Links for today: Blogging and Jay Rosen

• Bloggers should stop whining about mainstream media reports because they quote them all the time says this US marine. And I'm not going to argue with her even if she is currently deployed in some far off distant land...
• Bloggers at the Global Voices Summit remind Chris Vallance that blogging is not for everyone. Especially when you're daring to publish information from a place like Iran, or China, or Egypt with only your keyboard to defend yourself.
  
• Jay Rosen says it's time for those old world journalists to pack up their bags and migrate on over to the new land of digital opportunity.
  

A Fifth Estate? The Internet community acting as media corrective in David Davis's resignation

I largely missed the news of David Davis's resignation. At the time, I was being filmed for a BBC Six O'Clock News reconstruction for the "intelligence officer loses documents on train" story - I played the role of: 'the arm of the intelligence officer'. (This sort of thing happens if you sit around at the BBC not looking sufficiently busy and wearing a smart-ish suit).

But anyway, I more criminally also missed the media reaction to David Davis's resignation over the extension of the terror detention limit to 42 days and what appears to be quite a significant moment in the history of commenters, emailers and bloggers acting as a corrective to media coverage in the UK.

It seems that the mainstream media significantly misjudged the story and the public response to David Davis's resignation. They then quickly backtracked as it became clear from blog posts, comments and emails that they had got it wrong. (So apologies that this post is a couple of weeks out of date but it's useful for me to catch up even if everyone else has moved on...)

Here's the evidence, with a hat tip to Rachel North for getting me started.

Rachel North notes that the Sun's editorials went from vitriolic:

• Friday 13 June: "HAS David Davis gone stark raving mad? How else can we explain his silly act of self-styled martyrdom?"

To he's 'still got a massive ego...but'

• Monday 16 June: "WHATEVER David Davis says about noble causes, flouncing out of Parliament is no way for a senior player in a potential government to carry on....Annoyingly, though, it is hard to disagree with the cause Davis has decided to embrace."

And finally, to whole-hearted endorsement:

• Tuesday 17 June, Fergus Shanahan: "I respect Davis for defending freedom" - "Davis has quit his Tory post over the 42-day detention limit. His enemies say he has made a bad miscalculation. I’m not sure he has. Although Davis is mocked in Parliament, the mood in the country is different. Davis has hit the nail on the head."

But the Sun wasn't the only one who misjudged the mood in the country:

• Michael White on Comment is Free, The Guardian 12 June: David Davis resignation: a stunt and an ego trip
• By 13 June Michael White was quoting Tory MPs who thought the resignation was "egotist", "self-indulgent", "loner" and "quixotic", but included a section about how "resigners' motives are usually high-minded".
• Here's Peter Wilby on various other commentators initial reactions...
• "Davis was guilty of "flawed judgment, erratic temperament and unrestrained ego", raged the Times leader. His behaviour was "egregiously self-serving", his resignation statement "weary rhetoric".
  
• The Guardian's Julian Glover thought Davis's decision the result of "some sort of extraordinary brainstorm".
  
• The Telegraph's Iain Martin saw it as "monumentally wrong-headed"
• The Mirror's Kevin Maguire as "the mother of all bad political stunts"
• The Independent's Michael Brown as "truly bizarre".
  
• And that was just in the papers that agreed with Davis, at least on being against 42-day detentions. On the pro-42 days side, the Sun's headlines were "Davis is a quitter", "Who Dares Whinges" (Davis is a former SAS man, geddit?) and "Crazy Davis"."

By Monday various sections of the media were rapidly rewriting those commentary pieces because of an Internet backlash:

• Peter Wilby in the Guardian: "But reaction against the dismissive and patronising media tone was sufficiently strong on the internet and in e-mails - the BBC's Nick Robinson reported the corporation was "inundated" with praise for Davis - to cause a certain softening and even backtracking in later press comments."

• Read Frank Fisher in the Guardian: 'David Davis and the great media U-turn'
• He links to:
• Janet Street-Porter in The Independent: "Is David Davis a champion of the people or a shameless self-publicist? Many in the Westminster village quickly dismissed his resignation over the Commons' vote on the detention of suspects for 42 days as a meaningless gesture, but outside the hothouse atmosphere of party politics, there's been a more considered response."
• William Rees-Mogg in The Times: "Pragmatists may have failed to recognise the impact of his personal declaration or the strength of public feeling on libertarian issues."
  

So how did the media get it so wrong?

Matthew Parris explains in The Times:

• "I distrust clichés such as “Westminster village”, but there are occasions when they fit. Within the space of an afternoon a relatively small number of people - MPs, broadcasters, journalists, party hacks - gathered within a relatively confined space and, communicating mostly with each other, worked each other up into a clear, sharp and settled judgment on the question of the hour. By now it was almost unanimous. The judgment was conveyed electronically to the offices of the national press, bouncing back at Westminster in the form of vituperative editorials and opinion columns by dawn the next morning."

And here's Frank Fisher again:

• "The media sought the easy story - but they also sought what seemed to them the accurate story. They sourced, corroborated, conferred - the angle they decided on was absolutely spot on, but sadly, it was spot on on another planet. When your living depends on your contacts, and your contacts are all party political figures, your stance is always, invariably, coloured by that. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In fact, as we now see, what looked like a nail was in fact a screw-up."

