As the great paid content debate of 2009 has played out, we’ve had a lot of assertions about what users should pay for without much clarity about what they would pay for or much about their habits. My gut feeling is that users will pay for certain types of content but that it will be extremely difficult to simply monetise existing content or attempt to create false scarcity by putting all content behind a paywall and drive readers back to print.
As a journalist who has chosen to make the internet my primary medium, my gut and quite a bit of my experience tells me that while I may be an early adopter, readers are moving more toward my habits than staying with or moving to print habits. However, I’m very careful not to generalise without data. My friends are all part of what I often refer to as the global geek collective. Our habits are our own and we shouldn’t assume that those habits are common to our audiences.
This week, however, new data appeared that made me feel slightly less like an outlier. The American Press Institute released the results of a survey of 2,400 news executives in the US. The event was invitation only, but Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism released the 80-slide presentation. It is a treasure trove of data and journalism bloggers have been slowing dissecting the data and the methodology all week.
…the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local Internet sites.”
Steve comes to the conclusion that “newspaper leaders remain delusional”. I might be a wee bit more generous and say that this is a clear message from users to newspaper owners in the US. However, not to put too fine of a point on it: This is a radical disconnect between the assumptions of publishers and the views of people who might have formerly been their audience.
Would the results be the same in the UK or other markets? I’d love to know. Suw and I often bemoan the lack of basic media research in the UK. In the US, the Pew Centers for the Internet and American Life and for the People and the Press do excellent basic research on internet usage patterns, attitudes towards the press and other media issues. The UK could really benefit from similar research.
Again, there is much food for thought. It’s important to note that the API commissioned the survey in the context of the meeting billed as the “Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference”, wherein the US newspaper industry tried to buy a clue as to how to survive the recession and rebuild a viable, sustainable business. Of course, Steve Brill and Co at Journalism Online have offered themselves up as the key to the glorious future of paid content online. They were one of several companies that provided proposals to publishers at the event.
Zach Seward provides this caveat about one of the companies responsible for the API survey, ITZ Publishing:
You’ll also want to apply a helping of salt because ITZ Publishing consults for Steve Brill’s pay-for-news firm Journalism Online, which just touted the results as an “API study” without noting its business interest.
The ‘frequency challenge’
The survey highlighted, yet again, what Steve Yelvington has been pointing to for years: The challenge of frequency for news websites.
In nearly all markets, newspaper websites receive 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews for each unique visitor.
Steve’s frequency challenge is this: High monthly (or even daily running average) unique figures for many websites obscure the fact that most of these visitors come infrequently and look at only a few pages. This is one of the reasons why, despite record numbers of visitors to news websites, it is proving difficult to translate this traffic into revenue. The recession and subsequent collapse in online and offline advertising is a slightly separate, but deadly, issue for news organisations.
As the survey found, the 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews a month figure is a pretty consistent figure across the industry. It’s grim, but it really highlights the amount of drive-by visitors coming to news sites via search engines and the high level of long tail activity on most news sites. The head of the tail is about 25% of readership, what the survey calls “core loyalists”. The survey found:
“Core loyalists,” who visit a newspaper 2-3 times a day for 20 days a month, comprise 25% of unique visitors. Not surprisingly, then, core loyalists account for 86% of pageviews and are “overwhelmingly local.”
Steve Outing’s and Zach Seward’s posts and Bill Densmore’s liveblog of the event are well worth reading for more context.
I’d like to see more demographic information about core loyalists. How old are they? Are they heavily weighted in older age groups? Is there evidence that these core loyalists are being replaced by readers over 30? Assuming that core loyalists are older – and there is evidence to support this – should newspapers focus on older readers? Unfortunately, we have good data that says that older readers aren’t being replaced. Focusing on a declining group of older readers is not a long-term strategy and it begs the question: Can news organisations provide compelling services that re-engage younger readers online or offline? Furthermore, if most of these services are digital, not an unrealistic assumption, can they build a business around these services?
The concept of ‘core audience’ as outlined in this study is difficult to translate to the British market because UK newspapers with national circulation don’t really have a loyal local audience unless one considers their London base as local. However, regardless of whether this data is relevant to the UK market, the pain being felt by newspapers, especially regional newspapers in the UK, is similar if not worse.
I’m still digesting these figures. I would say that they reinforce one of the points made by the Internet Manifesto out of Germany that has been making the rounds and some waves: “12. Tradition is not a business model.” As any journalist who gets out of the media bubble knows, the sense of importance, relevance and audience loyalty often expressed in the boardrooms of many news organisations is such happy talk that you have to wonder what’s in the tea and biscuits.
Reconnecting with audiences
Many of us have known for quite a while the problems that this survey flags up. Paid content advocates like Brill & Co will read into this that their promise to get 10% of online news audiences to pay for some kinds of content is achievable. However, this masks serious long term issues for news organisations. Our audiences are shrinking. They aren’t being replaced and while we have business-threatening short term economic issues we will have to quickly pivot to deal with these long term issues.
Journalists are truth-tellers. But I think most of us have been lying to ourselves. … The news became less local and less relevant, and reporters became less connected to their communities. Surveys show a steep drop in public trust in journalism occurring during the past 25 years. … The truth is the Internet didn’t steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason—many people don’t feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.
One important step that we need to take to rebuild our businesses is to rebuild our relationship with our audiences. This is why I embraced blogging as a journalist and have continued to embrace more recent forms of social media. I saw an opportunity to improve my journalism and, by opening up to a conversation with our audiences, I saw an opportunity to reconnect with audiences and build a sense of loyalty. It is why I stress when I speak to journalists and editors that it is a mistake to believe that social media is fundamentally a technical problem for news organisations. I’ve seen excellent technical solutions that still fail because journalists won’t engage with their audiences. More journalists will need to take responsibility for rehabilitating this relationship. It’s not just about building a personal brand. It is more importantly about rebuilding trust. Without that, the economic solutions are meaningless short-term fixes.
I’m a big believer in sharing stories about success, failures and even things that are in process. No one has the corner on good ideas, and often opening up the process can help get a wider view. No one has a perfect process, and often, we’re dealing with similar issues. It can feel a bit like the corporate version of group therapy, but it can be very useful, if for no other reason as a means of catharsis. Unfortunately, this happens rarely because most people maintain a relatively narrow view of competitive advantage.
They worked with Schematic to “provide the initial visual design and information architecture”. (Disclosure: Suw and I are friends with Dale Herigstad, the chief creative officer of Schematic and Jason Brush, the EVP of User Experience Design with the company. We’ve had the good fortune of swapping ideas with them over dinner, or in Jason’s case, also over blueberry pancakes before I started my US election trip last autumn.)
This post steps you through the entire process from goals to completion. Like many sites, NPR was working with a 6-yeard-old content management system and wanted to update the CMS and the design. My employer, the Guardian, did something similar recently.
