The Cyberamblings of Malcolm Bradbrook: It covers a few topics that I hold dear: communications, sustainability, running and triathlon to name but four.
So I did it. I left Higher Education and, to a lesser
extent, I left journalism as well.
Why? I hear you ask with half-hearted ‘enthusiasm’.
Well the answer is simple – the job was too good to turn down. I
am now Senior Communications Manager at Earthwatch, an international environmental
charity which is committed to conserving the diversity and integrity of life on
earth to meet the needs of current and future generations.
It is an
NGO based on science – establishing facts through detailed, thorough research.
I have wanted to work for an NGO for a long time, perhaps because of the guilt
I still feel about being a Daily Mail reporter back in the day or perhaps
because it has always fitted in with who I am. My ambition in journalism was to
be the environment correspondent of the Guardian and at uni I took a Wildlife
Conservation module which ended with a highly enjoyable week in Snowdonia
taking water measurements and studying local flora and fauna.
It was a
real wrench to leave the University of Gloucestershire, where I have worked as
online journalism lecturer and Course Leader since 2008. The work was varied
and we had made significant strides with the course which now recruits a good
number of highly-dedicated students and, I have no doubt, will continue to grow
in stature over the coming years.
To leave a
job that I enjoyed and found challenging was no easy choice. But, coupled with
my interest in the environment, I also felt that as a journalist with more than
15 years’ experience I still had a lot to learn.
Journalists’
attitude to people working in communications for corporations or other
non-mainstream media organisations has long been one of patronising mocking –
either you couldn’t make it as a journalist or you took the money to work on
the ‘dark side’.
But the
web and social media has opened up huge potential for self-publishing, not just
by the individual citizen, but also by organisations large and small which
means that people working in comms can be increasingly pro-active. There is much
less begging for a few column inches or a few seconds of airtime and far more
creation of content which can reach a wide audience even if the content would
be viewed as niche by the mainstream.
So here I
am – developing websites and social media strategies, writing copy and using my
design skills to work on projects monitoring freshwater across the globe and encouraging
the corporate world to help transfer their skills to help manage Protected
Areas and World Heritage Sites. What could be better?
For the first time in my life I nearly let out a loud, and very public, "Hallelujah, and Amen brother" in full evangelical style.
Where was I? A church in the deep south of America, in front of a gospel choir watching a preacher perform miracles upon a small disabled child? No. I was in a session at the news:rewired conference in London.
What brought about my conversion to gospel-style outbursts? It was listening to Francois Nel tell assembled delegates that anyone who thought that online content should be free needed to "Grow Up".
Ok, so it's not quite the Road to Damascus that you might have expected, but it was for me. I remember suggesting the same at the first news:rewired two years ago and I feared for my life as I was chased from the building by digital journalists carrying flaming torches and pitchforks.
A bit of an exaggeration perhaps but nonetheless, there has long been the assumption that any attempt to charge for online journalism is heinous in the extreme and bad for democracy.
Take the term 'paywall'. It is a loaded term implying secrecy and subterfuge and not a term ever used, for example, to describe the cover price for a newspaper or a subscription to a magazine.
It wasn't helped when the first person to try to charge for general news content in the UK - as opposed to a more niche publication like the Financial Times) was part of Rupert Murdoch's empire. And anyone who is anyone knows that he is the Magneto to liberal journalism's Professor X.
But journalism is an expensive business and it cannot be done with journalists - and lots of them. That's not simply a plea for employment for my students but a plea for the industry as a whole.
Think about the working hours Nick Davies has had to put in to uncover the hacking scandal currently rocking the industry. Think about the massive amount of data crunching the Daily Telegraph's investigative team had to do on the MP's expenses. Think about the undercover work carried out by the News of the World to expose the corruption within the Pakistani cricket team.
It's not cheap and it's not possible if you have cut back your staffing levels to the point where each reporter finds themselves churning out story after story simply to fill the paper. Read Richard Peppiatt's account of working for a Richard Desmond publication if you want first-hand evidence.
The Guardian has been at the forefront of the 'campaign' to keep online content free. I use inverted commas because there is no formal campaign and Alan Rusbridger claims that he is not doing so for societal reasons but because he hasn't yet found a business model to suit.
But since January 2001, the Guardian's circulation has reduced from 400,000 to 230,000, pagination has been substantially reduced and the print 'paywall' has increased to £1.20 a day.
