't do focus groups. They just ensure that you don't offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products.”
I was rather irritated the other day listening to BBC Radio 4’s Americana (available in the UK on iPlayer) when the presenter of the show, Kevin Connolly, made two anti-new media comments in the course of a six minute interview with Tina Brown, ex-Vanity Fair editor and now editor of online news site The Daily Beast.
He was lamenting the fact that the demise of newspapers would mean no more local court coverage (as an example of the community-based journalism) and no more scoops like Watergate. Fair enough, he was trying to act as devil’s advocate to counterbalance Tina Brown who was there to promote online news sites as the thing of the future, but even so his points annoyed me and had me shouting at the computer screen.
It seems to have passed Mr Connolly by that newspapers have long since stopped covering local courts. Few publications have been able to afford to do that for a decade or more. Most newspaper stories these days seem to be lifted directly from wire services, the television, the web – or from Twitter. I still remember how shocked I was when I was living in Las Vegas for a year and found that the local paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was 90% wire stories and syndicated features. It had given up all pretense of covering even the local Vegas stories; and now that state of affairs has spread to all but the most famous bastions of news in the US, while many of the UK papers give up the idea of covering news and focus on celebrity stories instead.
And as for scoops – the Americana program seemed to have been recorded before either the Iran election aftermath (where the story was overlooked at first by the major international news players like CNN and BBC as it was a Sunday and most of their staff had been ejected from Iran after the elections were officially over), and even more strikingly after the death of Michael Jackson, where all TV and news outlets were forced to lead for hours with “TMZ website reports that …” because that low-budget entertainment news website had the complete inside line scoop on one of the biggest stories of the year.
But there’s also sites like The Smoking Gun, which has broken some big stories in the past with their obsessive collecting and analysing of often obscure documentary minutiae. And now there are full blown news sites like Brown’s own Daily Beast and the pioneering Huffington Post in the US. Yes, these are the exceptions and not the rule, but it’s very early days for journalism on the web, and to dismiss online media as being incapable of filling the place of newspapers would be like someone dismissing the original Gutenberg printing press after the first year because there were only one or two books in production. It does take time to stage a revolution.
Would newspapers have pulled out of the local news and investigative reporting if the money was still there? Well, probably not – if they could afford it, they would most likely still want to be doing it. But note the ‘probably’ there – the fact is that the commercialisation of the newspapers into big businesses run by businessmen who weren’t really interested in the news but in the money it could earn them if they created huge multinational newspaper chains means that the profits were being sucked away by shareholders anyway. Having to explain to those shareholders why millions were going into reporters sitting for hours in court rooms and local council chambers, or on a story about obscure political scandals instead of being paid out to them in dividends meant that the purse strings were being tightened and choking the life out of the newspaper business long before the Internet suddenly popped up on the radar.
But the Americana story does show the tendency of old media people to think that the collapse of newspapers means the end of journalism. It doesn’t – the two things are not the same and shouldn’t be confused. Newspapers are a particular business model and type of medium, but journalism – the art of news reporting – will live on. It will change, and may not be a profitable business in the same scale as decades past, but it will continue and indeed thrive.
I’ll be sad to see newspapers die. Until very recently I’ve felt that newspapers would live on in some form. But increasingly, as we watch newspaper owners lurch from indecision to disastrous action and then utter confusion, it’s clear that the current industry doesn’t have the wits to get itself out of the current situation. Sadly it seems as though the industry is determined to smash itself to pieces in order to clear the ground for whatever the 21st century journalism environment turns out to be.
It’s a shame. It’s going to be painful, a lot of blood will be spilled; but rather like the days of the unions and hot metal printing in the UK had to be destroyed in the 80s, so the newspaper and news industry as a whole must now be torn apart in order to allow itself to find anew ways forward.
I wish it weren’t the case – and would be happy if people found a nicer, easier way. But I’m not holding my breath, and the end of days for the news business is already upon us.
I woke up this morning to the news that a website for the MOD and RAF project managed by my colleagues in the office and delivered by one of our appointed agencies, LIDA, had won Best Website at the CIPD Recruitment Marketing awards.
