Panorama and FIFA

Interesting - at least from a journalistic point of view - that investigative reporting has been a topic of huge debate in recent weeks. Last night it finally came to a head with the broadcasting of Panorama's investigation into allegations of corruption at the FIFA.

The argument has raged back and forth with accusations that the BBC is unpatriotic for scheduling the programme days before the winner to host the 2018 World Cup is to be announced being countered by the assertion that investigative journalism cannot be silenced for commercial or nationalistic considerations.

But the bid team and our Prime Minister have said they have no intention of silencing free speech but have criticised the timing of the programme and questioned why it could not have been aired some time ago.

As a journalist clearly I want to see investigations come to the fore - I tire of the churnalism that we see day-after-day in the media and of the constant use of celebrity to justify the news values of a story (why do we need Bob Geldof and Bono to convince us that Africa needs our help?).

But what did last night bring to the table? It was difficult to see much new information.

Panorama has given some truly superb examples of investigation but last night was little more than a 'cuttings job' - a story which has been formed entirely from repackaged existing news.

We had a summation of Panorama's previous, and entirely justified, attack on FIFA vice-president Jack Warner four-years ago. The top line to come out is that three senior officials took bribes in the 1990s, and a large part of the reporting was based upon investigative work by the Danish newspaper Tipsbladet.

The most interesting aspect to me was the fact that FIFA insisted that Government change their laws to protect the commercial rights of the tournament's official sponsors. The goes a long way to explaining how a group of women was arrested for wearing orange dresses during the world cup in South Africa this summer. It was seen as ambush marketing by brewer Bavaria which undermined the official sponsor Budweiser - but making wearing a colour of clothing illegal is a shocking victory for commercialism.

However, even that 'revelation' was actually the work of the Dutch Government and not Panorama. It also transpires that similar agreements have already been reached regarding the London Olympics next year and yet that does not seem to interest the BBC.

The Daily Telegraph's eminent sports writer Henry Winter had the following observation on Twitter immediately after the broadcast:

Watched Panorama with eminent sports news hacks here. They shrugged. Btw
David Mellor hardly added to substance.

But Paul Hayward in The Guardian offers a different view. He states:

Three days before the 2018 World Cup vote, the English bid is starting to feel like complicity in the supreme authority's slavering pursuit of the game's
astronomical wealth

And there's the rub. Whatever we think of the BBC's timing, it is FIFA that has failed to tackle corruption within its ranks and it is FIFA that puts the needs of sponsors before that of a democratic judiciary.

Whether or not the BBC should be rating chasing by sensationally timing its broadcasting of such a programme is a side issue - it is FIFA that has done wrong and it is our job as journalists to uncover it.

The Sunday Times' sting operation was hugely criticised by FIFA yet what the organisation failed to deal with was that the newspaper has uncovered yet more corruption.

I love sport and, barring the idiotic minority of football fans, still love the game of football but if we lose the 2018 World Cup because we have journalists willing to challenge corruption when they see it then that is a price I am prepared to pay.

Delicious irony on the Media Show

Just caught up with last week's podcast from the excellent BBC Media Show.

Interesting interview with Sir Michael Lyons (rather bland, political and evasive) with Media Show host Steve Hewlett (informed yet overly forceful and opinionated on this occasion) regarding the deal with the Government to take a £340m cut by paying for the World Service and S4C among other things.

However the thing that made me chuckle the most was the final interview of the pod. It was with Clothilde Le Coz of Reporters Without Borders regarding their Press Freedom Index 2010

But just as Clothilde got to the issue of a lack of press freedom in the UK, Steve cut her off and said they had no more time.

Of course, it was true. But they only ran out of time because they gave so much time so their own Chairman could explain why he had cut a deal with the Government which in a small way compromised the independence of the BBC.

It was all done in a very deadpan way but surely the irony cannot have been lost on the staff of the Media Show.

Anyway, I would suggest you follow the link above and give the press freedom index a good read - it is well worth it.

The Age of Opinion

One thing the internet has truly enabled people to do is to air an opinion to an audience outside of a (formerly) smoky pub.

Online News is full of opinion - blogs, comments, Tweets, Boos etc etc and most of it is welcome despite the BNP's attempt to ruin it for everyone. This is something I welcome as a vital part of the ongoing democratisation of the media.

But forums are where it starts to fall apart for me. Of course I may still suffer from PTSD from my time managing forums for Newsquest Oxfordshire (hence my hatred of the BNP who repeatedly targeted our boards for spamming/trolling sessions).

Have you ever seen a news or sports forum that doesn't descend into name calling? Have you seen one where people share thoughts and consider others' views?

I'm not sure I have. I have, however, witnessed hundreds of ill-informed, soap-box mounted rants which don't seem to do anyone a favour.

Take the issue of refuse collection in Oxford. Councillor Jean Fooks changed from a weekly collection to an alternate recycling and general waste collection. Some people took umbrage at not being able to create as much waste as they liked and mounted an anti-Fooks campaign.

This focused on the issue of rats in the city and how this new scheme had led to a huge increase. Of course, it hadn't and for those reading the small print on the Oxford Mail (local papers love a protest true or not) would have spotted that the increase was due to Severn Trent ceasing to trap the sewers as they had done for decades.

But on an on this raged on the forums. Any time it was pointed out to the anti-Fooks what Severn Trent had admitted they claimed it was a conspiracy. The whole things became pointless as any discussion was ruled out by the swamping effect of the antis.