That is all against a backdrop of failing to find a way to monetise online content through advertising or other activities. Last year the group announced losses on £33m and two years ago, GMG had to sell it's regional newspapers to Trinity Mirror to offset such losses.
More power to Trinity Mirror and, in my opinion, bad for plurality in general as the group takes an even firmer grip on all the big publications in the North West.
Finding a successful model for getting readers to pay for online content is not easy - you're pretty much guaranteed to slash your audience by 80 to 90 per cent overnight - but only if the industry 'grows up' works together can it work in the long term.
The Scott Trust, the organisation funding the Guardian Media Group, is a crown jewel among British journalism. It ensures that at least one national daily newspaper is not beholden to shareholders and commercialism in general.
This is how the Scott Trust describes its core purpose:
1) To secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
2) All other activities should be consistent with the central objective. The Company which the Trust owns should: be managed to ensure profits are available to further the central objective; not invest in activities which conflict with the values and principles of the Trust.
3) The values and principles of the Trust should be upheld throughout the Group. The Trust declares a subsidiary interest in promoting the causes of freedom in the press and liberal journalism, both in Britain and elsewhere.
How possible will that purpose be if the current management fails to find a suitable model for making online pay? Especially as the Guardian is keen to explore all of the new forms of journalism available and, for example, live blog the first appearance of the new presenter of Countdown.
I must admit when I saw that blog I did wonder how it adhered to the second objective - but that's probably a thought for another day.
It may be that they will never find a way of making 'online' pay but that the media audience will naturally migrate to tablets such as the iPad, where most organisations are already erecting 'paywalls' - although they don't seem keen to use the term paywall in this context.
Anyway. It was just joyous for me to hear someone else say out loud what many in the industry have known for a long time.
Francois was not quite as vulgar as I perhaps am and highlighted that it didn't have to come back to cold hard cash. He used the term 'Reciprocity' to underline that he meant that we must ask for something back. He highlighted the Daily Mail as a successful business model as print readership was declining more gradually than other publications and online readership was rocketing.
If I thought it brave to demand paying for online content at a conference like news:rewired, then the chutzpah required to praise the Daily Mail is off the chart.
However, I dislike the Daily Mail's methods here. They separate online and print and seem prepared to shovel any old content online - hence hideous mistakes such as the recent use of a video of an alleged rape. I understand from insiders that such a policy is causing problems as specialist reporters are coming in to find furious messages from contacts who have seen a story posted online, which lacks the kind of contextual information that a more considered form of journalism might bring.
No, for me its about the cold hard cash. I don't want a profit and I don't expect to become rich but I do want my journalism to be well supported financially.
It is great to be part of the digital evolution of journalism, but if we fail to fully interrogate all the issues now, we could fail the industry in the long term.
Today The Mirror online has run a nice helpful story about Joey Barton and the comments he made about the John Terry case.
Twitter was alight with speculation about the comments soon after they were posted on Barton's @joey7barton account. Barton-bashing is a favourite pastime these days, although to be fair, he does walk around with kick me sign pinned to his back.
The new theory goes that Barton has breached contempt laws by making statements which indicate guilt on Terry's part. In theory, that does breach the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
In theory. In practice we are unlikely to see a prosecution from the Attorney General because the charge against Terry is a summary offence and will not be tried before a jury. Therefore proving that Barton's ill-advised comments have influenced the court will be difficult in the extreme.
I'm sure the Mirror reporter knew this. Odd it wasn't mentioned in the story.
Still, it puts me in mind of a blogpost I wrote last month. You see, several national papers had 'decided' to allow comments on online reporting of the Terry case, similarly breaching the CoCA.
You could argue their breach was much worse than Barton's as all journalists are trained in media law so should at least have known there was a breach.
Now let's see, which news outlet was the worst? Oh yeah, that's right, the Mirror.
The Daily Mail is now speculating that Barton may well be the first person prosecuted for contempt for comments made on Twitter. Interesting opinion - completely wrong of course - but interesting nonetheless. In recent checks however, I do have to point out that the Daily Mail does at least have a decent record in showing it has a good understanding of the contempt law.
Perhaps the law does need changing for contempt now that social media has enabled everyman to broadcast opinions and that not everyone has a solid understanding of contempt. That is particularly true as most police procedural dramas in this country are American and therefore display a completely different law.
