George Packer’s take on twitter has clearly twanged many nerves – not least Nick Bilton and David Carr. So far, so New York.
How is it that people keep finding new media in which to rehash the same old arguments?
Mr Packer manages to smoke out some real issues with what seemed like an attack on twitter but is merely a re-iteration of the old signal-noise ratio problem. Is George merely suffering from a dose of the shirkys — a dread dose of the filter failures? If so, it is a condition diagnosed two years ago – why are we still debating what he is suffering from when we know how to treat it?
Twitter is a great tool but it requires maintenance. Using a desktop app worked for a while, lists helped, but in the end there is only so much filtration that can be done.There is a base level of filtration beyond which only unsubscribing works. If that threshold is too high, then maybe twitter is not for you. Fair enough.
Reducing a tool and one’s preference for it to an us-versus-them position is a morons’ game. If Mr Packer’s reluctance is based on a genuine, informed choice, who cares if he has never signed up to twitter?
If its simplicity has been used as a way to expand its user base and its investor numbers, it seems a tad disingenuous for users to complain that a journalist must really use twitter and really understand it before they decide it’s not for them.
My sympathy is with Mr Packer on this one — and I use twitter every day, although more to read than to post. His avoidance of the tools of real-time communication does not seem to have hampered his career too much. And he has made an informed choice – why does that exercise so many twitter fans? Are they so afraid to be wrong?
Suspicions must always be raised when the loudest cry is “he doesn’t get it”. “OMFG, Packer just DOES NOT GET IT”. That way lie naked emperors and credulous crowds.
I can recall a time when bloggers, pissed off with “dressing gown in basement” put-downs, used the mental practices of journalism to define its quality rather than the tools or medium used.
A curious, questioning mind plus checking sources plus objectivity plus transparency plus right to reply = journalism (roughly). It doesn’t matter if that reaches you through the The Telegraph, the telegraph or the bush telegraph.
Once more, Twitter is just a tool. Like a pencil. Use it to write a shopping list or to write a symphony, but don’t pretend both are music.
So did twitter really suffer a denial-of-service attack last night or was it just overwhelmed by massive interest from Newsnight viewer newbies?
Evan Williams, the Twitter chief executive, was interviewed by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight on Wednesday night. This post was delayed because my addled brain could not dredge up a Will Rogers quote and google was slow in forthcoming, but here it is at last:
“An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.”
You would think I could have remembered that, given how many ignorant people I know. Trust a vaudevillain to put humourous wisdom in such simple words. Plus, fulfilling the most important criterion for any post-2008 pith, it amounts to fewer than 140 characters.
In a “but how will it make money?” crusade led by the Guardian, Charles Arthur, the paper’s technology editor, prefaced the headline of the interview’s transcript with “Read it and weep”. And from that objective standpoint, things went downhill: “Newsnight got the ‘first British TV interview’ with Twitter co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams. What did they ask him about? Demi Moore. Then it went downhill,” guardian/co.uk/technology wrote.
Lest I be accused of imbalance, my colleague Shane Richmond wrote ‘Is Newsnight a form of journalism?’
The truth is, I read both pieces and many tweets on the subject and did indeed almost weep. The gist seems to be that those few who are already aware of this service and care about its business model deserve priority over the unwashed masses who still get most of their news from the television and for whom all of this is still a discovery.
If James Dyson were on the show, would the host ask about the business plan for his new design of vacuum cleaner, or would she ask how it worked, what makes it different, does it suck more than previous models?
Which served the viewer better – the assumption of no previous knowledge or asking how Twitter will pay (probably a secret), a knowing wink to existing users (a bit naff) and the navel-gazing that only tech journos can muster (a bit off-putting to anyone but tech journos)?
Let he whose paper has not run rubbish Twitter celeb stories cast the first stone. Or perhaps not.
My own critique of Evan Williams? If anything, Mr Williams looked underprepared for basic questions that most of us have already heard answered online. That is not much of an excuse for not having his quips polished for his first British TV interview.
Maybe Mr Williams missed the wood for the trees – keep it simple is great advice, never more so than when explaining technology to the over-40s. The twitter fans, myself included, are not going to ditch it based on a deer-caught-in-the-headlines interview such as Wednesday’s. But the lacklustre defence of admittedly obvious attack questions is not going to encourage many over-40 newbies to try it out.