One of the things I noticed from the write-up:
(NPR) had two editorial producers embedded in our group for the duration of the project. Their feedback was invaluable in helping us design a system that met the needs of our news teams.
I think this is important, but I would also suggest that journalists are involved in any process to choose or develop a CMS. As an online journalist for more than a decade, the CMS is either the enabler or the roadblock to efficient work. One of the reasons that I’ve been a big advocate of blogging tools is that they are faster and easier not just for the technically proficient but also for the novice. If your CMS trims even just 10 minutes off of every story a journalist writes or produces, that adds up to days over the course of a year. Clumsy tools take time away from creating compelling stories.
NPR also shifted to an Agile development process. That is a major challenge, and we at the Guardian also use Agile. I’m not going to go into the details of Agile here, but Suw and I have long thought that Agile is good for platform level projects like site redesign but not best suited for day-to-day editorial development.
However, in this review, I’d highlight one of the lessons NPR learned that relates not simply to Agile development but to wider issues of major projects like a site redesign:
Each one of us also had to be open-minded and empathetic. When conflicts arose over how best to solve a problem, it was imperative to remember that in the end, we were all working toward the same goal.
The article is well worth reading and digesting. I’m sure that people who have been through this process will see quite a few points they recognise, but this is an invaluable exercise in openness by NPR. It might not prevent you from facing the same or similar challenges, but at least you’ll know you’re not alone. Moreover, when conflicts arise, remember the real competition is down the street rather than down the hall.
I think that visualisations and interface innovation hold great untapped potential for journalism, not only helping journalists and audiences to see trends and understand complex sets of data but also as a tool that will dramatically improve news site usability. The last few years have seen a lot of innovation in visualising data with the advent of mash-ups and easier visualisation tools from Google, Many Eyes from IBM, etc., but there has been too little interface innovation for news websites.
By and large, news websites still reflect their print heritage. They make the classic mistake of rigidly reflecting their own structure while ignoring the semantic connections that cross desks and departments. Most news web site interfaces obscure the vast amounts of information we produce as journalists. Good interfaces go beyond design and search to issues of information architecture, user experience and discovery.
I believe that interface innovation can unlock the power of technologies, helping them break out of a small group of technically adept early adopters to a much wider audience. The Windows-Icon-Mouse-Pointer interface helped open up computers to a much wider audience than when command line interfaces were dominant. The graphical web browser helped unleash the power of the world wide web. In 1990, when I first used the internet, I had to learn arcane Unix commands to even read my e-mail. In August 1993, I used the seminal web browser Mosaic for the first time in a student computer lab at the University of Illinois, where I was studying journalism and where that groundbreaking browser was created. I instantly realised that the web browser would become a point-and-click window to a world of information, communications and connection.
I’ve been interested in interface innovation since the late 1990s when I first saw the Visual Thesaurus from a company then called Plumb Design, now called Thinkmap which showed the connections between related words. The company did even more impressive work for Sony Music and EMPLive, an online exhibition for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project. In many ways, the work was way ahead of its time and sometimes ahead of the capability of the internet. The projects used advanced interface concepts more often found in CD-ROM projects of the day than the internet. One of the things that impressed me about especially the EMPLive project was that it allowed virtual visitors to the navigate the music collection a number of ways, whether they were interested in time, genre or a particular artist. The presentation also showed relationships between elements in the collection. I like Robin Good’s description on the Master New Media blog of Plumb Design’s work:
The original goal at Plumb Design was to create dynamic interfaces to information systems that reveal interrelationships often obscured by conventional methods of navigation and information display.
In many ways, Plumb Design showed what was possible with data, semantic analysis and rich interfaces more than a decade ago.
While interface innovation has not been an area of focus for most news sites, thankfully we’re seeing some tentative steps forward after a post-dot.com crash period of stagnation. Slate has launched a service called News Dots. Chris Wilson describes it like this:
Like Kevin Bacon’s co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.
Like EMPLive and the Visual Thesaurus, News Dots helps show the interconnection between stories. The feature uses Calais, “a service from Thompson Reuters that automatically “tags” content with all the important keywords: people, places, companies, topics, and so forth”. Slate has built its own visualisation tool using the open-source ActionScript library called Flare.
It’s a good first stab, but Slate admits that it is a work in progress. I like that the visualisation clearly links to articles and sourcing information. I like that the dots are colour-coded to show whether the dot represents a person, place, group, company or ‘other’. I think there might be a possibility to better show the correlation between the tags, but as I said, this is a good launch with a lot of possibility for improvement and experimentation.
Another project that I think shows the potential of improved interfaces is the Washington Post’s visual commenting system called WebCom. As Patrick Thornton explains, it is a visual representation of comments n the site. As new comments are posted the web expands. Those comments rated highly by other commenters or those that spur the most responses appear larger in the web. The web not only allows for navigation and discovery, but users can comment directly from within the visual web interface.
Thornton says:
The commenting system was built in two weeks by two developers at washingtonpost.com. A front-end developer worked on the user interface, while a back-end developer created the database and commenting framework in Django. Because the user interface was built in one language — Flash’s ActionScript 3 — and the back-end in another, the Post can take this technology and put it on different parts of washingtonpost.com with different user interfaces.
Wow, that’s impressive in terms of turnaround time. Django is quickly becoming an essential tool for the rapid development of journalism projects.
Thornton points out that it doesn’t work on mobile browsers or older computers. I might quibble with the focus on most popular comments or comments that spur the most response; comments that draw the most responses can often be the most inflammatory or intemperate. Likewise, popularity often becomes self-reinforcing, especially when it drives discoverability as it does in an interface like this. I would suggest that a slider that weights other factors might be useful. A simple search or tagging system might help commenters to find threads in the discussion that interest them. Again, this is a good first attempt and, with the development time only taking a few weeks, it shows how rapidly innovations like this can built and tested in the real world.
It’s exciting to see these kinds of developments. News organisations are struggling during the Great Recession, but often these times of crisis spur us to try things that we might otherwise think too risky. Whatever the motivation, it’s good to see this kind of innovation. If this can happen during the worst downturn in memory, just think what we can do when the recession eases.
Normally, I would just add this to our (almost) daily collection of links, but Vin Crosbie has said something so succinctly and clearly that it deserves a post and a full reading. At ClickZ, Vin says:
…today with newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters who clamor for the “missing” business model that will allow them to stay in business doing what they’ve always done. It will never be found because continuing to do what they’ve done no longer makes sense. There are more quick and efficient ways to produce and disseminate information.
Anyone looking for the silver bullet business model to save their old business needs to read what Vin has to say.
The internet has fundamentally changed the economics of information. Digital distribution has ended information scarcity, and much of the new talk of paywalls isn’t about making money but attempting to recreate scarcity. I seriously doubt this will work, and I seriously doubt that trying to squeeze revenue out of much of the existing information output will work. There is no business model that will allow journalists to simply continue doing what they have done. Journalists, editors and publishers need to accept this and re-make their businesses.