I used to be a bit of a 606 addict where I would go to 'discuss' rugby. My suspicions about 606 being, well, crap were first aroused during WC2007 when a sizable number of posters repeatedly called for Matthew Tait to be played at fly half. Matthew Tait had never played fly half at schoolboy level but somehow was expected to do so on the world's biggest stage.

But 606 got worse. It's just a place for whingers and wind-up merchants.

Wales are rubbish - everyone hates England - Martin Johnson was a rubbish player - Chris Robshaw is good enough for the All Blacks etc etc

It's just tirade after tirade. I don't think people even read other posts before wading in which kind of makes the whole things pointless.

Recently I have been seeking out forums about the iPhone thinking they would be more upstanding. But even there we seem to have the Montagues (Jobbites) and Capulets (other smartphones) waging verbal war.

I think there is a book in this: The Forum Effect and the Departure from Reason. Mmmmm I think I'll get on to OUP.

Then of course there is a major issue with defamation on forums. It is almost impossible to proactively monitor these sites and you risk libel and contempt of court every day.

With the Government taking a keener interest in online news every day I am sure some form of over-the-top legislation will be brought in to prevent the open-access to these forums. Attempts have already been made to take action against posters and one failure will not put people off

Anyay, as much as I love Twitter and Facebook and the Internet in general, some of the things I discuss will have to remain in the pub where at least people pretend to listen before ripping me to shreds!

Paywalls and me

So Murdoch is going to charge for the Times and the Sunday Times and now we know how.

Same week we found that out that the Johnston Press experiment had been a spectacular failure - although real figures have not been published.

Of course, it isn't really a surprise that Johnston's experiment failed when you consider the titles they decided to experiment with and the fact that that regional media has already lost so much ground to other (free) outlets such as hyperlocal sites, blogs etc et.

But what about Murdoch's experiment? I think most people expect it to fail and fail in a pretty high-profile way.

But perhaps we first need to define what success would be.

I suspect that Murdoch will not mind losing 90 per cent of his unique users if his profits increase by even just one per cent.

However, to the Guardian it is all about reaching as many people as possible but in 08/09 lost a reported £36.8m and has now had to sell off the Manchester Evening News in a bid to prevent further massive losses to the group.

It's going to be an interesting 12 months - short term I can't see the paywall working because of the number of options we have. And of course, the BBC is, and probably always will be, a free option.

I am glad someone has gone for it though even if has to be Murdoch. There is so much emotion around this - even the term Paywall is highly charged. It's not a term you use for anything else and I have never heard Rusbridger and co demand an end to the news vendor's 'Paywall' as I hand over my £1 for the Guardian.

Longer term, finding a way of getting readers to pay for online news as they have for printed news is a workable way of ensure the industry remains strong and democratic. We might lose a few publications along the way but I the industry is a bit flabby and losing some titles may even help in the long term.

It's a shame that any attempt to discuss the BBC's role in the future of the media and its role in society and democracy is beset with squawks from the left about 'clipping the wings of public service broadcasting' and screams from the right about unfair competition.

The truth is somewhere in between but we need to debate it and debate it like adults at some point rather than sounding like Cameron and Brown on PMQs otherwise I fear for the future of online news.

Questions which need answering:

1) Is the licence fee really paying for online? If so then how so when it is has hardly changed since online and digital tv spread the BBC's resources even more thinly.

2) How much commercial work is the BBC doing abroad and how much is that dictating programme making and web development in the UK?

If the answers are yes and not much then I vote for the BBC to stay as is but I remain a sceptic until these things are proven.

Still, as it happens I don't even read the Times anyway so it won't bother me too much right now but let's see what Lebdev does to the Indie.

Last time I spoke to Simon Kelner he said they were considering introducing an honesty box for online payment. That would be interesting to see in action in the UK but it failed in Miami.

Embedded citizen journalism in Haiti

I have finally caught up with the most recent Radio 4 Media Show podcast - always a good listen and it sparked an interesting internal debate for me.

The first part of the show was centre around coverage of the earthquake in Haiti.

There was an interesting interview with Matthew Price from the BBC's New York office on how so many reporters seemed to get to Haiti when aid workers couldn't and how they remain detached when faced with such human misery.

However, it was the second Haiti section which interested me the most. Nancy Snyderman is a paediatrician and professor of surgery who has been reporting for NBC. She was sent out to Haiti so she could fulfil two functions
1) work as a doctor
2) report on the situation and her work as a doctor in the middle of a humanitarian disaster.

Now it is clear she is not a citizen journalist in the strictest sense of the title (and I know the title annoys many people; but just as with joyriding and happy slapping we are stuck with it). She is a medical correspondent for NBC and has been for some time.

However, it does raise some interesting ethical debates.

On the one hand it is great to get doctors on the ground and it is equally valuable for the outside world to be able to see and hear first-hand what is going on in Haiti.

But I have some concerns. Do people know that by being treated by this doctor they are becoming part of a story? Do they have to give consent? If they are unconscious what happens to this consent etc etc etc.

If you look at the excellent Ethics Handbook from the Thomson Reuters Foundation. You can see 100 ways in which Dr Snyderman's role is both supported and another 100 in which is may be dubious practice.

I don't have the answers. As a news editor/web editor of course I would want her out there but I have reservations about her role and how it fits her.

That is no criticism of her as I am sure she is doing an excellent job for both masters. But I suppose my liberal side knows that there was probably a cold-hearted NBC business executive behind the decision to deploy her and it just doesn't feel quite right.