PS

Further to yesterday's post, check this out. The tool itself is pretty cool, but Chris Atkins' work brings up some of the same points I was trying to make yesterday:

"But it was Atkins's bogus Facebook campaign calling for the return of the prime minister's new cat, Larry, that has been most successful. Within 24 hours of the site having been created, the Mail ran the story under the heading: "But that's my auntie's cat: Man's claim on 'stray' No 10 ratcatcher (… and there's a Facebook campaign to get him back)." It also appeared in the Metro, under the heading: "Dear David Cameron: You've stolen my aunt's cat, please return him."

But the entirely made up story received most attention on Gaby Logan's BBC 5 Live show, in a light-hearted slot before the 1 o'clock news.. Discussing the story with chief political correspondent John Pienaar, Logan joked that the dispute over ownership of Larry the Downing Street cat was likely to "run and run".

Media and Social Media

I'm slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the existence of Twitter and the role it has to play in journalism.

Up until a few months ago, I didn't really have a Twitter account. I mean, I did, but I opened it because a particularly funny friend of mine was on Twitter and I wanted to read the things he posted, but his Tweets were protected so I had to get an account to read them. I posted maybe five things in over a year, until I realised everyone at work had it and they started hounding me to use mine. So I've embraced it. And in doing so, I've come to see that it can be a lot more than just another narcissistic forum for people who think everyone cares about what they think a lot more than anyone does.

Since everyone and their dog is now on Twitter, it can be a great resource for finding out about events and stories, for following what's going on as people live-tweet events, and as I hardly feel needs saying at this point, for finding out what's happening in places that are closed to traditional media. This became increasingly obvious as governments took measures against press freedom in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya in recent weeks. It's hard to find fault with using social media in these situations, for organising, for sources, for spreading word between journalists. I would caution, though, about completely overstating the importance of social media in these situations - several journalists who were on the ground in Egypt have since pointed out that when the internet was shut down around January 27, the presence on the street actually increased because people had no way of finding out what was going on and had to head to the streets to find out. But still, it's clear that in places like Libya, where press freedom was non-existent and the regime was doing everything it could to keep journalists out and deny violence against protesters, the fact that people had any way at all to get information to the rest of the world was absolutely crucial to understanding what was happening there.

So in these situations, I can absolutely see the merit of the kind of amalgamation of journalism and social media that we've seen in recent weeks. Where I do have a massive problem with it is in modern more domestic journalism, where getting opinions from Twitter and Facebook has become standard practice, and where posts themselves suddenly become news just because everyone can see them and decide to be outraged. Reporters regularly include 'reaction' from people who purport to care about an event in their stories - that is, they post a couple of choice tweets that come up when you search for the relevant trending topic or hashtag. Is this the same as getting an informed opinion from an expert, as we might have done in the past, or the same as actually attending an event, understanding the atmosphere, and getting an opinion from someone who was there when it happened and is reacting in that context? I don't think it necessarily is. There's no way of verifying sources on Twitter - it's somehow just assumed that anyone posting a comment on something is the same kind of person you might have otherwise sought out for comment in the pre-Twitter days. Likewise, it is now common practice when a person dies to report on what messages 'friends' have posted on their Facebook page. Is this the same as a journalist getting an emotional interview with the person's family or friends at a memorial service?

I also think there's a very real danger of becoming lazy because everything seems to be on hand, and of journalistic laziness being potentially dangerous. An example. When I was in j-school, I got a phone call from a classmate who was then doing some work for a national newspaper. He asked me if I knew a Jason Smith (not his real name), because Jason's last tagged photos on Facebook were in an album of mine. I didn't know him - he was the flatmate of an acquaintance, and had come along to a j-school event I'd organised and subsequently been tagged in the photos by his flatmate. Why? Well it turns out someone with Jason's name, who was or had been studying at our school, who was from Toronto, had just been charged with murdering a disabled woman in Toronto. Jason's Facebook profile fit the bill, and his profile picture was dark, with a baseball hat obscuring his face, so it was hard to tell if he fit the alleged murderer's description. I said I didn't know him, but was pretty sure he was living in Ottawa and not a murderer. When I got home, I had a Facebook message from another reporter, and could see from Jason's profile that some of his other friends had been contacted as well. Of course, it turned out to be a different person with the same name - but how many of Jason's friends were contacted to find out if he had killed someone, and what is the danger there? Were there more safeguards against this kind of mistaken identity when people charged with crimes were tracked down by the details available from police, courts, and public records (date of birth, address, listed phone numbers, etc)?

I guess what I'm really saying is that social media is a great tool for leads, a good source of information when nothing else is available and a dynamic way to see how stories move forward- but it cannot and should not replace real journalism. Research, context and verification have become more important, not less, as so much information is available to media consumers, and it seems to me that these are the first things to go when people start depending on social media for news, and, worse, when journalists start depending on it in lieu of doing the kind of work they have done in the past and should still be doing now.