Chris Anderson of Wired points out that the journalism businesses of the 20th Century was built on scarcity and monopoly rents. Newspapers were once the most efficient ways for advertisers to get their messages to the public. This created media empires that could fund huge staffs of journalists. Howeveer, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating with satellite television and the internet, people had more choices for entertainment and information. As I’ve often said, information isn’t the scarce resource now. We’re fighting for attention.
This leads to a host of questions. These are just a few.
Accepting that information is no longer scarce, what value can journalists add for our audiences?
If we’re not adding value, why are we doing it? What are we going to have to stop doing?
What new services can we create that will support journalism?
We really need to be thinking beyond business models to support our existing business and our existing ways of doing journalism. I used to think that the efficiencies of digital production would help existing journalism organisations to jump the chasm. I’m no longer confident that this is possible.
After a very busy summer, I’ve got a backlog of blogging here on Strange Attractor and a backlog of thoughts. In addition to considering the issues of over-supply, I agree with Dan Gillmor, we’ve got a problem with the demand for news. As per usual, Dan is asking some very important questions. I am starting to think of ways that we can stimulate demand by actively working to engage our audiences. I’m excited to be plugging back into the discussion about what we journalists do next, and Suw and I are looking to move this discussion beyond the talking and into doing.
Twitter has become a polarising service. I’m one of the millions of people who find value in Twitter, mostly because I’ve built a network of new media and digital journalism professionals, many of whom I am lucky enough to call friends. As I’ve said before, my network is my filter, and my Twitter network provides me with an incredibly valuable filtered feed of content that I have to know as a social media journalist. It’s better than any single site. I generate an RSS feed just of the links that friends post in Twitter to keep on top it.
However, for all of the people who find Twitter useful for social or professional reasons, there is now an equal and opposite reaction from members of the media and members of the public.
Regarding this animosity, Kevin Marks, who recently joined BT but was with Google as a Developer Advocate on OpenSocial, said to Suw and me (via Twitter):
In sociology, an outgroup is a social group towards which an individual feels contempt, opposition, or a desire to compete.
The latest example of this contempt and opposition is British BBC Radio 4 icon John Humphrys. I would be generally shocked if Humphrys said something positive about anything, and he strikes me as the kind of journalist who feels that paper is too new fangled and ephemeral and that really the importance of journalism deserves the permanance of stone.* It’s of little surprise then that he says of Twitter:
Why shd everyone try everything? Some (like underwater ironing) too daft to try. Stop counting letters. Get a life instead.
John, I’m disappointed in your. Demeaning yourself with text speak? However, he doesn’t stop there. In a comment on the Today programme website, he says:
I’ve never tried morris dancing, never tried incest – does that mean I should try them?
I would expect Morris Dancers to be lodging a formal complaint.
A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve.
Honestly, I heard the same opinion expressed often by newspaper journalists and editors at that time. It’s one of the reasons why newspapers are in decline. Apart from the odd visionary, this was a pervasive opinion amongst newspaper journalists. Reading the FT, they highlight this cogent bit of research:
Alarmingly, the (newspaper) industry has also so far “failed to make the digital transition”, according to a report last month from Outsell, a publishing research firm, which found that news organisations’ digital revenues were just 11 per cent of their total revenues, compared with 69 per cent for the broader information industry, which includes legal and financial data providers such as Reed Elsevier and Bloomberg.
I was working at the BBC at the time, and I was fortunate. My colleagues said to me on a daily basis that my job was the future. Working in radio and television, they didn’t have the same anti-technology bias because technology was so much a part of what they did.
In seeing how little has changed, Douglas Adams even refers to ” Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you”. To Humphrys Snr and many others, he says:
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
The internet just celebrated its 40th birthday. The internet is not so new, but what Douglas Adams wrote 10 years ago now still seems as fresh and relevant as if it was written on 29 August 2009, not 1999. It also explains why Douglas Adams is so missed and his early death was such a loss. Read the full article. It really is worth your time.
We need to think about the internet critically, but too often I fear that an acidic and unsophisticated cynicism is confused for a healthy dose of scepticism. The media may not be able to have an intelligent, nuanced discussion about the internet (or much of anything else), but that’s all right, the discussion goes on and has been going on, as Douglas Adams shows, for quite a while.
* Footnote: In the interest of disclosure, despite the fact that John Humphrys is a national treasure here, I’ve never actually been able to listen to an entire one of his interviews, mostly because it takes me 30 seconds to get bored with his badgering. You can listen to full 5 minute interviews of his where the interview subject might get in three words if Humphrys is feeling generous. One comes away knowing what Humphrys thinks in great detail but absolutely no idea what the interviewee thinks. I’m probably going to get deported for dissing a cultural treasure of Middle Class Britain, but I’m too busy to listen to someone badger and bloviate ad nauseum. The verbal jousting may be engaging to some, but it’s of no use to me. I need to know what I need to know, and Humphrys and Co can’t touch the meme per minute density of my RSS feeds and social news filters.
I guess it’s fair in the end. Humphrys doesn’t have time for Twitter, and I don’t have time for him. I now await a swift deportation.
Every journalist learns (or should learn) how to evaluate sources and, as the web increasingly becomes a source for stories, we need to know whether the things that we stumble across there would make a good source. The internet has been an important part of my job as a journalist almost since I took my first full-time journalism job in 1994. Internet journalists have their own investigative skills, skills that will have to become more widespread as the internet becomes part of every journalist’s job.
I mention this in the wake of a hoax last week by Alex Hilton, aka the British political blogger Recess Monkey. For background, I’ll refer to the Guardian, my day job:
Been following the ding-dong over Tory MP Chris Grayling comparing parts of “Broken Britain” to Baltimore, the crime-ridden city shown in The Wire? What about the riposte from Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon, who has hit back stating that comparing The Wire to the real Baltimore was “as pointless as boasting that Baltimore has a per capita homicide rate a fraction of that in the popular UK television show Midsomer Murders.” If only.
The British press, and to be fair the hometown Baltimore Sun, reported that the mayor of Baltimore rose to the defence of her fair city. The only problem is that she didn’t. The Guardian was one of the British newspapers that fell for the hoax.
I have to take my hat off to Alex. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but the hoax was very well executed. Alex created a Twitter account to promote the site. He created a YouTube channel and a video.
To create the site, he simply copied the underlying code from a web page from the official Mayor of Baltimore’s site and changed some of the content. This retained all of the links to the official site and the images were simply pulled from the official server. It’s an immaculate hack. He didn’t have to break into anyone’s server, just copy a web page and add his own content.
It’s a similar trick to phishing scams. It looks like Amazon.com or your bank, but you’ve actually just been sent to some mobsters’ site in Russia or a naked IP address. (I don’t mean to disparage the good people of Russia, but a helluva lot of phishing scams are .ru.) You have to be pay attention to the web address to notice that you’ve suddenly been teleported somewhere else on the web.
