The Media Blog

The moral compass askew

It would be fair to say Fox News hasn't always covered itself in glory when reporting on all matters Middle East; the news channel has previously drawn criticism for its less than even handed coverage of the Iraq war. The channel has also had the odd struggle with accuracy. But, in the interest of providing my own fair and balanced reporting I'll let you make up your own mind over their latest lapse: an honest mistake or an insight into foreign policy ambitions?

Going back to the Middle East, which can be a tough area to pin down geographically. There are examples of border disputes - Israel/Palestine, Bahrain/Qatar, north/south Sudan, for example. However, the graphic Fox News used to illustrate the region to its viewers had one small problem: it showed Egypt where Iraq should be.

Has the war on terror evolved into a war on geography, or is it just a case of mistaken identity - all those Middle East countries look the same right? I mean, it's not as if Egypt is in Africa or anything.

Turning the air blue

Anybody who thinks David Cameron is cursing himself over his "unguarded" swearing antics on Absolute Radio yesterday is sadly mistaken.

It's misguided to believe the Tory leader blundered with his language (see below), especially as most utterances of our political leaders these days are micro-managed and carefully weighed to the nth degree for their likely impact by their communications teams.

Many believe Cameron's Achilles Heel is a belief among some sections of the electorate that he is an out-of-touch Eton toff who has no real idea of the pressures facing millions of Britons or any real hope of connecting with an increasingly alienated British "yoof."

So what better way of showing what a bloody good chap he is by dropping the odd expletive into a live interview with one of our edgier DJs? It certainly seemed to work for DJ Christian O'Connell who said Cameron was a "good bloke" who acted as if "down the boozer." 

Mission accomplished then? I sincerely hope not. What is it about our contemporary politicians that they think such transparent attempts to court popularity are effective? There seems to be a growing trend in British politics for this type of ridiculous behaviour whether it be Tony Blair banging on about Jackie Milburn, Gordon Brown grinning inanely on YouTube or William Hague donning his baseball cap.

For me, these grotesque gambits exhibit more about what our politicians think of the public's collective intelligence than demonstrating any clear idea of how to win over a sceptical electorate. If the recent expenses' scandal teaches us anything, it is that voters are increasingly cynical of the political class and their desperate manoeuvres to capture our hearts and minds.

A healthy dose of cynicism is what is required here - along with a robust V-sign to the Tory spin machine and any other political apparatchiks who believe such blatant attention-grabbing ruses are the way forward.

Ha-ha! The Simpsons pokes fun at print media

A measured and insightful analysis from The Simpsons' Nelson:

No offence, but the media offends

Negotiating the concept of offence is like walking a greasy tightrope for the media. What offends one person can delight another, which is why the national newspapers – in theory, at least – are written for different readerships.

Earlier this week, the Daily Mail (so often ridiculed for its frenzy-whipping) published an attack against media scaremongering. As well as being astonishingly ironic, it suggested that as well as being scared of everything we ought also to be scared of being scared.

The same paper has made an art form of being offended. Who else could have engineered Sachsgate? Or published film reviews where the reviewer is too pre-emptively offended to go watch the film?

Aside from selling more newspapers, offence on a large scale often leads to action. After Sachsgate, Jonathan Ross was suspended and Russell Brand resigned from the BBC. During the Celebrity Big Brother race row, Carphone Warehouse pulled its sponsorship of the show. But the effects of offence can also cause offence, and sometimes this comes full circle.

Today, the Mail reported on how the UK police can wear Union Flag badges after they were originally deemed offensive. Again, the commenters fail to consider the subjectivity of offence:

So there we have it. This week, we're told to be afraid of being afraid. And now, it's time to be offended by others’ offence.

Nadia Saint has written for titles including the New Statesman, and is a member of the creative team at LEWIS PR. She also blogs at www.lewis360.com.

Newspapers and niches

Andrew Keen has written an interesting blog entitled “In Defence of Gatekeepers” defending the idea that newspapers should remain our “gatekeepers” to news rather than mere “curators” of what is revelant to us.

 

Personally I agree with Keen as I have problems with the notion of media sources becoming curators of relevant information. I fear the obsession with relevance means we'll only read articles that reinforce our existing prejudices and that it will create a social division as communities become ever more introspective. It will also take out a lot of the serendipitous fun of flicking through a paper we enjoy at the moment.

 

But I also see the move towards relevance is probably inevitable. Such fragmentation has already happened online and in TV over the past few years. This will probably need to be reflected by printed media too if newspapers and magazines aren't to die out.

