Category Archives: Media matters

Off to the National Union of Journalists Annual Delegate Meeting

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I’m off to the NUJ Annual Delegate Meeting tomorrow, on behalf of Calderdale NUJ Branch. Times are tough for journalists and the NUJ, as for other working people and trade unions. It’s important to stick together, stand up for our rights as citizens, workers and human beings – as well as the environment’s rights – and figure out how to effectively resist this oppressive, unjust government.

It’ll be interesting to see if there are many other hyperlocal online journalists there, as well as traditional reporters. I’ll be looking out for people who write about environmental, climate and social justice stories too.

Authorities must disclose environmental information that journalists request

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The Information Commissioner recently published guidelines on the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) 2004 that make it clear that the “default” position for public authorities and private companies is that they are legally obliged to provide environmental information that journalists ask for.

EIR is the equivalent to the Freedom of Information Act, and it applies, as the name suggests, to requests for information about environmental issues.
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Olympic pageant mashup

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Through the traditional medium of the pageant, 10,000 volunteers directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle performed a live action mashup or montage to portray who we are and how we got here. The pageant moved from medieval village life, through the industrial revolution, to a celebration of the NHS, children, comedy and popular culture.

Photo:Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images/Guardian

Photo:Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Photo:Lars Baron/Getty Images

Photo:Oliver Morin/AFP/Getty Images

Montage

Throwing different images together creates new meanings from their collision – this is the principle of montage, a film editing technique developed by early filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein in silent movie classics like Potemkin, October and Strike. It also underpins the work of the Surrealists, who famously defined beauty as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table. I guess it took a filmmaker to apply what’s basically a film editing technique to a gigantic live-action pageant.

Rodchenko poster for Eisenstein’s Potemkin

So what new meanings did this Olympic juxtaposition of images spark? There will be as many answers to that as there are people who saw the pageant.

A new idea – a National Environmental Service

For me, the pageant provoked the idea that what we need now is a National Environmental Service.

Just as the NHS was a creative, collective response to long-standing social injustices in a previous time of economic and social chaos – following the 1930s depression and the death and destruction of World War 2, so we need a collective, creative response to our current chaos – which this time includes environmental as well as social injustice. The NHS – which the Olympic pageant showed as a defining, much-loved feature of British life and society – provides us with a model of how to pull ourselves out of the mess we’re in, by creating social institutions based on truly collective principles.

Surveys show that most people in the UK

  • recognise that human-influenced climate change  is happening and is damaging the environment and people’s lives
  • would support equitable laws and regulations to reduce climate change and adapt to it

Current climate change policies are based on the idea that human-influenced climate change is a problem caused by market failure. They therefore advocate financial and market-based measures to solve the problem. This view underpins the Stern Review, which has formed the basis for the Climate Change Act 2008. This Act basically shapes all national and local government policies and programmes to deal with climate change.

As a response to a massive, collective problem, treating climate change as if it’s a market failure is as if Aneurin Bevan’s health service reforms had said that tinkering with the private health care system would solve the problem that millions of people couldn’t afford health care.

Collective, creative political reforms

Climate change is a political problem, not the result of market failure. It’s the result of historical decisions about the kind of economy and society we’ve developed – one that, as the Olympic pageant showed, has been based on industrial-scale use of fossil fuels.

It’s also what planners call a wicked problem – a problem that’s so pervasive and complicated that no single “silver bullet” solution is available. There are only a variety of clumsy solutions to wicked problems. In other words, solutions that work more or less well for different bits of the problem.

Climate change is also a social justice problem. The richest individuals and the biggest and most powerful companies cause the greatest amount of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. The poorest produce the lowest amount of emissions, but suffer most of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change.

For all these reasons, climate change is a collective, political problem. That means we need a collective, creative, political solution. Inspired by the value and durability of the NHS, let’s imagine how to extend the Olympic pageant into the future, taking with us the skills, knowhow, creativity, sense of fun and commitment to collective, socially just reforms that’ve brought us here so far, and extending them to repair and make good the unforeseen problem of human-influenced climate change that our very successes have generated.

Now, you may think this is nuts. But read what the pageant’s writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, has to say.

Good practice in reporting floods from You Tube user-generated content

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Ed Walker’s blog posting about reporting on floods on the basis of user-generated content from You Tube is really useful – I wish I’d known all those good practice procedures before reporting on the Todmorden floods.

He reflects on his experience of fact-checking user-generated video on You Tube when reporting for Chronicle Live on the North East’s floods last week, and reports on what he learned in the process about making contact with the people who filmed and uploaded the video, and getting the bigger story behind the video.

Join the Stop Government Snooping petition hand-in to Craig Whittaker on Friday 29th

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On Friday the 29th, Shirley, a local 38 Degrees member, has arranged to hand the  Stop Government Snooping petition in to our MP, Craig Whittaker.