So what else did I do to make sure this wasn’t seen as the true views of the Mayor of Baltimore or an attempt to deceive anyone or to smear Chris Grayling? I registered the mayorofbaltimore.org domain in my own name. I squirrelled in the English spelling of “dishonoured” as a clue. I put at the bottom of the page, “Copyright R Monkee Esq” and linked it to my currently decrepit Recess Monkey website. I put the following message on Recess Monkey for anyone who cared to follow the link:
Sorry, RecessMonkey is on holiday in Maryland. Right mouse button click view source (but not on this website) R Monkee Esq.
If you had looked at the source on the site, you would have found this:
OK, so I’m just having a bit of fun at Chris Grayling’s expense. Sitting in the office on a hot August afternoon, I was fantasising that I was Mayor of Baltimore and how annoyed I would be. I hope you very quickly picked up that this was a spoof. Didn’t mean to break any laws or ethical mores – please don’t extradite me if I have unwittingly done so. Hope you appreciate the humour, Alex Hilton, alexhilton@gmail.com – 07985 384 859
Alex expected journalists to spot the humour and the hoax, but it was reported as fact. He rang the Guardian switchboard and was put through to me. He was trying to ratchet down the media furore. The Guardian media desk wrote a brief story about the hoax, and I alerted the news desk so the correction process could begin.
So, what gives a hoax like this away? Here’s your three point guide to spotting when someone’s pulling your leg.
Pay attention to the URL
When a colleague sent me the website address, I spotted the hoax immediately. I didn’t even need to see the site to know it was a fake. How? The URL was mayorofbaltimore.org, not .gov or .md.us. In a UK context, that’s similar to a fake Downing Street site with the address www.number10.org.uk instead of www.number10.gov.uk. Org addresses are for non-profits not for governmental websites.
Who owns the site?
Finding out who owns a site is easy. Do a WHOIS lookup, and you’ll find out not only who owns the site, but sometimes even their contact details. Most of the time this is corporate information that won’t give you a person to ring, but as Alex says, he registered the site in his own name.
Hover over the links
Why? If you hover over the links, you would have seen they went to a different address, not mayorofbaltimore.org. It could save you from a phishing scam and it could have prevented journalists from falling for this hoax.
Be wary of a Twitter account with only one update
Alex created a fake Twitter account, and the only update linked to his fake press release. That’s a big warning sign to me.
Alex also hid a huge clue in the source code, including his mobile phone number and his e-mail address. To see the underlying code of a web page in Firefox, go to the View menu and scroll down to Source. For Internet Explorer, go to Page on the menu bar and scroll down to Page Source. UPDATE: A commenter on Twitter admitted she probably wouldn’t have thought to look at the source code of the page. I looked at the code because I wanted to see how Alex had cloned the page. When things look fishy, the code can reveal a lot. Alex also made it clear on Recess Monkey that there was an Easter Egg hidden there as well.
Much of what I have described were once specialist skills that only web geeks needed to know, but as the web becomes more of every journalists’ job, having these relatively simple skills might be the thing that prevents you from falling for the next hoax. These are not technical skills anymore. They are skills you need to evaluate a source on the web, conduct an investigation and protect your credibility as a journalist.
This is a response to comments on Friday’s post about Gary McKinnon. Normally, I’d just write a comment, but in this case I decided to write a new post so that the links I’ve collated don’t get buried. I’d encourage everyone interested in the case to read Lord Justice Burnton’s ruling of 31 July 2009 (PDF). Included in the ruling are almost two pages (p16-17) from the US Department of Justice on how McKinnon’s mental health needs would be met.
Let’s take the comments in reverse order.
Christian, indeed, let’s look at the facts. The US Senate unanimously ratified the treaty in 2006. The US Embassy and the UK Foreign Office issued a joint statement on the 26 April 2007 noting that the treaty had been ratified by both countries. I’d also note that before this treaty came into force, it was the US that was at a disadvantage in terms of extradition.
See the Foreign Office Statement:
“The treaty, and the Extradition Act 2003, have also redressed the unequal balance that existed under the terms of the 1972 Treaty in which the UK required more from the US than they asked of the UK. The US was required to demonstrate a prima facie evidential case in support of extradition requests made to the UK, whereas the UK merely had to demonstrate ‘probable cause’.”
The US has not refused a single UK extradition request since the 2003 Extradition Act came into force.
Whilst there is justifiable anger at the way the US government behaved under Bush, some of the sense of inequality in US-UK relations is based on perceived sleights not supported by the facts. Christian is not alone in believing, incorrectly, that the US hasn’t ratified the treaty, but I’ve never heard it reported here that it was the US that actually suffered the imbalance before the treaty was ratified.
Ian suggested that the US wanted to ‘crucify’ McKinnon, but again this is a common misconception largely based on poor reporting about the likely, as opposed to the maximum, penalty McKinnon faces. The Law Lords noted, before the formal request for extradition, that McKinnon was offered a written plea agreement.
McKinnon said he was not offered guarantees and his mother says it wasn’t in writing. But the Law Lords said the plea agreement was a ‘lengthy document’, and Lord Brown even manages to to quote from this supposedly non-existent document.
In section 22 of the ruling:
The proposed “deal” was conditional upon the appellant entering into a form of Plea Agreement, a lengthy document including the provision in para 4…) The plea agreement said that in return for a guilty plea, he would be given a 3-4 year sentence based on US sentencing guidelines. Section 18 of the ruling states: “On this basis it was likely that a sentence of 3-4 years (more precisely 37-46 months), probably at the shorter end of that bracket, would be passed and that after serving 6-12 months in the US, the appellant would be repatriated to complete his sentence in the UK.
He could have served 6-12 months in a US prison, followed by repatriation to the UK. Hardly
‘crucifiction’.
Colin: based on the Lord Burnton’s ruling, reasonable people can come to their own conclusion about the eagerness of the CPS and the DPP to prosecute McKinnon under UK jurisdiction. I’ve embedded the ruling in the previoius post and added the link to the PDF at the top of this post. It’s worth a read.
But I would draw attention to this quote from the Divisional Court ruling in section 45 of the July 2009 ruling:
The CPS did consider whether to launch a prosecution in the UK and for good reason decided against it. The defendant intentionally targeted computers in the US; his actions resulted in criminal damage being suffered there, as well as causing very considerable disruption to the workings of those computers resulting in interference and disruption to military activities in the US. It is not my task to determine which
state has the better right to prosecute, but for what it is worth my view is, unquestionably, if the defendant is to face prosecution, it should be in the US.
As for whether McKinnon was offered community service by CPS, that’s irrelevant because the case isn’t being tried here and the courts have consistently supported the CPS and the DPP in their decision that is shouldn’t be tried here.