Maybe he was lulled into a false sense of security by the twitter faithful? Maybe he (like many of the twitter-obsessed) was expecting Miss Wark to have read the TechCrunch-leaked documents and grill him on Twitter’s business plan and the service’s scalability?
Scalability? What in the name of god is that, I can hear my mother ask. But if Demi Moore is on it … i might give it a look.
Can we chalk the @ev #newsnight debacle down to another MSM misunderstanding? Well, no. Expectations are too high if they demand that Miss Wark ask Mr Williams in-depth questions that assume an intimate knowledge of his product. She does not run a tech blog – she hosts a general news show. Cue basic questions assuming no previous knowledge – on behalf of the viewer, not necessarily of Miss Wark.
Do I know what YouTube is? Yes, but every time it crops up in copy, I will try to add “the video-sharing website” because I cannot smugly assume that everyone shares my earth-shattering knowledge of the internets.
Quintillian wrote: “We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us”.
That I have repeated the quote as by Harold Evans shows what I know, but those of us with the benefit of hyperlinks, near-instant feedback and, let’s face it, a much younger audience, would do well to remember those words.
After all, gents, the questions were nowhere near as offensive as a BBC presenter showing too much leg.
What utter wank.
Chris Anderson persists in marketing a book, Free (£8.54 from amazon.co.uk) whose relevance failed at about the same time as the international credit markets.
Among other things, Anderson is known for his book, The Long Tail, which at least has the virtue of being based on an observable mathematical phenomenon - that the less popular a product was, the fewer people bought it and vice versa – ground-breaking stuff.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, a book devoted to how humans have an uncanny gift for quickly sniffing out bullshit, says here that Anderson’s argument is full of holes.
Seth Godin (I haven’t read any of his books – his post is unlikely to change that) and Anderson (in this uber-patronising smugfest) would be a lot easier to take seriously if they addressed some of the questions in Gladwell’s critique rather than giving us one more high school-pitched lesson in economics and marginal cost and an extrapolation as to how it applies to newspapers.
Such as – why YouTube, free darling of the Web 2.0 movement, and case study in Anderson’s book, has yet to make a red cent in profit. Why Amazon’s Kindle 30-70 profit-sharing/copyright deal with the Dallas Morning News is fucked – if the marginal cost of an extra copy is “close enough to nil as can be rounded down”, shouldn’t the deal be a bit more equitable? That the eerily reminiscent Lewis Strauss’s “too cheap to meter” claims failed to materialise and why.
Gladwell excuses Anderson as a “technological utopian” in his misunderstanding of the costs behind running any network. I think he is being too kind – at best Anderson is an after-dinner speaker and new media consultant for whom the book, Free, serves as a business card.
I think I will wait until, like any such advertisement, Anderson’s book reaches the price of its title before reading – it shouldn’t take too long.
And can somebody please call the cops or social services or whoever and free those poor guys trapped in Anderson’s basement cranking out GeekDad posts for Wired?
This is probably accurate, but a tad harsh.
Is this an omen?
In an Ireland so unfamiliar to me that an artist can be interviewed by police for caricaturing a sitting Taoiseach, I suppose I should feel comfort that John Waters is still a humourless contrarian:
“The only amusing thing here is Casby’s deluded belief that he has something to say … His works are crude, unfunny, vindictive, without intrinsic content and wholly lacking in artistic merit.”
Waters seems to be sincerely arguing that because he finds no meaning or merit in what Conor Casby has to say, nor how the artist chooses to express it, that any outrage at his subsequent treatment is misplaced. He could overlook the supposed hurt to Cowen’s family, the disrespect to the office of the Taoiseach and, his most po-faced objection of all, “the breach of security at a national institution”, if Louis Le Brocquy hung a 6′x 4′ of the chief defecating, perhaps?
Casby was not subjected to the deliberate, cynical fear of Garda interview for being a shit artist, for having a shit sense of humour, or for breaching the Pentagonesque security of the National Gallery. He was intimidated, as were employees of Today FM, and I have no doubt, those of RTÉ, for no other reason than he made the Taoiseach look like a tit.
Suggesting that the “affair of the Casby paintings” represents a threat to democracy, Waters opines:
“Intrinsically devoid of intellectual content, they nevertheless cumulatively contribute to a climate in which public discourse is cheapened and debased, rendering it less likely that people of intelligence and sensitivity will participate. What kind of society do we expect such a culture to conceive?”
Well, with Waters guarding the door, admitting only those of intelligence and sensitivity, democracy should have no cause for concern. Is he kidding?