 

In some respects you could draw an analogy with the decline of political parties over the past 30 years. Once, parties were broad churches that attracted a mass membership based on “identity politics” - if you were working class, you were Labour; if you were middle class, you were probably Tory.

 

But since the 1980s people have left political parties in droves, and voting turn out has declined too. Instead, we seem to prefer single issue groups like charities or “mass movement” causes such as Make Poverty History.

 

People can agree on a single issue. That simplicity is attractive. But parties need to have an opinion on every issue, however complex, and need to find messy compromises that assuage people from across the spectrum. That isn't so attractive.

 

Similarly, newspapers have attempted to appeal to as wide a base as possible. Readers who care about politics have to put up with celeb gossip, sports fans with pages of share prices, and so on.

 

Is it inevitable that newspapers will have to choose their niche and specialise? I hope not – after all, political parties have survived, even if their membership has reduced from its peak.

Chipmunks plan to kill us in our beds

You won’t have missed it, I’m sure, but one of the big media stories of the summer is shaping up to be the invasion of chipmunks who are sneaking in to the UK through the Channel Tunnel, with all the Daily Mail-baiting audacity of a Sangatte escapee.

Once here they are taking all sorts of liberties, such as invading our kitchens and eating our Crunchy Nut Cornflakes (much to the delight of Kellogg's marketing department, I'm sure/skeptical).

Don't believe me? Well, Ananova reports:

Chipmunk invades kitchen

So this is just a normal Siberian chipmunk, you say?

No, no, The Sun offers far greater insight.

Killer chipmunks invade kitchens

Ah, killer chipmunks (such as the one pictured above mugging a man for his peanut, on pain of death). You should have said these bloodthirsty beasts were deadly. Oh what's that? You did…

Breakout fuels killer chipmunk concerns

And again…

Killer chipmunk chased my cat

I wonder how many people have been killed in the UK by these 'killer chipmunks'?

Don't take any chances though. Go carefully out there.

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.

5 top tips for terrifying media

Media scaremongering has now reached self-parodic proportions. With increasingly banal subject matter (cows in today’s Sun and MORE wheelie bins in the Mail), a rhetoric of paranoia has emerged.

Aspiring doom journos take note. Here are five ways to scare your readers witless:

1. Use hyperbole to the max. Pick ‘regime’ over ‘plan’, and ‘panic’ over ‘worry’.
2. Capitalise at random. ‘The Authorities’ and ‘The Powers That Be’ tend to work well.
3. Quote specious statistics. Figures are always factual, regardless of their provenance.
4. Use misleading headlines. These will drive traffic if nothing else.
5. And finally… Create a nifty little graphic to sum it all up:

 

Top 10 posts this week

1. Typo of the year: Thank you Guardian subs

2. Wanted: Intern, must be visibly ethnic, c/o Daily Mail

3. Cosmo, your feature's on back-to-front

4. To bleep or not to bleep, that is the f***ing question

5. Daily Mail crowdsources tone and quality control

6. The Mail’s age old problem

7. Nothing to fear but the Daily Mail

8. Big Brother’s death is media reality

9. I fear no part of this is ironic

10. Leona Lewis and bunny score tabloid gold

How to write a great headline, click-harvesting-style

Spotted this on the BBC just now: 

Of course, anybody reading that is supposed to fall for the teasing suggestion it could be some memorable soul from hit UK TV show Pop Idol, making it a fairly interesting story for the millions of people who watched that show. The headline certainly works, because out of interest I clicked on it to see which poor wannabe had come a cropper. Only to find out:

A former American Idol contestant has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident in New Jersey, officials say.

Clever. But hardly big news, even in the UK showbiz world.

So the headline works, turning a bit of a nothing story this side of the pond, into a must-read for those of us who list Pop Idol among our guilty pleasures. However, a good metric as to how likely it is readers feel cheated by such click-harvesting tactics is evident in the fact the most-read story is nowhere to be seen in the list of most shared as readers quickly click away after the first paragraph:

The BBC has a very strict character count for headlines on its website but you can be sure, if the headline read: 'American Idol...' it would not be the most read story today.

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.

How the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment ran out of steam

This morning, news of a crowdsourcing success. This afternoon, a high-profile example seemingly a little stuck in the mud.

Six weeks ago the Guardian invited its readers to help it trawl through hundreds of thousands of expense claim documents released (in redacted form) by Parliament.

Within three days 20,000 people had helped classify 160,000 pages. The paper was rightly proud of its crowdsourcing experiment and splashed the news across the front page of its Monday print edition.

But now it seems user involvement has slowed to a trickle.