McKinnon and his legal team have offered a written confession in the hopes of securing a prosecution in the UK, but Lord Burnton wrote:
Moreover, it would be manifestly unsatisfactory in the extreme for the Claimant to be prosecuted and sentenced on the basis of what he is prepared to admit in this country rather than on the basis of what could be proved in the USA.
This doesn’t entirely refute Colin’s view that the only reason the CPS didn’t prosecute the case in the UK was because of orders from ‘the very top’, but it does provide a perfectly reasonable and legal reason why they did not, reasons that have been supported by British courts.
For the cost estimates, in the interest of argument, let’s say that the disruption causd to the 97 computers listed in the indictment only met the threshhold of $5000 damage, that woud be $51 per computer. However, seeing as his disruption alleges to have shut down a network of 2000 computers in the Miliary District of Washington for 24 hours, the damage estimates sound not only plausible but on the low side.
As for the letter that Colin says exists retaining the right to try him under Standing Military Order Number One, why hasn’t the letter been introduced as evidence? It would be germaine to the defence’s case of the likelihood of disproportinate punishment in US jurisdiction. As it
stands now, without such evidence, UK courts have rejected the possibility of McKinnon ending up in Guantanamo as ‘fanciful’. Lord Burnton also rejects the idea that he might end up in a supermax, and it appears from the judgement that the defence has dropped this contention. The court rulings in this case have dealt with the facts presented and come to the same conclusion now several times.
As for whether New Jersey wants him to ‘fry’ or West Virginia has a death penalty, both contentions are irrelevant. The case is in federal, not state, jurisdiction. The US government, not the state of New Jersey or West Virginia filed the case. As a state, New Jersey doesn’t have a dog in this fight. Even if a sealed indictment does exist, which I doubt, it is irrelevant whether West Virginia has the death penalty because I know of no federal or state hacking law that carries the death penalty. If anyone can show me the West Viriginia state law that sentences convicted hackers to death, I’d be more than happy to amend the post.
As for the charge that I only recognise “facts that fit (my) conspiracy theories”, I recognise the facts presented before British courts in this case and decided to be relevant and accurate by British judges. In those rulings we have signed affidavits, letters from McKinnon’s lawyers, the US Department of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service and expert witnesses on McKinnon’s mental health, just to name a few. The facts that Colin presents are his own. To believe his telling of the case, we have to put our faith in shadowy orders from ‘the very top’, sealed indictments and hearsay from closed-door meetings.
As for being a friend of Scott Stein, I’ve never met the man. Yes, I am American, and I’ve made no effort to hide that. As for being anti-British, the accusation is ridiculous. I worked for the BBC in Washington for seven years. I’ve lived in London going on five years. If I held any animosity towards the British, I wouldn’t have married a British woman. As an American who has great affection for both my native United States and my adopted home of Britain, I can only say that Americans and most people in the US government whom I have met share my affection for Britain and for the British people.
I’ve also been accused of a personal agenda in my blogging and reporting about the case. As a journalist, I see it as my duty to correct the record, whether in the course of my professional work or here on the blog I share with my wife.
My issue in this case isn’t with Britain but the British press. The core of what I have written in this post and previous posts is based on knowledge of the US legal system, backed by source documents, and more importantly, British court rulings. I’ve done this in my spare time and easily refuted much of what has been written. As I’ve said before, the British press has done an appalling job of reporting this story. It is my job to report facts and separate fact from fiction. It is not my job as a journalist to decide guilt or innocence. I leave that to the courts. I wish the British press would do the same.
I usually steer well clear of writing about anything political here on Strange Attractor, but last August I made an exception because I was unsettled by the one-sided coverage of the case of British hacker Gary McKinnon.
I flagged up the post, with reservations, on Twitter last weekend and then, through a friend, I found out that McKinnon’s mother Janis Sharp had mentioned me on Twitter. She went on to call me a lazy journalist and accused me of “launching a smear campaign” for my own agenda. I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but when someone questions my professional standards, even if only with regard to my own blog, I feel the need to respond. Two, now three, blog posts and a few comments in response to attacks by Sharp on Twitter hardly constitute a smear campaign. I simply retain the right to look at the facts on my own and come to an independent conclusion.
My issue is not with Sharp or McKinnon. My issue is with my profession. Apart from some excellent coverage in the UK tech press, much of the coverage in the British mainstream press is deeply flawed. It is one-sided, riddled with errors, sensationalist and filled with the unsophisticated, unthinking anti-Americanism that is pervasive in British media. I expect this from the British tabloid press but, in this case, the coverage in the so-called quality press is almost indistinguishable.
The extradition treaty and the US Constitution
But while opposition MPs claim that following September 11 the UK government granted the US special extradition privileges to help bring terrorists to justice, Julian Knowles QC says that the imbalance is rather due to the specifics of the US constitution.
“They can’t reciprocate due to their Constitution,” Knowles told FactCheck.
The Fourth Amendment, part of the first 10 amendments that we call the Bill of Rights states that probable cause needs to be established. The Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The US, Europe and members of the Commonwealth need only a warrant for a person’s arrest. And Channel 4’s fact checkers rendered this verdict:
Opposition parties are right to say that there is an imbalance in extradition proceedings between the UK and the US in favour of the US. However, the reasons behind the imbalance are not due to the granting of special privileges for the US, as is claimed
It’s also relevant to note that the standard of proof that the US requires the UK to meet, probable cause, is also the standard of proof that was required to secure an indictment against McKinnon. The US is holding itself to the same burden of proof that it asks for US citizens to be extradited. There is some parity here, even if the treaty leaves an “imperfect reciprocity” between the US and UK.
It’s also worth noting that in the US the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the treaty. They said that it threatened due process and “seriously erodes the judicial review for individuals sought by the United Kingdom”. It sounds very familiar to criticisms here, but it also contradicts the impression that the US has retained excessive latitude to reject extradition requests from the UK.
Federal Sentencing Guidelines and McKinnon’s probable sentence
The indictment alleges that Gary McKinnon scanned a large number of computers in the .mil network, was able to access the computers and obtained administrative privileges. Once he was able to access the computers, McKinnon installed a remote administration tool, a number of hacker tools, copied password files and other files, deleted a number of user accounts and deleted critical system files.
Based on this, the British media says that McKinnon faces 60 or 70 years in prison.
However, McKinnon has been indicted in federal court, not state court, and US federal sentencing guidelines apply. They used to be binding, but since a 2005 US Supreme Court ruling, more discretion has been returned to judges. Here is a brief explanation from Cornell University Law School:
The Guidelines are not mandatory, because they may result in a sentence based on facts not proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury, in violation of the Sixth Amendment. United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 20 (2005). However, judges must consider them when determining a criminal defendant’s sentence. When a judge determines within his or her discretion to depart from the Guidelines, the judge must explain what factors warranted the increased or decreased sentence. When a Court of Appeals reviews a sentence imposed through a proper application the Guidelines, it may presume the sentence is reasonable. Rita v. United States, 127 S.Ct. 2456 (2007).