Naturally, I first heard this from Twitter – by way of the Director of Digital Engagement’s post as it happens – and there were some lovely details once I got into the office about how the host of the event, John Barrowman, handed over the award to Group Captain Gordon Bruce whose rank insignia is the same as that which Barrowman wears as his Torchwood character “Captain” Jack Harkness.
It’s nice to hear about COI successes, because for the most part we’re very low key. The spotlight usually goes to the client (MOD/RAF in this case) and/or the agency (LIDA), and the work that COI puts into it gets lost in the background. There are good reasons for this which I’ll go into, but it’s sometimes more than a little annoying to see others take sole credit for a piece of work that you know the team at COI has also spent many hours working hard on.
This segued into some thoughts I had a few days ago reading Emma Mulqueeney’s post about what the Home Office is doing with respect to digital engagement. It’s a great post, a real insight into what goes into pulling off such transformational projects; the irony is that Emma didn’t seem particularly wild about the post herself prior to posting it, and seemed to think many would find it dull, obvious or just not interesting. Far from it, as I think has been proved by the very positive response.
The moral of that story is how important that it is we should be getting the message out, talking about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and carrying people along as we do so. Emma’s been great at doing that and long may she lead by example. She’s fortunate that she’s speaking of projects being done by her own Home Office team; COI on the other hand almost only ever gets to do projects that are commissioned through us by government departments and agencies. They’re not “ours” in the same way.
So how can COI do more to get the message out about what we do and how? How much of the visible leadership role should we be seen to take? Should COI be doing more along those lines? Is that seeking to take the credit too much and aggrandize COI at the expense of the message and the client? Or should we be more of the backroom boys making our clients (the government departments and agencies who pay our bills) look good and shying away from taking the credit ourselves?
Another example to illustrate the dilemma is COI’s News Distribution Service (NDS) which aggregates press releases from across government and makes them available either on individual departments’ websites, on the NDS website or via RSS. One developer, Dave Cole, picked up the RSS feeds and made them into Twitter streams (a very welcome development as far as COI was concerned); in his blog comment he noted that “the Central Office of Information run a rather good website called the News Distribution Service … Unfortunately, no-one knows about it as the COI doesn’t do much to promote it despite being ‘the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications’.”
That irked me at the time, probably because there’s some truth to the barb: COI doesn’t promote its services and successes outside government. But again, for good reason: we’re providing a service to the government departments and getting their press releases out; that it’s done by COI or that there is an NDS site is rather beside the point and a distraction from the central message we’re being paid to get out there.
The few examples we’ve had of work which has been COI-generated have included the Improving Government Online initiative and the Usability toolkit, and it’s been good to have something that we can unreservedly promote. The team behind those two initiatives, the Digital Policy Team, are looking into blogging on a more regular basis in future to keep people up to speed on what’s happening with their work.
But the Digital Policy team are a relatively tiny and atypical part of COI: the rest of us work on client campaigns, procuring and project managing agencies for research, design, film, radio, publications and websites. A lot of that is frankly rather dull and routine – albeit vital – project management work. It’s hard to believe that anyone would find that interesting, even if we could find things to talk about that didn’t affect client and agency confidentiality. So what would work?
I’m interested to find out if anyone has any thoughts on this – what COI should be outspoken about, or whether it’s best left in the background. So what frustrates people about what they do and don’t hear from organisations like COI – how can we do better, in other words?
links for 2009-06-29
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Picking up on a BBC 'review' of a 1980s Walkman by a modern 13-year-old (well worth the read for the march of tech time) and making some much needed balancing points on the BBC's original story.
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The fake David Miliband account got widely quoted after Michael Jackson's death by some very gullible (or maybe simply lazy) journalists.
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Fascinating look at Twitter's tech roots, including the amazing stat that "80% of the Twitter traffic comes through the API" – which rather squelches that Nielsen ratings piece the other month on a critical fla in their process.
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Thought provoking, especially on the pricing of Amazon Kindle content at the start. "The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws. "
links for 2009-06-28
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The idealism and tragedy of management archetypes. Read it, and it'll strike a few chords!