These are the bare facts:

We have 458,832 pages of documents. 23,185 of you have reviewed 201,587 of them. Only 257,245 to go...

By my reckoning, around 500 documents were processed last week. At this rate, we'll be nearing 2020 before the project is complete.

This is not to say the experiment has failed but the paper does need to work out how it ties up some loose ends. If it cannot re-energise the crowd, that is.

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Nothing to fear but the Daily Mail

Media outlets aren’t always noted for their self awareness. But this article in today’s Daily Mail has really surpassed itself.

“Do you ever feel as if The Authorities are doing their damnedest to scare us all to death?” opens the article, provocatively.

The Mail itself is routinely lampooned for its scaremongering tactics. With all this immigration and disease and wheelie bins and Christmas robins and everything, no one and nothing can ever be safe.

(And don’t forget: most things both cause and prevent cancer – so make sure you always avoid and indulge in them.)

Unfortunately, most of the commenters have missed the sublime irony of the piece. If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, then the Mail gives this a subtle twist. We have everything to fear including fear itself – and being fearful is the scariest prospect of them all.

Is that the sound of the crowd? Just maybe.

There's a good chance you are not one of the Birmingham Post's 12,700 daily readers and therefore may have missed something of a landmark event in crowdsouring.

Help Me Investigate, the public journalism project designed to kick-start investigate reporting with public involvement at its heart, has its first story in print today.

Via the pages of the Post, it reveals the worst places to park in Birmingham, a story based on an initial inquiry by a resident called Stacey and followed up by seven others (including, it must be said, some intimately involved in the Help Me Investigate project).

The Freedom of Information request that led to the release of the parking data was written by Heather Brooke, she of MPs' expenses fame.

For the record Alum Rock Road leads the list with 4,000 tickets handed out last year. In total Birmingham City Council issued 135,656 parking tickets in the year to 2009.

So far the crowd is modest but this morning's Post story points to interesting things ahead.

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News. He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Cosmo: your feature’s on back to front

Call me old fashioned, but is it too much to expect a story to exist before a journalist covers it?

(From a Response Source query sent this morning.)

To bleep or not to bleep, that is the f***ing question

Nothing undermines the mature and serious nature of a newspaper more than the habit of starring or dashing out swearing.

It is a device used to great effect by The Beano who in my days as a reader would use strings of characters such as "#@$!*!" to suggest Dennis has pushed his dad too far this time and caused Mr The Menace to say something unprintable.

But does it make sense that what's good for The Beano should be good for The Sunday Telegraph?

The closing quote - a major point of lasting impact for an article - from an interview with a clearly rattled Manchester United manager today ended with Alex Ferguson describing claims from Liverpool's Rafa Benitez as (look away now if you're easily shocked... by lame editorial decisions):

"--------, absolute --------."

Now, I think that might be 'bollocks', or possibly 'bullshit'.

But perhaps Ferguson was going off-piste with something more creative, like 'cockwash'. Or maybe he was calling Benitez a 'shithead' or 'cocknose'.

The point I'm slightly childishly making is that if The Sunday Telegraph thought it newsworthy, isn't it important to report the words as they were spoken? Isn't this crucial to journalism?

Yesterday's Guardian thought it front-page-newsworthy that Jeremy Clarkson had, for two weeks running during the filming of Top Gear, called Prime Minister Gordon Brown "a cunt". It probably is newsworthy given Clarkson's role as influential bellwether of the right wing masses.

So having decided to run the story, the Guardian published the word, because the use of the word was the story. To star it out would have been to mislead and patronise the audience.

Update: The Observer also ended a similar article to The Sunday Telegraph's with the same Ferguson quote, using it unedited and benefiting therefore from its impact. If you're interested and up to the shock, it turns out Ferguson, not for the first time, was talking "bollocks, absolute bollocks".

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.

After typo of the year comes apology of the week

The perils of interviewing somebody who works under the cover of darkness and maintains a veil of anonymity - this from today's Guardian: "It has transpired that last week's interview...purporting to be with Banksy was actually somebody impersonating the graffiti artist. Apologies to Banksy..."

Missed it earlier in the week? See 'Typo of the year', here.

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.  

Gerrard, Winehouse and the media's split personality

There is a personality disorder within the media that means it is in a continual limbo, one in which it believes it can both exist yet not exist at the same time - commenting with a logic of sorts upon the entirely illogical world it has created.

I was entirely unsurprised to see two stories side by side in many of today's papers; those outlining the acquittals of Steven Gerrard and Amy Winehouse in separate but not dissimilar cases.

