Director’s Blog

FaithBook (geddit?)

This is a tiny snatch from the draft of a chapter I have written for a book on religion and journalism. (Declaration of interest: I am an atheist). I once presented a BBC documentary on the subject and last year spoke at a conference on religion and news. I have remained fascinated by it ever since. I welcome any comments, references, links or suggestions on the topic. (more…)

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…)

LSE

This is a paper submitted as part of the Polis Summer School

The limits on freedom of expression in journalism by Rebecca Hales

A western European, when questioned on the subject of freedom of expression, might wave his or her hand in a vague easterly direction and boldly claim the privilege of a comparatively free press and liberal broadcast organisations.

Formally, freedom of expression is considered a universal value but just 17% of world’s population enjoy what is widely considered to be a ‘free press’.[1] This essay will identify and explore the three levels of limitation on free speech that all journalists in the modern world have to negotiate, not just those working in countries historically perceived as being non-democratic or ‘not free’.  (more…)

LSE Summer School

This post is an essay from Polis Summer School student Steffen Horstmannshoff on the idea of objectivity in the age of new media.

Introduction

“If you use social networks for both professional and private activity then use separate accounts.”(1) Such can be read in a manual by the international news agency Reuters that was published on the 10^th of March 2010. For the ones asking “And why exactly should I do that?” Reuters has got an answer as well: “Put simply, we’re expecting you to apply standards to your professional use of social media that will probably differ to those you would use for your personal activity.” (2)

The authors of the manual aren’t clear about what standards exactly they are referring to but implicitly it is quite obvious: They are referring to impartiality and objectivity – two concepts of journalism that are getting increasingly contested in the New Media Environment. This case study sheds light to a rather heated discussion between “old” and “new” media. A discussion that centers around questions like: (more…)

Polis Summer School

If people feel that mainstream media is ignoring alternative politics, then they can now create their own media. But how should traditional journalism respond? Should it change its ideas of impartiality to reflect the real diversity of contemporary politics? This is Polis Summer School student Steven Linett’s course paper that tackles this complex problem, citing media around the rise of US Militia movement.

How impartiality and objectivity in journalism changes in the New Media environment by Steven Linett

The new media environment has helped level the playing field for those outside the mainstream media to publish and disseminate their views to the world.  This environment appears to be a godsend for the participatory models of democracy, which “emphasize the importance of ‘real’ citizens’ participation and their more active involvement in democracy (Barber 1984).  As such, they criticize the radical separation of citizens from power, the elites and democratic institutions through representation” (Bailey, et al. 2008). (more…)

LSE Summer School

Kevin Anderson (@KevGlobal) gave a positive history of the virtues of new media journalism in a talk to the Polis Summer School that captivated most students. But as Summer School student Joanna McNurlen reports, social media at its most un-mediated can create profound problems. Do we really want total freedom of digital expression?

When Documentation Becomes Reality

by Joanna McNurlen

Let us begin with a typical college party: music blaring, Solo cups everywhere, drunk people falling over one another… and don’t forget the cameras, capturing it all. You can’t go to a college party without seeing people (usually girls) snapping off rounds of photos to document their presences in the social scene. The next morning (or later that night), these young women upload their photos to Facebook and broadcast their social achievements to their friends and compatriots on Facebook. Comments pour in as users cheer the evening’s tidings or lament their failures to attend. For the picture-takers (who are, in the sense of new media, photojournalists), the purpose of attending the party soon becomes not to interact with people but to document their interactions with people: the documentation of reality becomes reality. (more…)

This is a second draft extract from a paper I am writing on the idea of ‘Quality’ in Networked Journalism. Read Part One here. Comments more than welcome!

Networked Journalism creates ‘quality’ by adding value to news in three ways.

1. Editorial diversity: it creates more substantial and varied news

2. Connectivity and Interactivity: it distributes news in different ways

3. Relevance: it relates to audiences and subjects in ways that create new ethical and editorial relationships to news

Public participation through networked journalism also adds economic value to the news media in the sense that the contribution of the public literally creates content – usually for free – from the citizen. Journalism must be one of the few industries where the consumer volunteers material and services to the producer.

A network of quality?

Counter-intuitively, the abundance of disintermediated information may also give quality networked journalism a market advantage. The plethora of data sources and competing platforms and outlets means there will be a premium (or ‘freemium’) for authoritative and trustworthy curating and filtering of news. The demand for transparent and relevant mediation will increase. Networked Journalism as a kind of intelligent and pro-active engine will create quality by adding value to search. BBC News Online, for example, has already become a kind of global topical reference work. (more…)

This is a rough draft of an article I am writing on the idea of ‘quality’ in journalism in the digital, Internet, Networked Age. Outdated concept or vital idea? These are my opening and unfinished thoughts.

Essentially, the traditional mainstream media definition of quality was a mixture of cultural and political or class assumptions. Quality journalism was for quality people: educated, opinionated, influential, responsible, concerned and powerful. (more…)

Not the digital youth

This is my introduction to a series of papers on the subject of the ‘myth of digital natives’. They were given at a Polis event last autumn, you can read them in full here. They attempt to dispel the idea that young people of the Internet generation are naturally gifted at using online resources and seek to find ways to enhance everyone’s ability to benefit from digital communications.

Myths can be useful ways for societies to tell stories about themselves. They can help us preserve our values and cope with change. So the idea that young people are particularly, even naturally adept at using new media technologies is comforting and perhaps even exciting. (more…)

Media researcher Wadi Hassan has made a charming and thoughtful video about two children from the next century discovering how the Internet changed their minds – as predicted in a rather alarming speech by scientist Susan Greenfield.

Clay Nicholls from Dadlabs speaks in defence of the Net and Video games, while I muse about being part of the television generation.

Judge for yourself with the video, but my (incredibly ill-informed) opinion is that any effects are related to behaviour and so are more of habit than biological or chemical. In other words, media consumption certainly impacts on us as social beings and so we can choose to change the impacts and effects. And often we will make more creative results out of these influences.