Energy Royd, as an online community of content creators, contributors and readers, has a direct interest in protecting  internet privacy.

The petition hand-in is taking place at 1st Floor, Spring Villa at 16 Church Lane, Huddersfield, HD6 1AT. Everyone is invited to  join Shirley on Friday at 3.30pm, to get ready to meet Craig Whittaker at 3.45pm.  A strong turnout will show him that many people in Calderdale oppose the government’s plans to spy on who we email, text and call.

The Petition says:


Dear David Cameron,

Respect our privacy. Stop the internet and phone snooping plan.

  • Don’t spy on our e-mail, phone and internet use
  • Keep your election promise to “reverse the rise of the surveillance state”
  • This is Britain, not China or Iran. We don’t want the government spying on our every move

Why the petition?

The government has set out its new plans for the year ahead in the Queen’s Speech. They want new powers to invade our privacy. 
They plan to collect and keep information on all of us about who we call, text and email, and which websites we visit. And they won’t need a warrant or reason.

38 Degrees says:

“Our civil liberties have taken a battering in recent years from politicians of all backgrounds. Now it’s time to for us to push back.” 

You can sign the petition here. So far over 184,000 people have signed. 38 degrees is hoping for 200,000 by the hand-in time.

What is 38 Degrees?

This is how 38 Degrees describes itself:

“38 Degrees is the angle at which an avalanche happens. In the UK, 38 Degrees will enable people to act together, to create an avalanche for change.”

 

Energy Royd stage 2 – working it out at UClan’s Media and Digital Enterprise project

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Now that the UnLtd grant has come to an end – and many thanks to UnLtd for supporting the creation of the beta (test) version of Energy Royd – I’m working on how to turn the website into a hyper-local news start-up, still focussing on energy and climate change news and stories.

I’m quite excited that I’ve just been accepted onto the University of Central Lancashire’s (UClan) MADE start-up weekend. MADE is the Media And Digital Enterprise project of the School of Journalism, Media and Communication. It is working to help news start-ups in the UK and Turkey stay up through innovative training and business incubation support programmes.

 

There’s no such thing as objectivity. There is such a thing as fairness

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Being new to this game of hyper-local online journalism, and pretty much making it up as I go along, I’m on the look out for guidance on how to do a good job, and I don’t expect I’m the only one in this situation.

So here’s what looks like a very useful Reporters Handbook. I came across it on the Press Think website, which discusses and reproduces the Voice of San Diego Reporters’ Handbook.

Voice of San Diego is a not-for-profit online newspaper (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) in Southern California, that won a 2011 Online Journalism Award for General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small Site.

 

Voice of San Diego New Reporters Handbook

We only do something if we can do it better than anyone or if no one else is doing it.

* We must add value. We must be unique.

Three things to remember for each story: 

* Context
* Authority
* Not just what is happening, but what it means

There is no such thing as objectivity.

* There is such thing as fairness.
* But everyone sees everything through their own filter. Acknowledge that, let it liberate you. Let it regulate you.
* We are not guided by political identification, by ideology or dogma. But every decision we make, from what to cover to how to cover it, is made through our own subjective judgments.
* We are guided by an ability to be transparent and independent, to clearly assess what’s going on in our community and have the courage to plainly state the truth.

Our bent: Reform. Things can always be better.

* We don’t have a dogmatic or ideological bent. But we do believe San Diego can and will do better.
* We can have better infrastructure, a healthier environment, a better education system, a responsive, efficient and transparent government, a better understanding of our neighborhoods’ challenges, a thriving economy and an ever-improving quality of life. If anything, this is our bias.

Be the expert.

* Write with authority. You earn the right to write with authority by reporting and working hard.
* No “he said, she said.”
* The day we write a headline that says: “Proposal has pros, cons” is the day we start dying.
* There is no such thing as 50/50 balance. There is a truth and we work our damndest to get there.
* Sometimes two viewpoints don’t deserve 50/50 treatment.
* Most of the time there aren’t two sides to something, anyways. There are 17. Who’s not being represented? If they’re not speaking up, how can you represent them?
* We don’t just “put things out there.” We’re not “only asking the question.”
* We don’t ask questions with our stories. We answer them.
* We don’t write question headlines, unless they’re so damn good that we can’t resist:
* We don’t do this: “Did City Official Take Bribe?”
* Or, to cite a recent example: “Did Wikileaks Hack Servers?”
* We’d maybe do this: “How Did a City Official Ended Up With Millions in Donations?”
* We’re not someone’s goddamn transcription service.
* They can relay their own news. In a world where leaders are able to communicate directly with their constituents very easily, we have to a.) make sense of what they say and b) find out the things they don’t want to say. It’s the only way to effectively use our limited resources.

Tell the truth.