What is true however is that the mainstream media does know our contempt laws and with breaches we have seen in recent weeks, including the allegation that Guardian reporter Jamie Jackson named a juror, perhaps they should stop casting stones from their big glass houses.
So this is a time when journalism is under massive scrutiny.
The Leveson Inquiry is looking in-depth onto every nook and cranny of the industry and threatening to drag out all of the skeletons and then slap the handcuffs of draconian statutory regulation on us all because a minority of hacks erm, well, they hacked.
So why is it that the some titles cannot follow the basic principles of the law correctly?
Yesterday The Sun ran a story on the on-pitch battle between Anton Ferdinand and John Terry. You may recall that on February 1, Terry is due in court to face an allegation that he racially abused Ferdinand during a game between Chelsea and QPR last year.
The story is perfectly acceptable and written with the boundaries of the law as it stands. However, for 12 hours The Sun allowed people to comment on the story.
Some of those comments, as you might expect of modern day 'passionate' fans, were pretty fruity and several stepped so far over the line to be in clear breach of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
That Act is intended to allow suspects a fair trail and ensure that juries are not swayed in any way by anything said outside of the court room. All journalists know that to print anything which might suggest the guilt of the accused is a clear breach.
You will have to take my word for it that three comments breach that Act is a very blatant way. I have the screen grabs but do not intend to add to The Sun's indiscretion.
About 12 hours after the story was posted, and after at least 21 comments had been left, The Sun realised their mistake and took the story down.
Fortunately, at the time of writing this blog no prejudicial comments have been let but it is easy to do so. I signed in to Disqus with a Google account and left the comment to the left.
My comment is not prejudicial in the slighted, containing only words 'My real time comment'. It was left purely to satisfy myself that no pre-publication moderation of comments was happening at The Independent and sure enough my comment was published immediately.
* The Times - comments allowed but they are pre-moderated (no link behind the Paywall) - my real time comment was published but I was unwilling to attempt to post a prejudicial comment so cannot guarantee a result either way.
* The Telegraph - comments allowed - my real time comment was published immediately
* The Mirror - comments allowed and I didn't need to do a test as the top comment was such a clear breach of the 1981 Act it clearly had not been moderated (screen grab taken)
If four out of nine mainstream newspapers are unable even to adhere to a basic law governing journalism - what chance do we have of avoiding statutory regulation?
I know that one of the most exciting aspects of online journalism is the interaction with the readers but you cannot publish and be damned - there is no Reynolds Defence in Contempt.
UPDATE: Following queries from readers about whether the Contempt of Court Act 1981 applies in a magistrate's court and for a summary offence (ie that not before a jury), I sought a definitive answer from the Attorney General's office and was given the following reply:
"The Contempt of Court Act applies to any court and applies from arrest."
So that settles that. That's not to say that the Mirror will be prosecuted but it certainly confirms that it could be if someone were to formally report the breach.
For starters, I worked there in the 1990s despite being a left-leaning person keen on supporting human rights. Then last year I wrote a blog post about how poor the standards were becoming at the Mail.
The Daily Mail is a favourite of the Twitterati - its right-wing politics and tub-thumping, link-baiting journalism is guaranteed to get us liberal social media types uptight and sniping.
Even when they recently claimed personal and professional success in the conviction of two men for the murder of Stephen Lawrence they failed to win even a flicker of support from their traditional enemies.
To sum up it's a hate-hate relationship.
Today they have stooped so low that makes me feel physically sick to my stomach. And it's a strong stomach I might add.
Today they carried a report of an alleged rape on Big Brother in Brazil.
No problem there - of course they should report on that. After all, the programme is still huge news around the world and a crime has been alleged.
But the Daily Mail was not content in telling its readers about the allegation, it also deemed it necessary to show them what had taken place in a seven-minute video taken from YouTube.
No I won't link to it because in doing so I would republish this mindless, unethical, immoral 'journalism' and I have no intention of doing that.
No doubt the defence will be that the material is already out there on YouTube so why not? Well, the answer is simple: we are gatekeepers of information. We edit and employ logic and ethics to decisions about what and when to publish - that's why experienced people in our trade (or profession if you prefer but you'd be wrong) get more money and the top jobs if they want them.
Snuff movies have been available from dodgy market stalls for years, hard core porn has been available on the top shelves of newsagents or adult shops for decades yet no newspaper editor has felt the need to republish their content.
Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. And in this case that fact is so blindingly obvious to anyone with a brain I can't believe I am even having to write this.
