virtualeconomics

Daylight

One of the basic tests of whether what you do is good or bad is whether you can imagine, having done it, going home and saying to your parent(s), partner(s), kids or friends "hey guys, guess what I did today?" Or as Louis Brandies most elegantly put it, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Things are done furtively in the dark that no-one would be willing to own up to in the light of day.

On Friday Laurie Penny kicked off a debate about misogyny online when she pointed out that for airing her opinions she is regularly subject to threats, abuse and all sorts of hate from anonymous - presumably male - commentators. Many other women have since commented that they have been subject to similar abuse. The fact that women say things apparently drives some men into a violent fury, and many websites give them the option of venting that fury through anonymous trolling.

Rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail

With thanks to @timhardford and @stevesilberman, just recording some of the work of the rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail for posterity before they notice and take it down.

The full gallery is (was) here, and using a celeb gallery to raise awareness of Occupy Wall Street is funny. Hats off to the guy, who is presumably now looking for a new job.

How little newspapers matter

News today is that the world's second most popular English-language newspaper, the News of the World, is to close. Most likely it will simply be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun (the world's most popular English-language newspaper).

Not because, like so many newspapers in the early C21st, it loses money. The News of the World makes money hand over fist (not literally of course), so much so that its closure threatens its persistently loss-making quality stablemate the Times. Printing lies about celebrities is worth a fortune and the model is replicated thousands of times around the world. 

Communication breakdown

When Haringey Council voted to close four elderly people's drop-in centres, the users of the centres contacted the council to point out that they could save the centres if they simply stopped wasting public money on publishing the cat-basket liner "Haringey People".

Dropping through the door six times a year, this self-congratulatory pamphlet serves the same two slightly sinister purposes as all such local government "newspapers" - to present the council's squandering of public money in a positive light, and to crowd out such independent local journalism as might actually subject the council to proper scrutiny.

Amusingly, when put to the vote the coucil overwhelmingly supported the continued publication of their magazine and council leader Claire Kober told the Haringey Independent newspaper that "cutting Haringey People would seriously diminish our ability to communicate effectively with residents". Any communication problem would, of course, be better solved simply by paying a modicum of attention to what those residents want - which unsurpisingly appears to be an unambiguous call for services instead of propaganda. 

(The details of the story originally appeared in the print edition of Haringey Independent - I cannot find the same story on the website, presumably a failing on my part which I will remedy as soon as a link becomes available.)

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

Maybe Demand Media's CEO doesn't use Google

Google's latest update, Panda, was targeted specifically at content farms.

This isn't ambiguous or in any way contentious. Panda, named after a Google employee but also known as the farmer update, was explictly "designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful", and while the Panda announcement itself was reluctant to use the term "content farm" an earlier blog post by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer and co-signatory of the Panda announcement, stated that Google was targeting "“content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content". 

So when Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt recently told Kara Swisher that "I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either"...that was a very strange claim.

The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

But is it true?

A news organisation's moral authority arises from its validation of the news. If something appears on the front page of the Guardian or the New York Times, we can be confident that people there have checked that it's right. Insofar as news sources have our trust, they have earned it by making sure that what they publish is right (and issuing immediate, full corrections when they're wrong). 

In Australia, Fairfax just sacked its subs - and with them, it threw away its moral authority as a news organisation.

Newspapers don't break news - since the plane that went down in the Hudson River to Osama's execution yesterday, news breaks on Twitter, then on blogs, then on radio and TV. Newspapers don't have the only or the best writers, they don't own the only printing presses, they aren't the only way to find out what's going on or what it means.

A news organisation's unique selling point is the process by which it verifies and legitimates information, a process on which their reputation is built (see what happened to the Mirror when it emerged their Abu Ghraib photos were fiction - the immediate and evidently permanent loss of about 10% of the readers). Anyone can write anything they like, on Twitter or their own blog or in the comments on the BBC, but it's not until a recognised news authoriity checks it out that anyone takes it as more than an ubsubstantiated rumour. If the recognised news authorities out-source that validation, taking the subbing function outside the building, all they're doing is publishing words and letting someone check if those words are true. Even I can do that, and so can you. Actual news publishers would probably be better 0ff outsourcing the writing.

Little more than a glance at the new economics of news

Strange to see Scout Analytics' latest infographic on the disparity between online and print news revenues getting so much coverage. It's obviously true, but it's also just a fairly superficial restatement of a small subset of the known facts.

Is online news worth less than offline news because less time is spent reading it (both absolutely and relatively), because of anchoring at "free" and because of commoditised online ad rates? Well...sort of. Partly. It's true as far as it goes.

First, this isn't about news.

If newspapers really cared about the freedom of the press, most of them would close tomorrow

There's been a lot of talk about press freedom of late, what with the rich and powerful taking out super-injuctions and attempts by special interest groups such as the GMC to exempt themselves from press scrutiny.

The common theme here is, of course, that as fewer people read newspapers and newspaper company revenues decline the power of news organisations to hold even the minor celebrities within their own ranks to account, let alone to talk truth to power, evaporates.

Newspapers had the power to unearth and reveal secrets because they wielded vast political and economic influence and could afford the best lawyers. Celebrities, politicians, plutocrats and even doctors increasingly think it a safe enough  bet that actually they now have the best lawyers, and even if the Sun won it for the Tories in 1992 no-one even in Wapping seriously pretends it will ever carry such political weight again. Twenty years later the Telegraph spent the better part of a year spinning out the revelation that practically every member of the lower house had systematically stolen from the public purse and the political fall-out was inconsequential - the barest handful of sacrificial imprisonments and the rest allowed to continue on their way. Insofar as serious investigative political journalism is still attempted outside the pages of Private Eye and - utterly bizarrely - Rolling Stone its key practitioners are currently being tortured by the US military or going through the slow process of being quietly shipped off to the same fate by obedient European governments.