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Deeply depressing story about Michael Jackson's condition: He could no longer sing, for a start. On some days he could barely talk. He could no longer dance. Disaster was looming in London and, in the opinion of his closest confidantes, he was feeling suicidal.
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Inside story of how the Liverpool St Station flashmob happened.
links for 2009-06-27
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Interesting article on built-in batteries: 33% better capacity and hardly anyone buys a second battery to switch in/out anyway.
links for 2009-06-26
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A brilliant review of the arthouse movie "Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen". It's poking more than a little fun at Bay and the film but it's a great review all the same. Still don't want to see the movie, however …
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Another collection of gorgeous photos from Boston.com this time shot from the International Space Station and featuring among other memorable shots an erupting volcano in Russia.
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Last night's news was dominated by one celebrity website. How come they beat the mainstream media? And does it suggest that journalism will live on even when the mainstream media dies?
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"Funny how when the real time web breaks news, the news breaks the real time web"
links for 2009-06-25
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Teens prefer updating their whereabouts or their status within the walled gardens and privacy of social networking services like Facebook. So FB's forthcoming changes to its status updates may have some unexpected consequences …
links for 2009-06-24
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I do love a good, well thought out, creative title sequence for a film/TV programme. Too few of them around
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It’s a blog! No, it’s a microblog! No, wait, it’s a cocktail party! No, it’s something for you to be witty or interesting on so you gain followers! Wait, no, it’s the light infantry! But not for conferences! And not for mundane crap!
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Surely hope so … And if true, then Max is out in October.
links for 2009-06-20
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He is Britain's best known, most loved and most cerebral geek. And Apple lover. Here he reviews the 3GS, celebrates a prophetic utterance from a year ago, and bemoans the Nokia N97
links for 2009-06-14
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Twitter's "suggested users" could be a serious cash commodity – the the users and to Twitter. But is that a good thing, or corrupting the system that's made twitter what it is?
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Reading the runes of the very confused and disturbing state of the Iranian Elections. Twitter's been covering this from the start, but major news networks seem to have been very slow to even notice. Media 1.0 dying along with democracy in Iran?
links for 2009-06-13
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An astonishing ideas: some local politicians in one of the US's poorest cities believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area, by razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
links for 2009-06-12
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Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Labour MP Tom Watson debate squared up in Twitter earlier this week, with fascinating results and an interesting outcome. As one journalist puts it: "That's what I call digital engagement."
links for 2009-06-11
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Another one goes … What does this mean for Digital Britain? Who will drive it through or will it sit on the shelf?
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Former darlings of the online world, they're now failing against social media sites that refused to be bought out like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.
links for 2009-06-10
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Interesting new features in the new iPhone software, including variable playback speed and a 30s rewind button. Very useful! Wonder what else 3.0 has in store?
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Emma Mulqueeny on the appointment of "Emperor' Berners-Lee to sort out the sharing of government data. It's a geek's dream; surely nothing can possibly go wrong with Sir Tim joining Andrew Stott to get to grips with this … ?
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In the interests of natural justice, I am so incredibly happy about this. Having someone's freedom taken away without them even being able to see what evidence is being used against them is offensive to a free society. I'm not deaf to the reasons the government has put forward about the need to defend citizens against terrorists, but we have to find a way that doesn't involve us losing our souls in doing so.
The new iPhone was announced on Monday. And I’m absolutely delighted with it: because I have no interest in buying one.
I’m delighted because I was half expecting a radical overhaul of the iPhone that would leave my favourite shiny gizmo looking sad and old and dated. I only got it six months ago, and I did so in the full and certain knowledge that there would be a new iPhone unveiled in the summer, so it’s not that I didn’t know the possibility was on the horizon.
It’s like buying any new piece of IT kit: you wait and you wait and you wait, and then whenever you decide to jump into action it’ll always be two days later that a new model is announced, a specification change is unveiled, or the price will tumble – leaving you with an old, lower spec or simply overpriced item on your hands that you can do nothing about.
So I expected to feel this way after Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone 3GS, and the truth is: I don’t. I’m as happy as can be.
For one thing, the new iPhone looks exactly like the old one. Or to put it another way, no one can tell at a glance whether my phone is shiny new or six months old. Even those with the original iPhone can still survive casual glances (it takes a real Apple geek to be able to tell the original from the 3G from a distance; needless to say, I now have that superpower!)
