One of the great things about freedom of speech is that by extending it to everyone we can identify the lunatics as soon as they open their mouths. And one of the best things about the internet is that it extends freedom of speech so freely and universally that everything everyone says is immediately available for critique, rebuttal and derision.
Compare and contrast, for example, Melanie Phillips' insane rant claiming that teaching children about the child-rearing habits of penguins will turn them gay, with Johann Hari's beautiful and impassioned plea for tolerance. Phillips has been derided sufficiently elsewhere. Hari's column should be read by everyone.
Once upon a time, people limited to reading a single printed newspaper might have been exposed only to the original rant. Free and universal access to the counter-point exposes it for what it really is.
But it's hardly an unfamiliar newsflow phenomenon - dangerous dogs or foxes attacking babies happen to make the news one day and having captured the public imagination we suddenly discover they're everywhere, merely because subsequent commonplace incidents that would ordinarily have warranted a few lines on page two of a local paper momentarily fit a wider narrative and so make the TV news.
John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk was kind enough to include virtualeconomics.co.uk amongst his picks for top five journalism blogs of 2010 (thanks John!), so I've run another Google reading age filter over all thirteen of the blogs listed (three people got a pick, two of the blogs were picked twice) with the results you see to the left. I'm afraid both Wannabe Hacks and After Deadline return data anomalies.
"The Daily Telegraph is showered with awards because it offered to buy a CD-ROM with MPs expenses on it.
"The Guardian is currently even more pleased with itself than usual because it's publishing classified information that not a single one of its journalists helped to gather.
"The News of the World proclaims itself as the greatest newspaper in the world because of its rare journalistic ability to record mobile phone conversations."
Another day, another assault on press freedom by a clueless US government department. Just for the sake of variety though, this isn't an attack on Wikileaks, Wikileaks supporters or the allegedly free US press for reporting on what Wikileaks is doing. This is Homeland Security's seizure of four blog and forum sites that discussed and reported news about BitTorrent.
The full debacle is at TechDirt, and Mike calls it "downright scary" and "wrong". But Homeland Security summarily seizing domains on grounds that they were infringing the bogus copyright laws made up by the MPAA is one thing; seizing those sites when in fact all they were doing was linking to news stories and opinions about use of the BitTorrent technology is a(nother) direct assault on the freedom of the press. Homeland Security needs to issue a statement, now, admitting that it made a mistake, promising to hand back those websites immediately and most importantly stating for the record that writing journalism about BitTorrent does not constitute a criminal infringement and that journalists remain free to comment on the use of technology, even on the use of technology that may itself be legally dubious in some jurisdictions.
Now that Julian Assange has won the popular vote for Time Man of the Year (with twice as many votes as the Turkish Prime Minister in second) there seems little doubt that Lieberman, Palin et al will be hammering on the editors' doors demanding this honour not be confirmed by the magazine.
The cool thing for Time to to do now would to publish in full any and all communications it receives from representatives of the Federal Government in this matter. It seems Time readers are big fans of crusaders for open government. Why not join in?
I am not writing to join the chorus of complaints about the treatment of Jody McIntyre on your news programmes last night and again this morning. I believe in freedom of speech and in independence of editorial judgement and if your journalists choose to exercise that freedom and that judgement by treating as a hostile witness a wheelchair user suffering from cerebral palsy who has uncontestably been violently assaulted by the police in the course of his peaceful protest that is their affair and yours. There is increasingly a consensus that all journalism comes with an agenda and the best we can do is make that agenda explicit. If that is the BBC's news agenda it is undoubtedly best to have the matter out in the open.
However, this morning's BBC Breakfast News was the second time that one of your current affairs programmes attempted to conduct an adversarial interview with Mr McIntyre. For the second time, Mr McIntyre had the clear upper hand throughout the exchange. Without putting too fine a point on it, his appearance this morning was the second time he ran rings around your interviewers and left them looking not merely callous but absurd.
Your current affairs programming is rightly considered amongst the finest in the world, "noted" (as the BBC website puts it) "for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination". It is trusted to report the news and in so doing wring the truth from politicians and CEOs in the name of the license fee payers it serves.
Your interviewers just got hammered, twice, on their own turf, by a guy in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy they were trying to patronise. So I am writing to inquire - just so we know whether to take your programmes seriously in future when we see you try to do the whole "talking truth to power" thing and taking down some criminal mastermind or corrupt official - who you've fired and what's going to be different next time?
Since Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I've used it to compare a pretty arbitrary selection of news and journalism blogs I happen to follow for a view as to the different reading ages of sources going into the site. I've included aggregator Mediagazer as a baseline (although like Techmeme it seems to have a higher reading age than its constituents, oddly).
Patrick Smith's site doesn't show up properly on Google's reading age tool so the dignified prose of Alan Mutter's Newsosaur seems to come out with the highest reading age, followed by Jay Rosen and then Paidcontent UK (amusingly coming out very slightly ahead of the main US site). My own modest efforts bobble around the middle of the pile.
Not that writing for a high reading age is necessarily anything to shout about of course - there is a great deal to be said for plain English. But since the tool is now lying around I've been using it to compare newspapers, social networks and other sources so I wanted to see how the news and journalism commentators came out.
You can see the results for UK newspapers here, social networks here and a Techmeme-derived sample of tech blogs here.
Since Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I've used it to compare the top thirty sources on Techmeme for a view as to the different reading ages of sources going into the site. I've inclued Techmeme.com itself as a baseline (although Google's reading age tool claims not to have any Techmeme results it does return a score).
Unlike the results for UK newspapers and social networks, these numbers seem to be of only curiosity value really - apart from the fact that Techmeme seems to average a reading age higher than its top contributors, which is odd but meaningless given that Google's reading age tool barely acknowledges that the site is there.
Notes on methodology: the URL in the left-hand column typed into Google Advance Search with the "annotate results with reading levels" option turned on. Different results seem to be generated by icluding the www, in some cases. Results are ordered by % of pages classed "intermediate". HT to Searchengineland for the original pointer that the tool exists.
Richard Sambrook's recent report on the redundancy of foreign correspondents raises a fair point; that the ubiquity of self-publishing tools make it increasingly redundant for newsrooms to send people to the far corners of the earth merely to tell us what's going on there. From the report, via Journalism.co.uk
"as the traditional foreign news bureaux have shrunk, the opportunities to find out about the world have greatly increased."
But why stop at specifically foreign correspondents? Sure, British and American newsrooms don't need to send journalists to Tierra del Fuego just to stand in front of a camera and find out what's going on, given the existence of Argentine reporters already covering the patch. But by the same token they don't need to send anyone to Michigan or Cornwall either. When much of Cornwall flooded last month the first coverage on the BBC breakfast news was produced via a phone call with a local resident on the scene, and we found out what was going on just fine. There were no newsrooms on the scene when Charles and Camilla were caught up in the protests last night, but there's video of the event nonetheless.
It is often only in extremis that we discover old habits have long been unnecessary.