Simply appalling.
UPDATE: The video had been removed from the story by the evening of January 17.
Death porn is a slang term for the material found on the internet that is intended to gross out its viewers. All pictures/videos of dead bodies, horrible accidents, or blood and guts can all be classified as death porn
It is a phenomenon surfacing on the internet - as most modern phenomenon are. I read Jack of Kent's posting on this subject and had to ask: why are we seeing Death Porn in the mass media?
Take this for example. The front of the Sun's homepage:
Perhaps not a surprise when you consider The Sun's previous form with such classics as 'Gotcha' during the Falklands War. But have I missed something here?
When did it become OK to show death so graphically - and in such a celebratory fashion on the front page of a newspaper?
The Sun was by no means only outlet to use Death Porn on its front page.
This is The Mirror:
Pretty awful. Not quite as crowing as The Sun but clearly a celebration of the death.
It seems to me that the mass media is simply unable to resist. They can see material being published on the net and want 'some of the action'. It is a rationale used to defend the monstering in the coverage of Christopher Jefferies in the Joanne Yeates murder investigation.
But news media is read in a different way to social media such as Twitter, Youtube and Faceboook - there is an impression of authority from a conventional media outlet and that authority gives the words and images power.
Just as Peter Parker was told by his Uncle Ben 'With great power comes great responsibility' - the gratuitous use of these images is not serving any purpose other than to celebrate death. And is that a purpose the mass media in this country should be pursuing?
If we desensitise ourselves to death and violent in such an accepting and mainstream way, where does it lead? I'll leave you with this story that has brought tears to the eyes of this hardened hack.
The Daily Mail is one of the most successful newspaper in the United Kingdom - that much is beyond doubt.
The ABC figures released this month show that, in terms of circulation alone, it is second only to the The Sun with 2,030,968 copies sold daily in December compared to the Sun's 2,717,013.
The future looks bright too as the Mail's rate of year-on-year sales decline seems less than most other nationals at -3.89% compared to The Sun's -5.10%, The Guardian's 11.89% and The Times's -14.01%.
Online the Mail is leading the way (despite its shockingly late entry into the fray in 2004) and now gathers about 35% of the online UK newspaper traffic - an incredible stat when you think of the plurality within the field.
Of course, the Daily Mail has long had its detractors. It is frequently reactionary, displays homophobic and xenophobic tendencies both in the written word and news values and frequently scare-mongers to an extent that would make Freddie Krueger proud.
Websites are set up to oppose the views taken by the Mail, it is constantly mocked on Twitter and one of the best songs of 2010 was written 'in its honour' by Dan and Dan and has had almost 1,000,000 views in 9 months (below).
But let's put that to one side. It's in a box marked 'Reasons why I don't buy the Daily Mail'.
In the interests of transparency at this juncture, I must point out that I worked at the Daily Mail in the 90s. I was going to add 'for my sins' or 'to my shame' to that sentence but that would be the easy option and an unfair reflection on the professional relationship I had with the paper.
So lets open a new box called 'Why did I choose the Mail?'
First out of the box: It was the first national to have me. Other work followed but at that time the Mail was taking all the hard-working and enthusiastic reporters from the regions it could get its hands on.
My first choice would have been the Guardian but I didn't have a public school or Oxbridge education so didn't even get a courtesy letter in response (there's still time to atone for this error Mr Rusbridger).
That sounds bitter but it isn't really - or at least it's not meant to. It was just a fact at the time that the left-leaning papers seemed to recruit in this way (and pay peanuts). At the Daily Mail, I worked with mainly left-leaning journos eager to both make a splash in the industry and pay the electricity bill.
Anyway, I was pleased to be going to the Mail and the main reason was that it was respected within the industry. Its reporters were hard working and versatile - that middle-ground target audience meant you could be doorstepping celebs one day and uncovering the NHS postcode lottery the next.
Stories were stood up, copper-bottomed, topped and tailed and all the other euphemisms for thoroughly researched you can think of. I remember once being given a photograph of a restaurant in the Caribbean which had a poster outside proclaiming that critic Michael Winner was banned for lewd behaviour.
I did everything I could to stand up the story but couldn't get confirmation from the man himself. So the news editor (Tony Gallagher - now editor of the Daily Telegraph) told me to spike it.
A fortnight later one of the Mail's restaurant critics discovered that it had been a hoax and the restaurant was just seeking a bit of publicity. Great call from Tony and I have no doubt that it will be a surprise to many to hear that we didn't just 'publish and be damned'.