The pliant director general of the nation’s biggest broadcaster is two phone calls from the head of government and not only pulled a story concerning the head of government in its entirety but orchestrated an apology.
Policemen threatened warrants if journalists did not reveal contact details for a guy who drew a picture.
They actually sent a file to the Director for Public Prosecutions. Democracy should have nothing to fear.
“His response is typical of a public discourse almost fatally degraded by internet auto-eroticism and an obsession with what is called ‘comedy’.”
There is no comedy in the paintings. I don’t think they’re very funny. I don’t even think they’re very good.
The comedy stems from the over-zealous reaction of Government flunkies and the spinelessness of the RTÉ top brass, from red-faced gardaí combing the country for a painter of “dirty” pictures and from the burning shame that any Goverment press officer should be enduring as a one-night story enters its second week. That is funny.
That most of the objections to Casby’s treatment are online adds sauce to Waters’s delusion:
“The internet has reduced public debate to the level of a drunken argument, in which no holds are barred, in which deeply unpleasant people get to voice their ignorant opinions in the ugliest terms, in the name of ‘free speech’.”
In case Waters has forgotten, free speech is only of use if it allows people to say or express things you are vehemently opposed to. It is designed to be ugly.
In what totalitarian nightmare do we justify the censorship of popular debate at any level? Should cultural and political debate be limited to those readers who worship the august organ of John Waters? I think that is what he wants. He decries the demise of public discourse yet thinks anyone who laughs at a Taoiseach on a toilet should just shut up and listen to him and only him – discourse by monologue.
“This episode … continues to be misused by a media increasingly debased in its desire to pursue popular opinion to the gutter and below”
Another Irish artist, on the subject of lying in the gutter (or below) suggested that some of us are looking at the stars.
“All art is quite useless,” Wilde said. Let us hope, in Casby’s case that he was wrong. Let us hope this abuse of State power, inadvertent or not, is remembered at the polls – it may even dethrone Cowen. If nothing else, let us hope that it marks the week when John Waters’s relevance, if ever he had any, evaporated in a cloud of sanctimonious snobbery.
I am having real difficulty getting my head around Picturegate.
Had somebody stood up in the Dáil and shouted: ‘”The Taoiseach has a small penis” there would be less exposure, indecent or otherwise, than what has resulted from the State’s ham-fisted censorship.
RTÉ got a deserved roasting by Twenty, Damien and Gavin , but facts are still thin on the ground.
Censor this Taoiseach
What I would like to know is who, specifically, ordered the Government Press Office to lean on RTÉ to make an apology and who in the national broadcaster caved in. Did Eileen Dunne, the newsreader who did the original report, agree?
It would also be amusing to know which dim-witted PR adviser thought this would be a good idea – I can only assume they have never heard of blogs, Twitter or YouTube.
If Brian Cowen had let this slide, it would have been a one-night story, with a possible follow-up when the artist came forward. The way Biffo handled it has made it a week-long story and a T-shirt.
Now the gardai are involved – police are investigating a cartoonist for drawing cartoons. They are even threatening a radio station with a warrant to seize email information on the artist (Today FM, at least, refused to roll over).
Again, we need facts – who made the initial complaint to gardai? That is surely a matter of record. Have CCTV tapes been handed over? Have the frames been fingerprinted? What crime, exactly, has been committed?
If Gordon Brown ordered the BBC to pull a piece, say on a Steve Bell cartoon, and then apologise for it, can you imagine the outrage? And the BBC is entirely dependent on the licence fee. RTE doesn’t even have that feeble excuse.
If the offence felt by Cowen is real, he should have made a complaint in a personal capacity – just as any other citizen can. If he wants to avoid dishonour on the office of the Taoiseach, he should call an election and see if the Irish electorate does him the honour of actually voting for him. Whether by design or not, all of this takes attention away from the fact that Cowen is up to €6 billion short on next month’s budget.
Non-State Irish media must not allow this Government to mask such an abuse of its power – they might be next.
I do miss Irish politics so … hat tip to markham.
Take that, biffo
Tribune.ie - shovelware at its finest
I spent some time yesterday wondering why the FT and BBC didn’t name the Sunday Tribune as the Dublin paper telephoned by the Real IRA to claim responsibility for its murder of two soldiers at Massereene Army base in Antrim.
The Telegraph named it, as did the Irish Times and Guardian.