And I sign off this post with some of the comments that might have changed a few minds:

'Wellop' on Michael White's CiF piece:

• "It's remarkable how disconnected from the general population most politicians and political journalists are. Your piece, Michael, is completely shot through with Westminster village parochialism. In the wider world, what David Davis has done today will be seen by many many people as the least cynical and most principled bit of politics seen in far too long."

And Metroisbetter:

• "Simply watching a politician that makes a stand makes for a wonderful change.

  Why would someone, by default, turn what at first sight looks like a principled gesture, into a cynical stunt?

  Because of the (cynical) angle of the person who makes the accusation.

  The author of this piece."

Comments on Nick Robinson's blog on the BBC website:

'SimonofOxford':

• "David Davis has given a very clear account of his decision. He has taken a principled stand. Now I know it might be hard for a journalist of your ilk to believe this - but a lot (and looking round the webosphere - a vast majority) of people can see what he has done and support his stand."

Richard Gosling:

• "You only need to go to Have Your Say to see how much admiration and support David Davis has from the vast majority of the public (or at least BBC News website readers), that we believe this is a genuine principled stand that does Davis nothing but credit, and (for many) gives credit to the Conservative Party just by association with him.
  
  I have never seen news reporting so out of step with public opinion."

Photo: Steve Punter, under Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Milblogger forced to stop blogging for writing 'too much unfiltered truth'

For more go to the Frontline.

News values and student interns

I've just posted a comment on Adrian Monck's blog, which I thought I' d reproduce below.

The background is this suggestion in The New Republic magazine that to be a successful journalism intern you need to be single-minded, strategic, have similar ambitions and come from a similar background to the journalists you work for. This results in narrow news selections because they are made by the same type of people.

This is my two pennies' worth:

I think the problem here is the institutional socialisation of news values. In order to move on in news organisations interns or students are called upon to internalise the news values of the existing senior staff.

This leads to uniformity in the selection of news. When selecting news, students have to learn what their news editor thinks is ‘a good idea’ for a news story. I know, because I’ve been there.

You might think that this makes sense because the news editor has greater experience and often this is the case. I’m not for a moment suggesting that students know it all - they still obviously have a lot to learn.

But we might well also ask how this very experience might hinder selection of stories that don’t fit with what the news editor has come to think of as ‘news’ - him- or herself a product of the organisational setting.

Apart from the obvious ‘wow’ stories, I think that if there is any method in story selection, it’s a learned institutional process, and at times there is a methodical non-method when selection of news is based on the availability of resources, time pressure, the interests of a particular news editor, ease of access - ‘we’ll use PA/PR/wires’ etc.

Some editors nevertheless continue to place faith in their ability to make what they see as objective news judgements - and they have to, in order to justify their editorial decisions.

We can only benefit from hearing stories and news selections from people who are outside of the ‘news factory’, which is why blogs are so important to the future of media and perhaps why, as a recently qualified MA journalism student, I’m already thinking about whether my future lies within a traditional news organisation.

Greenslade on journalism and blogs

I had a drink with a journalist the other day who was fairly frank about blogs: 'I just don't care', he said.

I'm amazed we're still at this stage. But not surprised. Here's Roy Greenslade in an introduction to an interesting post he wrote yesterday about the importance of the 'blogging revolution':

"The debate over blogging's usefulness to journalism tends to get stuck in a cul de sac, mainly because too few people - well, too few journalists - treat it seriously. At conferences I've attended recently, speakers have referred to blogging as little more than a sad ego trip. It is not regarded as having any real public service value."

And he concludes that blogging should teach journalists that they are not in a different class from bloggers, or the citizens who some claim to serve:

"When we journalists talk about integration we generally mean, integrating print and online activities. But the true integration comes online itself. The integration between journalists and citizens. Of course, there should be no distinction between them. But journalists still wish to see themselves as a class apart. We have to open ourselves up to a new thought process. There is no us and them".

Just over six years ago, and yes I do mean 'years' and not 'months', Scott Rosenberg wrote this for Salon.com

"Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth-telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors.

This debate is stupidly reductive -- an inevitable byproduct of (I'll don my blogger-sympathizer hat here) the traditional media's insistent habit of framing all change in terms of a "who wins and who loses?" calculus."

More than three years ago Jay Rosen had already worked out that:

"Bloggers vs. journalists is over. I don’t think anyone will mourn its passing. There were plenty who hated the debate in the first place, and openly ridiculed its pretensions and terms. But events are what did the thing in at the end. In the final weeks of its run, we were getting bulletins from journalists like this one from John Schwartz of the New York Times, Dec. 28: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”"

Journalism in the UK is still years behind where it should be; it needs to catch up and quickly.

Links for today: Blogging

• Blogging is a community strategy and some people still haven't sussed this yet says Adam Tinworth.

• Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog asks what skills we should be teaching online journalism students. For starters, I think they should all be made to keep their own blog throughout the year. Oh and expect them to have posted before 9am everyday...get them up and around and hard at work etc...

• Bloggers fight censorship in Uzbekistan.

Links for today: Impressions of Iraq

• Last of Iraqis has a post on the security situation in Baghdad which I summarised on my Frontline blog.

• Another dentist in Iraq has also recently written about his view of life in Mosul and Baghdad.

• A psychiatrist has pictures of the 'buses' he uses to get to work.

• And finally, US Army officer, Lt G, swapped engaging the insurgency in Iraq for an engagement party of his own. Congrats!