The sentencing guidelines are referred to in Lord Brown’s ruling, but they are rarely referred to in UK coverage. McKinnon was offered a plea agreement if he pleaded guilty to two of the seven charges.
From the ruling: “On this basis it was likely that a sentence of 3-4 years (more precisely 37-46 months), probably at the shorter end of that bracket, would be passed and that after serving 6-12 months in the US, the appellant would be repatriated to complete his sentence in the UK.” The ruling goes on to note:
19. The predicted sentence of 3-4 years was based upon sentencing guidelines themselves based upon a points system. The prosecution would recommend to the court a particular points level which the court would be likely to accept.
If he refused the plea, Lord Brown wrote McKinnon “might expect to receive a sentence of 8-10 years, possibly longer, and would not be repatriated to the UK for any part of it.”
Even without the plea agreement in place, McKinnon is unlikely to see a sentence of more than 5 years. Although, like the so-called NatWest 3, I would expect McKinnon to be offered a new plea agreement. Note, the NatWest 3 returned to the UK last November to serve out the rest of their 37 month sentence.
However, based on little more than speculation that a vindictive United States humiliated by McKinnon would seek maximum retribution, the British press have condemned him to the rest of his natural life in prison. They say that he has been branded a cyber-terrorist by the Americans. Except he hasn’t: The indictment doesn’t mention terrorism or terror-related charges.
In one of the examples of the British tech press doing the basic journalism that the general press should be doing, Sharon Gaudin of Computerworld quoted “Scott Christie, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey at the start of the hacking investigation, and was the first prosecutor brought into the case.” She writes:
McKinnon has contended that if extradited to the U.S., he could be treated as a terrorist, tried in a military tribunal and ultimately imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
“Mr. McKinnon has never been classified in that manner or treated in that manner, as far as I’m aware,” said Christie, who now leads the information technology group at law firm McCarter & English LLP. “He will be treated as a normal criminal defendant in the civil court system of this country. He’s a run-of-the-mill criminal with a run-of-the-mill crime.”
And as for the length of the sentence McKinnon is actually facing, Christie has been quoted several times:
Each charge potentially carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. However, U.S. sentencing guidelines would likely recommend a much lighter sentence.
A 60-year sentence is “extraordinarily unlikely,” according to Scott Christie, who was the lead prosecutor in the case in New Jersey before going into private practice. …
“His general exposure would be in the range of between three and five years,” he said.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about three to five years on each count but three to five years in total. Not to make too fine a point, but as Lord Brown said in his ruling, one of the factors taken into account in sentencing is the recommendation of the prosecutor. Christie is basing his estimate on the guidelines and the sentence he would have expected with a successful conviction. Three to five years. Not 60. Christie hardly sounds like the cowboy cops of the American justice system baying for the blood of a cyber-terrorist, as is portrayed without named quote or qualification in the British press. He’s never quoted because he falls outside the terror narrative of the British media’s reality-free McKinnon coverage. He’s too calm, too reasonable and too professional, not vindictive enough, so he’s just airbrushed out of the story. Yes, his quotes should be balanced by other views, but as the person first given the job to prosecute the case, his point of view is relevant and, I would argue, essential to the balanced reporting of this story.
Guantanamo is irrelevant in this case
The British media have created two fantasy prison scenarios for McKinnon. The Scotsman at least realised he wouldn’t be sentenced to Guantanamo but instead suggested that he would most likely serve in a horrific ‘Supermax’ prison in Virginia. The only problem as Kevin “Dark Dante” Poulsen (who has even less patience with the comic book coverage of the case than I do) notes the Supermax facility The Scotsman picked, seemingly at random from the map, is actually a Virginia state facility. The truth is that McKinnon faces charges in the federal court system and would serve any sentence in a federal prison.
While grounded in the horrors of the Bush administration’s extra-judicial atrocities, the coverage of the McKinnon is based on fantasy not facts. Is it possible that, in some fit of vindictiveness, US authorities could have exiled him to that extra-judicial black hole? Almost anything seemed possible during the Bush years. However there is a key difference in McKinnon’s case. He has, and always had, what the Guantanamo detainees have fought for years to get: An indictment in a US civilian court. If you look at the case of “enemy-combatant” Jose Padilla and the detainees, the Bush Administration fought to keep them from having access to US courts in the first place. McKinnon’s case started in the civilian judicial system and that’s where it’s going to stay.
Due process and human rights
In speaking with someone recently about the extradition treaty, I was told that the inequality of the treaty rendered the facts of the case irrelevant. The principles of equality and fairness were more important than the facts of McKinnon’s case or the coverage. I disagree.
The upset over the perceived inequality of the extradition treaty is grounded in feelings of nationalism and feelings of a loss of sovereignty. You hear echoes of anger over Tony Blair walking lock-step with George Bush into Iraq. People here complain about the UK being the 51st State of America. One person even said it felt like “the big, bad USA was lording over our tiny island”. I also know how much the British people value a sense of fairness, and the treaty seems to be inherently unfair.
But there are other issues here, issues that are just as important to democratic countries. One of these core, fundamental values is due process.
If you want to go back to the Magna Carta for a definition of due process, it says: “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
In McKinnon’s case, obsessive coverage of the treaty inequalities has obscured the fact that McKinnon has had access to British and European courts. If the treaty was truly as unfair as the press makes it out to be and the British public now seem to think, McKinnon wouldn’t have had access to appeals. The US would have simply shown up with an indictment and left with McKinnon. The coverage makes the treaty situation appear like some legalised version of extraordinary rendition, where the US can just swoop in and pick up anyone they want. That’s clearly not the case.
Has McKinnon been denied his day(s) in British courts? No. His supporters might not like the outcome, but that should not obscure the fact that the courts here have ruled, thus far, that the extradition and the plea bargaining process have not violated McKinnon’s rights. That has been reaffirmed by court after court in the UK. This is how the legal system works.
Should he be tried in the UK instead of the US? The law of this is relatively straightforward and wasn’t a novel invention created by the Extradition Act of 2003. In most international cases, the jurisdiction for prosecution is determined by the location of the victim, not the criminal. If US hackers broke into British computers, they would be subject to British, not American law. Writing in the Times, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said:
The court was equally clear that he should be tried in America because the crimes he is accused of — although they were conducted from a computer in his bedroom in the UK — did not remotely affect people in this country. They affected critical government security systems in America.
This is why the Crown Prosecution Service won’t bring charges. No British victim. No British crime.
Is McKinnon’s case really the perversion of justice that his supporters make it out to be? Has he been denied appeals and access to British courts? Has he been denied due process by the British legal system?