And the new features of the 3GS are distinctly ‘meh’ in my book. A digital compass? Voice control? Slightly improved camera (and at 3MP it’s not exactly state of the art even now)? Even video capture. None of these features are things I’ve ever expressed a need for. Nice to have, sure; but there’s no real pull for me to get these features and I can happily live without them. (After all, you’re talking to someone who was happy not to have any sort of camera on his mobile phone until last December!)
Okay, the thing will be faster. Who wouldn’t like to have a faster gadget? We all would. And I’m sure it’s very impressive and it’s no surprise therefore that this is the one feature that Apple have put front and centre with the name of the new iPhone (the ‘S’ in ‘3GS’ is for speed, the announcement proclaimed.) But I’ve been perfectly happy with the speed of my iPhone so as long as I stay well clear of seeing too many demos of the new phone’s blazing pace, I won’t miss what I don’t have there either.
Actually there’s one thing I would really have liked, and which almost made me hold off getting the iPhone 3G in the first place: the storage capacity. The 3GS has a 32Gb model, and the way that my music and podcast collection has exploded since I got my iPhone late last year, I could really, really do with the increased capacity over my present 16Gb.
But not at the prices that the iPhone is going to be sold for in the UK. Trying to compare contract prices is like herding cats, so instead I’ll quote the buy-outright, “pay-as-you-go” prices:
- In the US, the old 8Gb 3G is being retained as a low cost entry model to try and grow the market and bring in new users. In the UK, the PAYG price remains an eye-watering £342.
- The price for the 16Gb 3GS is £50 more than the 16Gb 3G model which is no longer available
- The top-of-the-line 32Gb 3GS is £150 more than the 16Gb 3G that was previously the top of the line.
Contract prices are similarly higher (or require a longer contract commitment.) Would I want the 32Gb for that kind of additional premium? I think not. Even getting a 16Gb model at fifty quid more would give me considerable pause, and you’re talking to someone who things the iPhone is the best thing since humans discovered how to create fire. And to add insult to injury, the UK’s exclusive carrier O2 is taking a hardline about existing customers seeing out (or buying out) their full contracts before allowing them to upgrade, a very difference stance to 2008’s rollout of the 3G where customers could upgrade for free by taking out a new contract.
Why so much? Well, part of it is the currency exchange rate – the pound has tumbled against the dollar since this time last year when 3G prices were set. Much though we might like to bleat “that’s not fair!” the fact is that it’s the way the world works, and we should get over it. That probably accounts for the price ‘rise’ for the 16Gb models done purely like-for-like. But the huge premium for the 32Gb model seems bizarre (RAM just isn’t that expensive) and rumours are flying around that O2 over-subsidised the 3G and this year have to grab back some of their investment before the exclusive contract that they paid so much for runs out. (But on the bright side at least O2 are offering iPhone users MMS and – for a high price – tethering services. Unlike AT&T who refuse to offer this to US customers for any price.)
Whether O2 or Apple have been responsible for the pricing structure for the 3GS I don’t know, but it will have a major effect on 3GS take-up. I can’t imagine too many people upgrading, and there’s nothing new that would persuade new people to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. I suspect that iPhone sales this year will be in a holding pattern, and in a world where a lack of exponential growth is taken as a sign of failure I think we’ll see a lot of “Apple sales decline! iPhone launch a failure!” headlines in coming months. Apple’s charmed decade could come to a crashing halt in the reality of the economic credit crunch.
Maybe Apple knows this. Maybe they figure this year will be tough whatever they do. There’s no point reinventing the iPhone or doing anything eye catching with the price with the economy where it is; maybe they accept that those downturn headlines are coming regardless and they may as well suck it up this year and come back stronger in 2010 with a quantum leap iPhone 4. It would explain the atypically clumsy and hard-to-explain 3GS name of the new model – at least next year they get to move up to a genuine version 4.