So, while I have shame that I worked for a paper with such a record of right wing views (I later volunteered for Asylum Welcome in Oxford in a futile attempt to shed my guilt), professionally it was the right decision.
That is why I am so surprised by what I see as falling standards at the Mail.
Charlotte Metcalf penned this piece and it covered what she called the 'Nouveau Pauvre'. Initially I thought it was something to do with pepper, but discovered that it was a first-person feature explaining that the author was poverty stricken.
She explained that she was lucky if she earned £500 per week and was no longer able to shop for Christmas presents at Harrods. One of her friends, sob, was struggling to find the £400 to buy an iPad for her 15-year-old daughter.
She seemed completely unaware that a minimum of £500 per week (that's £26,000 per year) actually represents a salary that many people would be pleased with. Yes it is a climb down from the £1,200 per week (62,400 per year) she previously earned but still not a salary one can use to claim destitution.
The feature alienated a lot of people. Working class people were angry that such a self-centred article could be published, while middle class guilt meant that she won few sympathisers from her own section of society.
One of, if not the, main strength of the Mail in increasing its market share in the past 25 years, has been successfully targetting its core demographic: middle class, middle-aged, aspirational and intelligent women.
Yet in one foul swoop this article undermined that - it is a rare mistake for the Mail to make. Even worse when we realise it is a follow-up to a previous Nouveau Pauvre article by Ms Metcalf which elicited a hugely negative response.
The second article then has a feel of a wind up - the kind of feature written purely to get a response using the principle that no publicity is bad publicity. That is true if you publish an article your core readership can attack without guilt but hold up a mirror to them and you alienate them.
This was published yesterday and was written by Liz Jones - a controversial journalist who has annoyed people a lot in the past for what they see as a patronising and superficial style in article such as 'how to live on benefits'.
If you look at the comments at the bottom of the story you can see that the word patronising prominently. But that is not my issue with this work - it is just that it is such poor journalism.
Poorly researched, badly written and full of cliches from intro to contrived and all-too-probably made up pay-off.
I am not the best writer - my journalistic strengths lay more in news gathering and news sense - so criticising other writers does not come naturally to me. But if one of my level one students wrote that feature they would scrape a pass with a very low third and a kick up the backside.
In fact, I would put money on any one of my level one students coming with something considerably better than that rambling load of vomit-inducing, eyeball-piercing piffle.
That's not intended to prove just how bad this is. Quite the contrary, my level one students are proving themselves to be a very strong bunch of journalists.
But the Mail has long been known for employing good writers. We might hate what Jan Moir writes (remember her homophobic rant following the death of Stephen Gately?) but her columns are well structured and she is capable of creating images in your mind and encouraging you to read on.
A large proportion of Daily Mail readers buy the paper simply because of its columnists - but how long will that continue if they are forced to read third-rate material?
A tragic but strong news story. Quite lazily put together using few facts but plenty of Facebook tributes but ultimately I am not criticising them for this as when working under deadlines we have to make the best of poor material at times.
Not it was a last par that grabbed my attention last night. It has now been removed and I didn't get a screenshot but from memory it said:
"A friend of Leah's sister said that Leah had recently had a flu jab."
And that was it. Nothing else just that - draw your own conclusions: 'Did the flu jab cause the heart attack? It must have done otherwise why would the reporter bring it up? Oh my God - my nan had a flu jab' etc etc and so it goes.
As I mentioned before, the Mail is well known for its scare-mongering - a point well picked up but Dan and Dan towards the end of their song.
But usually there will be something. Some grain of 'truth' among the fear: a piece of peer-reviewed scientific research or out-of-date Government figures - not 'just a friend of a sister said'. This third blatant example of poor journalism made a little blog come out and that little blog grew like the Blob that chased Steve McQueen to almost unmanageable size and now I have rambled enough.
I will end now but only after after saying that it is hard to see the Mail's success continuing if they don't return to stronger journalistic standards.
* UPDATE: 17.01.12: The most shocking yet. Today the Daily Mail has posted a story about an alleged rape on Big Brother in Brazil. For your pleasure you can also view a seven minute video of the alleged rape taking place. Words cannot describe how immoral and unethical this is - truly a new low for the Daily Mail.
It has recently been pointed out to me that I seem to knock The Sun and, more specifically, Rupert Murdoch on a regular basis.