PR perverting justice
Just as with the NatWest 3 case, the London PR machine has played a significant role in packaging this case for a pliant press. When I wrote last year drawing comparisons between McKinnon’s case and the NatWest 3, I had no idea how right I was. At the BBC News website, Caroline McClatchey writes:
And it’s no surprise to discover there is some PR professionalism in the campaign. London-based PR agency Bell Yard is working “pro bono” (free) for the McKinnon campaign. It has experience in this field, having represented the “NatWest 3” – three British bankers who were eventually extradited to the US on fraud related charges. The agency was unavailable for comment for this story.
The brand masters must be sitting back with some satisfaction that they’ve managed to take the court case of a confessed cracker and turned it into a Live Aid event. I know that this happens frequently on both sides of the Atlantic, but this case is an egregious example of the triumph of spin over the facts of a case.
Now anyone facing extradition has a ready-made recipe to truly pervert the course of justice: Just add spin. Furthermore, opening the British or US legal system to political pressure is a dangerous game. The sense of injustice over extradition is now moving British politicians to manipulate their legal system for the benefit of a single individual. It opens up avenues for abuse that can be exploited not just by people you might like or sympathise with, but also by people whose political views you detest. The source and political inclination of the manipulation doesn’t make it right.
As I have said, my issue is not with McKinnon. My issue is with my profession. British journalism believes in campaigns and they love the narrative of the small guy against the big bad US. They have painted him as the hapless victim of US heavy-handedness while committing no crime but apart from an over-active curiosity. But long ago this campaign lost touch with the facts of the story.
McKinnon says he was looking for evidence of UFOs and alien technology. He may not have found any, but he has succeeded in creating a parallel world. There is the world of the facts and findings of the case available for anyone to see in court documents and rulings, and then there is the fantasy world created by McKinnon and his supporters. McKinnon’s world has been embraced, almost without question, by a credulous British media. Sensing a well-selling story, the media here have become McKinnon’s unquestioning advocates. Opportunistic politicians, a garden-variety pest the world over, have hopped on the McKinnon bandwagon. Their only source is the tireless, and in this case misguided, campaigners in the British press. Tony Blair was lampooned as Bush’s poodle. Now, the fierce watchdogs, defenders of justice and democracy in the British press have become the lapdogs for a confessed cracker.
The view of McKinnon as a vulnerable victim of American rough justice relies on easily refuted distortions of the truth propagated by the media. In the real world, he’s not facing anything like 60 years if convicted, but 3-5. In the real world, he could have served six to 12 months in US custody had he accepted the written plea agreement. In the real world, US prosecutors like Scott Christie speak with quiet, measured professionalism. He is not the rabid American bully that has become the standard caricature in the British press. If you’d like a view of the real world from a UK perspective, read Stuart Turton’s look at the case in PC Pro, another example of the British tech press presenting a balanced and accurate picture of the case where the general press has failed.
[McKinnon] has created this cause celebre status in order to appeal to folks who will beat the drum on his behalf and they conveniently ignore the facts of the situation and the entire nature of his conduct. I think that, unfortunately, it lends some credence to the individuals who are painting McKinnon as a victim, to have the mayor of London weigh in as part of that team … people are resorting to a distortion of the facts in order to further his celebrity status as a victim. It’s troubling.
With that, I’m through writing about McKinnon. You may have a different view of the case, and the only thing I ask is to follow the links in this post. Look at the evidence. You may come to a different conclusion than I have, but at least you’ll know the facts. Welcome to the real world.
Chris Anderson, of Long Tail and now Free fame, is obviously getting peeved at the questions he’s getting from journalists. He says as much in this interview at Frank Hornig at Salon.com. Probably the most important line in this rather tedious interview is when Anderson says:
I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We’re tuning out television news, we’re tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news. It’s news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me.
Like Anderson, I have developed filters to tune out much of what is in the media. A few years ago journalists were decrying the loss of the all (self-)important gate-keeping function that they said they performed. I got to a point where I thought that if that is what journalists think is their unique selling point then they’re doomed because they are doing a lousy job of determining what is really important.
I spend a lot of time sifting through, while ignoring, much of the garbage produced by media to find a few, small nuggets of information that are useful. I can afford to do that. It’s my job. Not only can I not imagine most people doing this, I think they stopped quite a while ago. They realised that the signal-to-noise ratio was so low that they were better served by just tuning out.
I can ignore most of the childish nonsense that obsesses the mainstream media. Honestly, if it weren’t my job, I would pay to filter out much of this noise. I don’t need to read the professional trolls aka columnists who try to tell me what I should be outraged about. I can figure that out for myself, thank you very much. I do pay for insightful analysis. Most of what obsesses the media is remarkably juvenile, and as the media’s fortunes have waned, they have becoming annoyingly shrill in trying to reassert their role in society. Watchdogs? Defenders of democracy? I wish. Mostly of the media operate as little more than professional gossips and hypocritical scolds.
For the last several years, I have said that the network is my filter. Through blogs, social bookmarking services like Delicious, Twitter and even simple things like email newsletters, I am passed incredibly relevant and high quality information. It’s not that I think professional journalists are superfluous. I just find that social filters are providing an extremely valuable service in recommending the best, most relevant information available.
We’re coming to an economic point where we as journalists have crossed a Rubicon where we can’t do more with less, we’re simply going to have to do less. We just don’t have the resources to create redundant content that provides little value to our audiences. We need to start looking to ways to filter the best information. We need to do it soon. We’re running out of time. Our audiences ran out of patience long ago.
Bloggers were well represented at Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum, in part because it was the first time that they awarded their BOBs – Best of the Blogs – to the winning bloggers in person. The forum was a stark reminder of internet theorist Clay Shirky’s observation that technology that is often used to pass time in the West can be an essential tool for expression and democracy in repressive countries. Blogging has become a powerful means of expression, reporting and organisation in countries around the world.
Blogging and citizen journalism
During a panel on blogging and citizen journalism, Israel Yoroba Guebo from the Ivory Coast said that in his country, “We hope that our journalists don’t end up in prison.” There is only one television channel and opposition political parties have no way to communicate their positions. He used to work for a newspaper, but he wanted an outlet to tell about the everyday life of people in his country.
Ivory Coast was divided by conflict in 2002 as rebels held part of the country. The political conflict didn’t just divide the country but also its people. He wrote on his blog Le Blog de Yoro about life in all parts of the country and tried to show that people shared the same way of life in an effort to bring about reconciliation.
He was asked whether blogging could have prevented the conflict. He said:
“In Ivory Coast, we didn’t see a way to prevent crisis, but if we had the blog, maybe we could have prevented some of the massacres.”
Another person asked him who was the target audience of the blog. Was it Africans, many of whom don’t have access to the internet, or was it audiences in Europe and the US?
He said that it was important to let people in other countries know what was happening in the Ivory Coast, but maybe his blog would also encourage others to take up bloggin. “The more bloggers that we have, the greater opportunity we have to talk freely,” he said.
The problem is that blogging there is difficult and expensive. They don’t have broadband and have to go to internet cafes to post. However, he said:
“You can at least give the world the possibility to express themselves. Something that would never be accepted on the television.”