I can only assume that the BBC and FT decided that if the website of the Sunday paper that took the call — on Saturday evening – isn’t going to bother changing the lame budget story it carried as its Sunday splash then why should they namecheck it?
At a push, I suppose you could link to the four-line story, Adams condemns fatal attack on soldiers that you can see — second — in the ‘Breaking News’ feed on the right.
They got the call on the biggest North story in years — first British soldier killed in 12 years.
OK, it’s Saturday night, maybe the print run is finished. But to not even update your website?
Jesus wept. Truly shoddy work.
In the latest of his blogposts on business advice for Russian newspaper proprietors, Roy Greenslade’s Subeditors: another attempt to explain why they are becoming redundant mines an already rich vein.
I won’t yet waste your time with a list of the tasks faced daily by a modern sub-editor apart from saying that Roy’s piddling description of a sub’s duties should explain why he writes a column (for now, at least) rather than attempts to render them readable.
Roy’s commenters mount a spirited and comprehensive defence of their profession, but most miss some important points, including the reason behind the distinction between sub-editors and reporters.
It comes down to division of labour — reporters are better at reporting. They are, by and large, supposed to be specialists — the very notion of a beat is that you walk it daily and know crime, arts, science, whatever, better than anyone else in the building.
Like a beat copper removed from the street to meet centrally-imposed efficiency targets by doing paperwork, the beat reporter tasked with subbing their own copy cannot do their core job — finding and writing stories — as effectively or efficiently.
Sub-editors, by contrast, are generalists — I describe it to my in-laws as having to know a little bit about everything and not a lot about anything — in broad areas such as business, sport, even foreign news. Sub-editors are faster at producing the stories — checking, refining and polishing of text, adding value with pictures, adding hierarchy with page position, headlines and cross-references. Now re-read that sentence and see if you can find anything that can be dispensed with online.
The greatest value of subbing comes from knowing how to make a story fit — not just in a hole on a page but in time and in space. How does this story relate to all the others around it? How does it link to all the stories we have carried this week? How is it connected to all the stories we have ever carried on randy peacocks and petrol pumps?
In an online economy that depends upon links, you need the people who have been performing these tasks — this curation — for years. These are not new tricks and old dogs should not be excluded.
Which brings us to the second important point lost in a mere job description. Through the process of fitting — in every sense — of stories and images, the best sub-editors become the collective and genetic memories of their papers. Their filtering of information and images on behalf of their readers becomes second nature and they pass that passion and skill to those that follow them.
As the quantity of that information grows, we dismiss at our peril the value brought to online journalism by that discrimination and that institutional expertise.
As for Mr Greenslade, if the Evening Standard is looking for savings, why not drop his column, keep a sub and have them link to his Guardian blog? Isn’t that the web way to do it?
Rebekah Wade, the editor of the Sun, gave her Cudlipp lecture last night and, following a path trodden by Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, she bemoans “the drip, drip of case law in the High Court without any reference to parliament” that is leading to a privacy law by the back door.
So far, so dull — but then she namechecks campaigns such as the Times pushing for the Reform Act of 1832 and investigations into thalidomide victims by the Sunday Times under Harold Evans.
Hmm, cleaning up massive parliamentary corruption and an almost decade-long struggle to secure adequate compensation for thousands of people born with deformed limbs.
… Ok, those are both good things that newspapers did.
She even says: “Great investigations, like yesterday’s Sunday Times exposé of the Labour Lords are lifeblood to newspapers. ”
… Yes, yes they are. Where is this going?
But it is “the epitome of self-flagellation when The Guardian publishes Max Mosley’s views on press freedom”.
Hooray — did you see what she did there? Why flagellate yourself when “Nazi” hookers will do it for you.
Is this for real? Can the editor of the Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper really be comparing the genuine work that papers do fighting on their readers’ behalf with the prurient, moralising muck-raking of the News of the World’s Max Mosley “investigation”?
Does anyone really at this stage not get the fact that the Lords investigation, while important, doesn’t interest that many Sun readers, while the Mosley “investigation”, while utterly trivial, had them slavering for more?
Can’t we stop pretending that this is about the courts’ erosion of “freedoms hard won over centuries” and about satisfying a lust, feeding a need and making a buck?
Or is it just that if law is made with “reference to parliament” rather than by inconvenient judges, then Rupert Murdoch and Mr Dacre know exactly on whom to call to have their curtain-twitcher’s licences reinstated?