* This means not being mealy mouthed and not being bias-bullied.
* Stand up to bias bullies. Tell them why you did something. Let them challenge you on it.
* If someone calls you biased, don’t be scared. Don’t dismiss it either. Reflect on it and answer with conviction.
* Don’t go quote-hunting for something you know to be true and can say yourself. Don’t hide your opinion in the last quote of a story.
* Take a stand when you know something to be true or wrong.

Care about your beat more than anyone else.

* It is your way to make San Diego a better place to live.

Focus on big problems

* David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has a quote that can be paraphrased this way: Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems.
* It’s easy as a journalist to take a stand against a six-figure salary. It’s easy to take a stand against an expensive meal on an expense report.
* Why do we take stands on those things and why are we afraid to take stands on bigger issues?

If you can’t find a good answer any of these three questions, drop the story: 

* Why did I choose this story?
* Why will people care? (Not why should they care, but why will they care.)
* Why will people remember this story?

Avoid ‘churnalism’

* It’s not your job to have everything on your beat. It’s your job to have the best things.
* Don’t worry about getting scooped. Worry about not consistently making an impact.
* Love the title of this Columbia Journalism Review story: “The Hamster Wheel: Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere.”
* A quote: “The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no.”
* Another: “You say, ‘Why not have it?’ I say, ‘Because it isn’t free.’ The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.”
* We are a small group with limited resource. Everything we do must [pay off for the users.]
* We can learn a lot from sports journalism. (That’s for a different day.) But here’s one great quote to always keep in mind from sportsjournalism.org: “Nobody cares who’s first with the commodity news, but being first with what the news means still has value – in fact, it has more value than it ever has, given today’s torrent of information. Readers will gravitate to such stories, share them and remember them.”

Avoid the news voice whenever possible.

* Sometimes it’s necessary.
* But you should never write a story [the way] you think journalists are supposed to write it. Write like you would if you were trying to get your friends interested in an email. Lighten up. Be creative. Have fun. Be conversational.

Bring us in the implications, not the event.

* So it’s not “Booze Ban Voted Through Council Committee.”
* It’s “Booze Ban Has One Final Hurdle Left.”

Don’t be boring. People don’t spend their free time on boring things.

* That’s it.

Don’t tell me stories about “critics” or “some”

* I don’t have a clue who “critics” or “some” are. But they managed to be the most quoted people on the planet.
* I need to know who they are for that viewpoint to carry any validity.
* And I need to know what, if any, financial stake they have in the issue. Honestly. (Just a sample of headlines in the news in a five-minute search this fall: “Some say Escondido police union’s flier crosses the line…” “Some say new constitution would solve state’s woes…” “Critics say Washing Oily Birds Is Wasteful…” “Observers Say Time Right for Santander IPO…”
* I’ve read stories that use blanket “critics” in different spots to describe people on the opposite ends of the arguments. It was so confusing.

Have fun! Be creative! Push the envelope! 

* You don’t do this for the money. So let’s have some fun.
* Try something that’s never been tried before. Or try something that someone else did somewhere else. Don’t do a story just to do it. Or because it’s an interesting exercise.
* Think about what will impact people or policy makers. What will they want to read or what will force them to make a change?
* Be a student of today’s great journalistic innovations.
* Be a leader of today’s great journalistic innovations.

Halifax MP urges Johnston Press to save Halifax Courier reporters’ jobs

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With the Halifax Courier soon to go weekly – with an online version and a regularly updated I Pad app replacing the daily paper – the House of Commons recently discussed the threat to local journalism posed by Johnston Press cuts, that will affect over 170 local newspapers.

The NUJ reports that the Halifax Courier is proposing to cut 11.6 editorial jobs – about a third of the current total. Clearly this will mean there aren’t enough journalists to report fully on local events and issues.

Ashley Highfield, the new chief executive of Johnston Press who announced the cuts, has said he expects the provision of editorial content to be split fifty-fifty between journalists and “community contributors” by 2020. At the moment, just 10 per cent of Johnston Press editorial content is created by readers.

Linda Riordan MP for Halifax has put down an Early Day Motion on Local and Regional Newspapers:

“That this House notes with sadness the decision by Johnston Press to move many long-established local newspapers from a daily publication to a weekly publication; condemns this unnecessary move and the implications it will have for the jobs of many journalists, printers, newspaper sellers and newspaper deliveries; praises the role local daily newspapers like the Halifax Courier and other titles in towns like Kettering, Northampton, Peterborough and Scarborough play in local democracy and in reporting the news on a daily basis; further notes the knock-on effect this will have on the local economies of the towns affected; urges Johnston Press to protect existing jobs at the newspaper titles affected and ensure that there are no compulsory job losses; further urges them to consult fully with the National Union of Journalists about their proposals; and hopes that local newspapers will continue to play an important role in the life of local communities for many years to come.”

So far, Craig Whitaker MP has not signed the EDM. If you want to ask him to add his support, you can email him.