Iranians do not have to be encouraged to blog. It is often said that Persian is the fourth most common language for blogs. Four years ago, women in Iran gathered outside of parliament to protest a law that prevented women from becoming president, but it was one of many laws unfair to women. The women decided to protest every day of the year against one of these laws, said Nazli Farokhi.
“We realised that 365 days was not enough,” she said, so they started the blog 4equality. It gives a chance for women who support the campaign to write about their experiences. She was asked about the security of the bloggers. Police have arrested 50 of their members, and four remain in prison.
During the BOBs award ceremony, she played the group’s anthem which describes the discrimination that women in Iran face and the hope that one day women and men can be equal there.
Threats to bloggers
A climate of fear due to threats of violence, intimidation or arrest face bloggers in repressive countries. Bloggers from China and Cuba were not allowed to travel to accept their awards, but instead had to record video messages for the BOBs ceremony.
Cuban Yoani Sanchez’s Generación Y won the award for best blog 2008. Appearing via video message, she said that having a blog in Cuba “can drive one to madness”: There are no internet connections in people’s homes, and bloggers are forced to go internet cafes or hotels that cater to tourists. The cost of using the internet for one hour is equal to a third of the average Cuban’s salary.
Zeng Jinyan won the Reporters without Borders best blog award. She’s the wife of imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia, and she began blogging after being put under house arrest. She writes about life under constant surveillance by the Chinese authorities. She couldn’t travel to accept the reward, but was able to get a video to the BOB organisers. In the video message, she said:
“Blogging has brought new hope to my life.”
Ahmad Abdalla won the award for best blog in Arabic. When he started writing the blog, he said that he was only writing “about small things” and didn’t think that anyone would care about it. But, he added:
“But these small things are affecting my generation, these small things that we’re missing.”
Blogging in Russia
Eugene Gorny said that two or three years ago, he wouldn’t have predicted that he would be interested in the link between politics and blogs in Russia, but now people who were not previously interested are getting involved in the political discussion.
Most popular media channels or national newspapers in Russia are controlled by the government. They have no chance to report about opposition political leaders, protests or anything that the government doesn’t want known or discussed.
The regime is afraid of any political activity of the citizens, and brutally oppresses them, Gorny said.
Russians first started blogging seven or eight years ago, but it was mostly for fun and for the self-expression of the internet elite. As the Russian government has seized control of the media, blogs have become an important alternative to the state media for people to discuss issues that are important to them.
A 2009 report by Russian search engine Yandex found 7.4m blogs in Russian, of which about 1m are active. There are 1m posts in the Russian language every day. Russian bloggers are journalists, opposition politicians or “anyone who has a story or an opinion to share”, he said. Journalists blogging are able to write about issues more freely than in the traditional media. But it doesn’t matter whether a blogger is a journalist or not, Gorny said. Rather, bloggers were judged by their peers about their ability to write about significant topics.
Many blogs have a huge readership and reach in Russia. Free magazine F5 reviews the hottest topics in the Russian blogosphere, coming mostly from popular blogging service LiveJournal. The magazine boasts a circulation of 100,000.
Bloggers write reports on what they see, publish documents such as Amnesty International reports, commentary on current events, coverage of protests and quotes and links to other posts.
Their favourite topics are writing about:
The “iIllegitimate, corrupted, aggressive and unjust regime”.
The constant search for internal and external enemies.
Human rights violation in Russia, Chechyna, Ingushetia,
Police mayhem, extreme violence and the “outrageous breach of all limits”.
Strategies of resistance.
The last has become important as the authorities criminalise new forms of resistance. Russian authorities have clamped down on flash mobs and, earlier this year, they even arrested members of a silent protest for using foul language. The protestors had tape over their mouths. As more protesters are jailed, blogs from prison are part of a growing trend in Russia.
Blogs are a significant and growing part of the media in Russian, and Gorny predicted that if the political situation gets worse, then that the role of blogs will only increase.
Blogs and democracy in the West
Of course, even in the West, blogs can still be used for democratic purposes. US transparency through technology group, the Sunlight Foundation, won the 2008 Best Blog in English for their Party Time blog. The blog aims to collect information on the lobbyists, corporations and other donors who pay for parties for US politicians.
Nancy Watzman said that anonymous sources, some even in the lobbying groups themselves, offer the group tickets to the parties. The tickets come from sources they trust. They post the information on the Party Time blog, helping to shed light on one of the poorly reported aspects of the game of money, access and influence in US politics. During the political conventions in 2008 ahead of the presidential elections, they went to many of the parties, taking videos and posting them to the blog.
They would like to take the project further and are looking for partners, including the Huffington Post.
Markus Beckedahl started blogging at Netzpolitik to discuss issues of digital rights, copyright and censorship on the internet, pulling together stories in German and from around the world on the subject. He does a lot of thinking about how to change politics. He said:
“Politicians do bills about internet and they don’t really know what they are talking about.”
About 70,000 people in Germany use Twitter, and Markus has found that it’s a good way to quickly oganise and mobilise people. Netzpolitik has its own YouTube channel and video podcasting channel, and this has led to reports in traditional media about their efforts and issues.
He discussed some of their political campaigns. In 2005, the German government began discussing whether to switch from Microsoft’s Windows XP to Linux. The software giant threw a party to lobby the government to stick with Windows, Beckedahl said. Netzpolitik crashed the party in penguin costumes, the penguin being the mascot of Linux. Some of the penguins even managed to send pictures from the party via MMS.
In recent months, Deutsche Bahn, the German rail giant, has been in a “spy scandal with their workers”, Beckedahl said. Someone sent him internal DB documents, which he posted on the internet. Their lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist letter. He posted the letter on the site, asking for advice. Soon, the letter and documents were spread across the internet, making it difficult for DB to get them removed.
Their most recent campaign is against a proposed law aimed at child pornography. Instead of seeking to shut down the sites, the German government is looking to use filtering software, but internet activists fear that government filtering efforts could be used by other industries such as the music industry against file-sharing sites or by the Hessen government to filter gambling sites. Activists would rather the government seek limited action to shut down sites operating outside of the law.
The German government has an online petition system. A successful petition has to get 50,000 signatures. Using Twitter and hundreds of blogs, Netzpolitik managed to get the necessary signatures in record time, getting 110,000 in all.
Final Thoughts on the Global Media Forum
I thought one of the best quotes of the forum came from Laura Pintos, who writes at the blog 233grados.com. (233 degrees being the temperature at which paper ignites.) She was asked during the BOBs awards ceremony what she saw as the future of journalism. She answered:
“It is the wrong question. it is the present. We are living in a digital moment. It is our present.”
It was nice to see that point of view represented at the conference, even if it probably represented a minority view amongst the speakers and attendees. While a lot of people are wringing their hands over what the future of journalism is, there are people Pintos and many of the bloggers and podcasters at the conference who aren’t worrying about the future of journalism and rather simply creating it.
