Director’s Blog

The Ambiguity of Blogging by Polis Summer School Student, Nadine Makarem

An international celebrity “Tweeted” in May 2009:

“Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Oscar Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave”.

The absurdity of this statement makes it comical, but the idea of media providing information from beyond the boundaries of reality is not only significant, but quite common. (more…)

The biggest threat to The Economist’s current relative prosperity will be when they get wifi on Jumbos. Some carriers are hoping to do so within two years. Economist readers fly a lot and use the down-time between airplane movies and meals to consume the magazine. On average they spend about 43 minutes doing so. When else do they get that sort of space in their lives?

Edward Lucas

Joking apart, this is the kind of factor that is changing the media landscape. So The Economist is always looking to build its substantial ‘niche’ as the compact, intelligent, authoritative, liberal package of analysis and reportage for the Globatariat. As The Economist’s Edward Lucas put it in a talk at the LSE, his magazine and its online operation is not just battling with the Times or Newsweek, it is in competition with ‘everything that takes up our readers time’. (more…)

That's Alternative

How do you define Alternative Media in an age when the Internet provides so many alternatives? Hyper-local blog expert Will Perrin came to Polis Summer School to join in a day of debate on that subject. This was the response from Summer School student Fatymatou Dia:

Since the beginning of the course, I have been struggling with definitions  for journalism in the digital age: What is media? What is new media? What is alternative media? What is journalism in the first place? (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…)

Messing With Media

Whose election is this? That was the question I am left with at the end of a fascinating week where I have heard directly from a top Labour campaign strategist, Welsh voters, and LSE political pundits. If you believe the mainstream media it is in the hands of the spin doctors and journalists. The pollsters and professors say it’s ‘motorway man’ in the marginals. I am not so sure

  (more…)

From Copenhagen to Beijing

If you spend two days in a seminar with 12 journalists from around the world (just one American, one Brit) you are bound to come out with a more global sense of the future of journalism. Add to that the 0ther 600 delegates at the World Economic Forum in Dubai who are talking about everything from the Ageing Society to the Welfare of Children and you get a perspective on journalism’s place in this new media world.

Of course, WEF is a pro-market organisation so expect left-field rather than Left-wing ideas, but it was interesting how the group on journalism stressed the potential public value of more participatory news media. (more…)

Old wave, new wave

I gave a talk to the Swedish Journalism Fund’s 40th anniversary conference on the Next Five Years for journalism. They seemed to have a better idea than I did of what’s coming next, but here are some extracts from my notes for the evening including a list of predictions for the next five years and suggestions for how journalism training or education should enable better journalism.

News media is now itself environmental – it is part of every aspect of our lives. But if journalism is to survive and thrive then it will do so by learning to love the public and work with them. My book SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can SaveThe World (Blackwell) recognised three possibly contradictory facts. (more…)

White People Like Him

The last time I saw the LSE’s main lecture theatre overflowing with 450+ giggling students was when the Queen came here. So what was the attraction of a geeky Canadian blogger who writes about organic coffee and camping?

Within a year Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like blog has gone from a private joke for college chums to global brand with a book, charity t-shirts and a TV show in development.

The basic riff is that he lists lifestyle habits of upper middle class north Americans in an ironic, dead-pan style that mocks the cultural pretence of liberal metrosexuals in an affectionate and ultimately approving manner. (more…)

A political weapon?

Political bloggers like to think that they will swing the next election. Big platforms like ConservativeHome and individual muck-rakers such as Guido Fawkes are billed as the websites that might win it.

But when I talk to MPs it is video that really scares them. Could this be the election when a punter with a Flip camera changes the course of a campaign? (more…)

Everybody likes to cite the Iranian protests as a great example of how the Internet and Social Media was able to bypass censorship and narrate a powerful, fast-shifting story to the world. But how much do we really know about what was happening online and how journalists outside of Iran connected to the Online information?

In this study (more…)