The observation followed a recent Tweet about Richard Desmond's acquisition of Channel Five in which I wrote:
"Looks like Richard Desmond is bidding to be the Lidl to Rupert Murdoch's Waitrose in the evil media empire stakes"
It was a hilarious and cutting observation which spawned exactly no retweets and, beyond the confines of my own head, very few laughs other than politeness.
I then followed it up with a comment on a former colleague's Facebook page in which I (jokingly) advised him to make up some journalism for The Sun because that is what they all do. So far so cliched and borderline defamatory.
But looking back, I do appear to have a bit of a history in knocking The Sun, which is after all one of British journalism's great institutions. It is the country's most read newspaper and the technical quality of the journalism is superb. I'm not just saying that - it is far harder to write 250 words on politics for The Sun than it is to write 1,000 words for the Guardian.
Also, Murdoch has recently seen a slight upsurge in public opinion. An example of this would be the excellent David Mitchell's article in The Guardian recently in which he says that liberal society's dislike of Murdoch is leading to a blindspot over the paywall he has introduced at The Times.
But I still can't bring myself to like The Sun or prevent myself from making sarky comments about it so I thought it was time I buckled down and examined why that might be.
So here's the case for the defence (it's my opinion I am defending in case you were wondering):
1) Many of The Sun's most celebrated stories are fabrication. Take for example, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster or Elton John has voice boxes removed from his guard dogs. When people talk about stories like these it is often with a chuckle and a roll of the eyes as if making this kind of stuff up is akin to a cheeky child being caught taking two biscuits when one was on offer. It isn't. It's wrong to make stuff up as I readily admitted recently in my silly season confession post. However, The Sun is so proud of its fabrications that if you like they have given permission for them to be reproduced emblazoned on a T-shirt.
2) The Hillsborough disaster coverage: "Oh no, not that again," I hear you groan. But yes that again. Not only did the paper accuse Liverpool fans of revelling the disaster, pickpocketing victims and urinating on those trapped in the mayhem, but it also took an obscenely long time to properly apologise (15 years since you ask). That apology only came about when it was clear that The Sun's circulation figures in Liverpool were never going to recover unless something was done.
3) The Sun is hideously self-important when it comes to politics. I've blogged about this before. Last week I was having a conversation on Twitter with David Dunkley Gyimah (@viewmagazine), who is a video journalist and lecturer at Westminster University, about the fact that modern journalism is ill-equipped to cope with modern politics. I summed up my views rather glibly with the phrase:
"Modern journalism is over-simplistic and modern politics is over-complicated"
Nowhere is this more obvious than at The Sun, which blatantly tries to sway the views of the electorate at every General Election. From being Maggie's lapdog and Kinnock's vanquisher to the uneasy alliance with the freemarket socialist Blair to backing the man-of-the-people/old Etonian David Cameron, The Sun has advised us who to vote for. But are we best served by having Murdoch's mouthpiece steering our vote? Do people know why the recession hit other than because Brown was grumpy and Alistair Darling's eyebrows are a different colour to his hair? There is a potential for astute political coverage in The Sun but it gets lost in the posturing and celebrity-obssessed diatribe we have to put up with.
4) Its coverage forced 10 seasons of Big Brother onto our screens. Admittedly I have little empirical evidence for this but I am sure that the interesting programme that was BB1 and 2 became the mud-wrestle at Aldi it is now because of the shallowness of The Sun.
I know, I know. That all sounds very po-faced and humourless. Believe it or not, I do like a bit of humour in my papers - I just don't want it to be made up or patronising.
Of course, it has been pointed out that I worked for a worse paper in the Daily Mail and that is undeniable. I would offer a critique of the Mail but Dan and Dan have done it better than I ever could.
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.
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!
This story caught my attention today for the sheer horrific brutality of it.
As a journalist I shouldn't use adjectives of course but as a parent and, above, all a human being, this has shocked me.
To my eternal shame, I used to work for the Daily Mail. I say shame because I despise the editorial stance of scaremongering and othering but my reaction to this story and what this family had to suffer is right up there with the Mail.
String 'em up I say. And I find myself calling for heads within the police force that failed the family so badly - and that is from someone who rails against the scapegoat generation we have become.
But sometimes, just sometimes, perhaps a strong response is justified. Maybe I'll write to my MP but I'm sure he's too busy rubbishing the Government to do much about it.
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