Nor was I surprised to see the Gerrard story in The Times lead with an account of the boozy acts of a drunken footballer's violent night out, while the Winehouse account lead with the all important fashion angle - what the feisty pop singer wore for her day in court. So far, so stereotypical.

What is less justified, and more commonplace, granted in the tabloids, is the nod-and-a-wink editorialising which points towards some injustice based on the apparently Teflon nature of the famous.

'They only got off because they're famous' is the view of the tabloid consuming masses. But a more sound argument would be 'they only went to court because they are famous', such is the glare of the spotlight the media trains upon them.

How many dust-ups, fracas, brawls and punches are thrown every Friday and Saturday night that don't go to court, where prosecutors don't fear the meddling of the media if they're seen not to act, and witnesses and victims feel less inclined, for whatever reason, to come forward?

I'd contest the media's fascination with celebrity is the only reason anybody perceives injustice to have taken place.

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.

Only in The Guardian

'In defence of the everybird' by Joe Moran in today's Guardian is a wonderful read; well written and eloquently and passionately argued.

It also reminds us there is a rich depth of quality, opinion and a very British irreverence to the written media, so often discounted in arguments about their diminishing identity, born out of an over-reliance on newswire content as well as the low-hanging fruit of the easy-win on diary stories that draw the press pack as one.

That said, I'm not convinced an article about the common pigeon's undeserved public-enemy status actually *needed* writing, but is there any other paper in the world where you would read these lines:

"There is no doubt that pigeons can be a nuisance en masse, But [sic] there is a lot of hyperbole in anti-pigeon propaganda...The messiness of nature must not intrude on...well managed and tourist-friendly urbanism... All the great naturalists have been suspicious of the anthropomorphic pecking orders we impose on animals and have found ecological worth in the ugliest of creatures."

Thank God somebody said it!

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.

Big Brother’s death is media reality

In today's Guardian, Mark Lawson sounds the death knell for Big Brother. He argues the genre died with Jade Goody – and that this year’s disappointing ratings could kill the show for good.

There are a number of reasons for the genre’s implosion (read: it’s really, really boring). What’s interesting, however, is the media’s role in Big Brother’s demise. As Lawson points out, the show’s erstwhile promoters (the redtops and the likes of Heat) have barely touched this year’s in-house shenanigans.

Adding fuel to this argument is former Heat editor Mark Frith. In a recent interview, he even cited Big Brother’s decline as a reason for his departure:

“I certainly felt I left at the right point… I feel that we were never going to sell any more copies than we were at that point. I’d gone off Big Brother, I was Big Brother’s number one fan and even I’d stopped watching it and that’s a huge part of our year.”

Assuming their prediction is correct, what will this mean for celebrity media – and the mainstream media by association? At a time when journalists are stretched and celebrities are so strictly PR-controlled, what will take its place?

If other reality formats (X Factor, etc.) go a similar way, the media will be bereft of ready-made and easy-to-report celebrity. There are only so many staged ‘paparazzi’ shots and ‘source-close-to-the-star’ fabrication that readers can take.

So unless Britney goes bonkers every year, it’ll be interesting to see what fills the void.

Nadia Saint has written for titles including the New Statesman, and is a member of the creative team at LEWIS PR. She also blogs at www.lewis360.com.

I fear no part of this is ironic...

It annoys me that local news outlets have been saddled with a reputation for being trite and parochial.

Oh, hang on...

Thanks to Andy McCue for sharing the pic.

The Mail's age old problem

Interesting to note the drop in revenues at the Daily Mail & General Trust, driven in large part by the decline of Northcliffe Newspapers in the regions. And even the mothership is struggling. The Independent - which not only shares office space with the Mail, but knows something of the sharp end of media economics - reported:

The Associated Newspapers division, which publishes the Mail titles, saw revenues decline 12 per cent to £206m. Earnings from newspaper circulation fell 7 per cent while those from advertising were 14 per cent lower.

The Mail is still in rude health, circulation-wise, relative to other papers, but its position on one newspaper-wide concern, appears uniquely more acute than the competition. You only have to read the letters pages to work out why. Two examples from today begin:

I was in the RAF in the war but never encountered a Me 262, the Luftwaffe Jet aircraft…

And:

When I was stationed down the Suez Canal, Egypt, in 1947…

Sorry to be so blunt, but one bad winter and you get the feeling the Daily Mail could be done for.

Enjoyed this article? Try this one too: Wanted: Intern, must be visibly ethnic. c/o Daily Mail

Will Sturgeon is director of media strategy at LEWIS PR and a former editor of silicon.com. He also blogs at sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com.