Director’s Blog

Essays

This is an edited version of an essay by Polis Summer School student Victoria Yates.

The idea of globalization is not new, despite many of the modern connotations attached to the term. The creation of the printing press created much the same revolution in communication, connecting people for the first time in a wide manner beyond traditional dialogical contact. (more…)

One of the functions of international reporting is supposed to be that journalists can warn the world of impending disasters. The idea is that intrepid hacks can spot looming conflicts or humanitarian catastrophes and help persuade governments or other agencies to intervene. In practice, this ain’t necessarily so. By it’s nature, news journalism tends to focus on what has happened, not what is coming up. And there is no doubt that pressures on resources make it harder for mainstream media to find time for that kind of analytical, predictive journalism.

So do we need a new special media body to do this? (more…)

An AP photographer snaps other photographers (AP)

It now appears that the Haiti Earthquake was a disaster on the scale of the 2004 Asian Tsunami in terms of loss of life. This is less important, of course, but it was/is also a media event on the same scale. But what questions does it raise about how journalism deals with humanitarian crises?  What’s changed in six years?

We are just starting to digest the lessons from Haiti, so I can only raise some questions. At Polis and elsewhere, researchers are sifting through the data and discussing the siginificance, but here are some tentative thoughts. I’d welcome any information on others who are looking at these issues and your thoughts on how we should be researching them.

1. Attention Surplus? (more…)

For a global elite who care about the big international issues such as climate change, economic regulation or conflict and security, modern media is a wondrous but worrying thing. Thanks to great multi-national brands like the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera or the New York Times we have fantastic trans-national news resources. While the Guardian only has 300,000 sales in the UK, it has 30 million readers online across the world. And yet at the same time the level of foreign correspondents, international coverage and the commitment to understanding global stories is declining in the hard-pressed mainstream media.

This was the problem that Columbia President Lee Bollinger sought to solve in a Polis lecture that used his new book about media freedom of expression as a springboard to discuss the kind of journalism we need for a globalised world. [The podcast will be up soon, as will a full report on the actual lecture] ‘Your news is our news now’ he said. And the implication is that therefore we also share a need to find a solution to what threatens it.  His answer was surprising and in a Chatham House Rules dinner afterwards was challenged by a former Fleet Street editor, a senior Conservative MP, and assorted UK academics, lawyers and an economist. (more…)

Does the use of new social media technology in the protests in Iran this year herald a new politics too? Will networked journalism turn into networked politics?

This is a paper I wrote for the LSE Taiwan Research Programme conference on comparative approaches to the idea of Justice.

It looks at how violence is represented in the contemporary news media and asks how the nature and effect of that representation may be transformed as journalism changes. It will use the case study of Neda Agha-Soltan who was killed during the 2009 protests in Iran over the Presidential elections. It will examine how the video of her death was created and then mediated by various citizen journalists and then by international corporate media and how it was used as a political tool. It will explore how the public participation and connectivity of this kind of Networked Journalism alters the nature of news communication. It will also consider whether that makes a difference to the moral or ethical claims of news communication as suggested by Professor Roger Silverstone (2006). In other words, in what ways are new media technologies and practices altering the relationship between citizens and the idea of justice?

(more…)

It is sunny in Sweden

Throughout my career I always avoided the liberal journalism cliche of going to Sweden to show a British audience how something should be done. ‘Here in Stockholm…’ was a phrase that never crossed my lips. Sweden and Scandinavia in general is a wealthy, culturally distinct exception to most rules.

So it’s not surprising that Swedish media is not experiencing the existentialist angst and real economic pain running through most of the Anglo-Saxon journalism industry.

The Swedish media association’s boss told me that 2008 was a record year for income. Sales and advertising have only dipped as the Global Crash hit, but not catastrophically. Commercial TV revenues are being diluted but that’s because the number of operators is increasing. So why worry if you are in the land of pickled herring? (more…)

New media: helping or hindering, fostering accountability or producing vulnerabilities, advancing journalism or simply complicating it?

That’s at the heart of Nik Gowing’s new report for the Reuter’s Institute at Oxford.  An extensive study of the interplay between journalism and foreign affairs, ‘Skyful of Lies’and Black Swans paints today’s highly digitized and interconnected world as one that’s rapidly democratizing power.  In extreme moments of crises (referring to Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory), the state can no longer hide realities from the world. This report by Polis Intern Esha Chhabra. (more…)

America is, in part, a Third World country that has not got over the deep stain of slavery – but it is also the most exciting and innovative society in the world. That was the realistic but approving verdict of BBC North America Editor Justin Webb in a Polis talk, as he reflected on his experiences covering key events in recent American politics, from 9/11 to the election of its first African-American leader.

This report by Jasmine Chan. (more…)