And maybe they’re making the most of the continued absence this year of CEO Steve Jobs, still on medical leave. Everyone said that Apple’s product launches would be dull without him, and they have been, so there’s been no disappointment. Maybe the good stuff is being held back so that the raised expectations for Jobs’ return pay-off in spectacular headlines and sales. Maybe.
In the meantime I’m far more excited about the new iPhone software, version 3.0, which offers MMS and cut and paste and a host of new features. Ironically the upgrade is free, and for the sum total of £0 you get what essentially feels like … a whole new phone. So who needs 3GS right now? Not me.
links for 2009-06-09
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Is this the first time that a serving government minister (Lord Drayson) has debated his role and the organisation of government, with random interested parties, on twitter?
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Some good thinking/calculations/analysis of the cost of an iPhone upgrade in the UK with the new announcements.
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An expert review of how well the London Summit web initiative performed.
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10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content. WHich would be true of most online communities, oddly enough …
links for 2009-06-08
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Overview survey of the social media activities of central government departments over the past year.
links for 2009-06-07
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The Guardian's Charles Arthur shows how journalism in the 21st century is suffering from cut-and-paste echo chambers distorting the story.
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Interesting to have some actual "real world" experiences with the new "iPhone-killer" from Sanford Dickert, Social Engineer.
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If no one reads a blog, does it make a sound?
links for 2009-06-06
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Fascinating look at a briefing document issued by Labour for its MPs and spokespeople to keep them on-message in the wake of the elections, expenses and sundry resignations rows.
links for 2009-06-03
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"The modern world is dreadful and it's all Twitter's fault" concludes the Telegraph. Okay, I paraprahse, but the Telegraph's aversion to anything modern is frightening. They write: "Twitter updates are contributing to numbing our brains and outpacing our neurons’ processing capabilities … our reactions to traumatic news stories are becoming increasingly flippant as our minds are trying to seek comfort in the simpler things that cause no stress or provoke a need for analysis. "
links for 2009-06-02
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Using Twitter to increase student participation in lesson discussions.
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Research suggests the public is unaware of the services that can be accessed online:
while 92 per cent of those surveyed shop online and 81 per cent used online banking, just 41 per cent had paid their car tax online and only 22 per cent paid council tax online. This could undermine the Transformational Government agenda,says the research. -
Horsesmouth looks an interesting platform: "someone knows what you need, someone needs what you know."
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The thing about having a content management system is that you have to actually MANAGE your content. That means assessing, stocktaking and classifying properly.
links for 2009-06-01
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How COi went about its recent "Improving Government Online" consultation.
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Things are looking bleak for ITN: a massive pensions black hole, takeover talks collapsing, and completely omitted from the government's Digital Britain report.
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Hypnotic video of the sheer power of water: from a slight pool of water on a road, to a ten-metre section of road being utterly swept away, in less than four minutes. Scary.
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Does Google Wave really reinvent social media?
links for 2009-06-02
I posted the following item to del.icio.us the other day:
But it got swept up into a “tidy up” aggregation of such items and the original post was moved, which broke a link to this page from Public Strategy as a result.
Public Strategy was using the link as a jumping-off point for a really interesting article about “zombie press notices” – about how the piecemeal coverage in press notices and resulting web site articles made it hard to actually get to the meat of the story in question – a real failure of (a) people writing press releases, and (b) too many journalists who do a mediocre job of processing the press releases they are spoon fed. C’mon, guys, journalism is more than just a bit of word processing! (That’s my spin on the situation, by the way, and not necessarily the thoughts of the Public Strategy article – don’t mean to misrepresent. Go see the article if you want to see what they say!)
I thought it was a great pick up on a topic that had never occurred to me when I was grazing the original Computing magazine piece linked to via de.icio.us when I was really just interested in the headline figures.
I make no such claims to be a journalist, so while the irony is not lost on me – that I was as content as the journalists with the original Computing magazine piece as it stood for the basic data – I can still claim that there’s a difference between bookmarking an article and writing one professionally, and I’m sticking to that line!
Anyway, I wanted to reinstate the original link so that Public Strategy’s link wasn’t broken, and more importantly to allow me to point to a really interesting new post that I’m happy to be name checked in and to have been even peripherally involved in sparking off.
Google Shared Items- America’s Place In The World
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