Media and Protest

I went to a discussion at the Frontline Club last week on whether the mainstream media 'gets' protest and how coverage of protest movements has been affected by social media. The talk had been scheduled ages ago, in the wake of the student protests in the UK over tuition fees and the education maintenance allowance, but since then, Tunisia and Egypt happened, and Bahrain and Libya were on the brink. As a result, the panel included a BBC editor, an Al Jazeera English reporter, the founder of a media website and a student protest organiser. The debate and the questions afterward ended up focusing quite a bit on the role of blogs, Facebook and especially Twitter in organising protests and getting the word out about what's going on.

What I noticed, though, was this. When people talk about the movements in Tunisia and especially Egypt, it is with an air of total hope, pride and agreement. And the mainstream media coverage is in large part responsible for informing that view, for perpetuating it in the way these stories are covered. Aside from a few articles questioning the future of Israeli-Egypt relations should Mubarak's regime fall, there never seemed to be any question in anyone's mind (except Ezra Levant in a February 1 Ottawa Sun piece) as to whether the protests in Egypt were inherently good. Coverage was glowing. Any and all damage or problems were attributed to police, paid Mubarak thugs, unruly elements. Never were the protesters generally described as anything other than great. Which was fine for me, because that happens to gel with my personal view, and I was happy for the Egyptians and Tunisians for what they had done and the future they could now hope for.

But then I thought about what this discussion could have been about if it had happened a month earlier, or if Tunisia and Egypt hadn't happened yet. A discussion about the way the media dealt with the student protests in the UK would not have been this positive. Mainstream coverage of domestic protests almost always focuses on what goes wrong. The biggest stories to come out of the tuition fee protests were the damage at Millbank Tower, the kid who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof of said tower, the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla's car, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's son Charlie's various charges for his involvement. There was no talk of revolution. There was no obvious slant to the reporting that said what the students were protesting for was right or wrong, no tone that made them obvious heroes. There were quotes from protest organisers and student leaders condemning the violence and saying it was caused by a small minority, but this didn't translate into the media coverage in the same way it later would for Egypt. Most people would look at the TV coverage or the newspapers the next day and say, "Look at those students destroying everything." There were citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitter users out there during the protests, posting their views on what was happening, reports and pictures of police brutality or peaceful activity. But there was no media embrace of these people, no big fuss about how Twitter was revolutionising the movement, no scramble to identify the most important bloggers/tweeters and make sure we always had their opinion.

And so, why the difference? Before the Q&A part of the Frontline Club event, and right before my phone died and I lost the ability to follow the livetweeting of it, I tweeted, "Different stories here - does msm romanticise protests elsewhere but vilify them at home?" Then, realising where I was, I decided to put the question to the panelists - between a protest leader, a BBC editor, the CEO of a citizen journalist website and an Al Jazeera reporter with experience in the British media, surely there would be some interesting ideas? People asked many questions about the role of social media, all met with long, thoughtful comments from the speakers. Finally, it was my turn, and I asked about the difference in the way international and domestic protest is covered. Does it have to do, I wondered, with political or corporate agendas, with a plurality of views available, with an inability to identify a definite enemy, with having more reporters on the ground and not needing the Twitter view?

And the answer was...nothing. The question was virtually ignored. The moderator, actually, said it was a great question and commented that as a former foreign correspondent, he could attest to the fact that in foreign reporting you are allowed to sort of "take a view" on things, to decide who are the good guys and the bad guys and report from that perspective. He then deferred to the BBC editor, who shook his head and said he had already spoken a lot tonight. The Al Jazeera reporter said that the question didn't really apply to her as Qatar-based AJ doesn't really have any news. And so, in a joke about the lack of anything happening in Doha, the question was lost and the panelists moved on to the next one. I was disappointed. I had really hoped for some answers on this.

When I got home, I saw a tweet from the BBC editor, responding to my last comment, saying "good point". When I asked him for his views again, he said they were "not for public consumption". The next day, I noticed a discussion between the website CEO and someone who had attended - and the CEO commented that he was more interested by my question than the point they were discussing. You know, the question he didn't say one word about at the debate.

In the end, I was left with two questions. One: what are the factors that contribute to such differences in the way protests are covered at home and abroad? I have some ideas, ranging from the fact that the public's a lot less forgiving about damages when it's their own stuff being destroyed, when it's their city up on the TV screen, to political influences in editorial decisions, to snobbery about the role of citizen journalists, to the need to simplify international problems into good guys and bad in a way we can't do here, to the fact that you just can't get everyone behind hating David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the way you can for Hosni Mubarak. And two: why don't journalists want to talk about it?

Intro

Because of the nature of my job, and the fact that I'm a bit of a news junkie, I'm usually reading a newspaper or online article, watching a 24 hour news channel, and receiving Twitter updates from journalists and news organisations for a good 12 hours out of any day, usually simultaneously. Being inundated with coverage has its downsides - stories seem to get very old, very quickly, and I'm becoming highly critical of the way TV reporters do their jobs - but it also means that I'm able to compare coverage almost without thinking about it. It just happens. Why has one organisation covered the story this way, how did this source come up, why is this being ignored, what's going on behind the scenes here?

This blog will, I think, mostly be just thoughts, observations, questions I have on the way modern media works. I don't know yet how comprehensive or varied it'll be, or how often I'll post. To be honest, right now this is mostly just an outlet for me, a way of communicating some thoughts that I can't otherwise without annoying the rest of the office with some stream of consciousness questions and comments. We'll see where it goes.