Updating #media140 day two under way

An update from the Media140 conference in Sydney where I’ve been for the past two days.

Interesting ideas and discussion and for me very pleasing to see that some journalists and media organisations  actually get “it”, without going overboard to claim that journalism is dead – but doesn’t know it’s a corpse – in the way that many social media evangelists twitter on about.

This is just a holding post with some highlights and a link to Jay Rosen’s speaking notes.

Jay Rosen is a professor at NYU and one of the world’s leading social media evangelists (IMHO). He’s just about to start on a feed via Skype, so I’ll be back with a review when he’s finished.

Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media

Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours.  The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.”  These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from’ is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

 

Media140  Blog – background on conference & upcoming events

Mark Colvin’s speech about Twitter and Iran

ABC News report

Barry Saunders’ blog on Malcolm Turnbull’s presentation

Some interesting thoughts on social media for legacy giants

I’m at #media140 in Sydney, the keynote this morning was ABC managing director Mark Scott. He outlined some interesting innovations for legacy media wanting to get on the Twitterverse bandwagon.

 

He started with the 4Ts: Telegraph, Telephone, Typewriter, Twitter. An interesting geneaology of communications technologies.

Scott noted that the 4Ts have always been about short, sharp reports of breaking news; particularly the generation of good headlines. He talked about how the ABC is moving quickly to embrace social media with the appointment of a coordinator of social media to formalise the ABC’s presence across all social networking sites.

The ABC is also today releasing its guidelines for staff using social media. The four guiding principles are really about brand protection and like the NYT are designed not to give guidance for journalists using social media as  tool, but more about social media as a distribution network:

1. Don’t mix professional and personal social media views in a way that will bring the ABC into disrepute
2. Don’t undermine your effectiveness as work
3. Don’t imply ABC endorsement for personal views
4. Do not disclose confidential information

Nothing here about journalistic ethics.

Scott made a good point about sharing information and allowing audiences to distribute ABC content. Setting up a number of widgets for people to embed on Facebook and blogs etc is obviously good business sense.

The ABC’s also launching ABC Open as a “digital town square” and part of this is training UGC providers in 50 locations to generate content.

This is the pro-am model and as Scott mentioned there has to be journalistic leadership, but also recognising that the audience is often closer to the story – at least in the initial stages.

The catchphrases are collaboration; conversation, communication and partnerships.

More later when I’ve had time to digest this and get my hands on some more notes.

Julie Posetti also argued that this is a revolution, not a war, but no doubt there will be casualties.

Michael Laws – self-praising dribblejaws

Thanks to Jess for alerting me to this.

Whanganui Mayor and inveterate loudmouth bully Michael Laws is at it again. This time he’s outrageously demanding the the “underclass” be sterilised.

This was the kind of ethnic cleansing policy followed by the Nazis in the 1930s and look where that got us. It’s also a popular battle cry amongst modern fascists of the BNP and White Power varieties.

But who is Laws speaking for? He as asked to define underclass by a Dominion Post reporter and this was his reply:

“A group of people who have no stake in our society, who are certainly welfare dependent, who have alcohol and drug problems and usually are criminals or consort with criminals.”

This to me could just as easily describe a bunch of Auckland property developers, wastrel socialites and finance company executives.

I’ve always felt that there’s a huge conflict of interest between Laws’ role as mayor of a major New Zealand city and his constant yabbering on the radio and in the Sunday papers.

Take this gem – Laws explaining why there are so few female executives:

Because feminism has allowed us to have our cake and eat it too. We get the sassy, sexually liberated sheilas who fulfil body and mind. But they also pull the ambition pin when their hormones kick in and they want kids.

And men do know women’s guilty secret. That they like being maternal, no matter how many letters after their name.

Why it’s great to be a guy [like Michael Laws]

Though, I do like this piece of honest self-reflction from the dribblejaws enthusiast:

READERS WILL appreciate that I’m not a particularly “deep” person. I am my gender, and despite the occasional philosopher or mystic, we males are a superficial lot. Which explains the eternal attraction of the bimbo with boobs.

Organ strife dead wrong

In this piece, about why it’s right to be an organ donor, Laws calls Maori party co-leader Tariana Turia a “racist” and then gets onto one of his favourite hobby-horses “special treatment” for Maori and Pasifika communities:

Cultural silliness from Maori and Pacific Island folk, that there’s something inherently righteous about going to the grave with all your God-given bits. And yet they are first in the queue to accept organs when required.

And the dog-whistle one-liner that follows like a stinking turd of a punchline:

There must be times when New Zealanders get bold enough to challenge the superstitious or silly excesses of other cultures.

That’s right Maori  and Pacific Island “folk” [condescending ass] you are NOT New Zealanders. Go figure, you were here first and whupped whitey’s ass in a war, but you are not of this place. And Laws thinks Ms Turia is a racist. This really is the spotless white kettle calling the pot “brown”.

Laws is the champion of not heeding his own advice. This from a recent column:

ALL MEN have fantasies. I’d like to write “all men and women”, but I’m being PC this week. I am excluding any satire/humour/mocking of any group that is not white, middle-aged, male and middle-class.

Behind every weak man is a successful Amazon

What a [Rodney] Hide this man’s got. First, his columns are rarely funny and there’s no discernable satire. and Laws is the first to attack the wobbly concept of “PC” – notice it’s our enemies, not our friends who refer to us this way. This is one of those dreadul “Shit, I’ve got a deadline and nothing to write about” columns where the panic-stricken writer falls back on family and friends and mocks loved ones. A crime against column-writing and a waste of space in any newspaper.

Another such effort surfaced around the annual boobs-on-bikes parade when Laws sought intellectual justification for his sordid pervy peculiarities:

It is sleazy, noisy and attracts every adolescent oink within 50km. But, gee, it’s fun. Heterosexual men love it because it allows a man to do what a man does best - to ogle the unobtainable.

Boobs

Even when he’s praising a woman – his choices are pretty feral – he can’t resist the ogle factor:

I’VE NEVER known what to make of Christine Rankin. She is not simply a polarising personality (thus drawing my instant empathy), but she has this unique style. All legs and cleavage.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate legs and cleavage: dear Lord, I’m a middle-aged heterosexual male. Appreciation is about all you get to do. And there are obviously some men in the public service who got to perv at much closer proximity.

Christine Rankin’s a champion

That’s enough. I could go on, but the truth this Michael Laws has not contributed anything to the advancement of Kiwi culture through his columns. He’s a loud-mouth who delights in offending. I suppose you could argue he’s the consumate “shock-jock”, others might say he’s a simple wanker.

It’s time to retire Mike, you’re boring us to tears.

Sunday and I’m stuffed

Two brief comments this morning about the Sunday news agenda.

Firstly, why is stuff.co.nz featuring two stories designed to get a rise out of Sunday morning male readers?

One is an inadvertent advert for Penthouse magazine and the other an advertisment for the Gold Coast SuperGP motor racing dressed up as a soft(core) news story.

The news value in these items is miniscule to non-existent. Only one has a local angle (the woman is a Kiwi, but appeared in the “Aussie Babes” pages of the magazine), but the “wow” factor is high — both feature prominent images of scantily-clad young women.

Don’t believe me that they’re adverts? Gentlemen start your engines; ladies, I’m sorry, but trust me, this is for research purposes only:

Topless teacher on Penthouse website
Miss SuperGP Gold Coast golden girl

EM tries to be a family-friendly blog (sometimes), so I’m not linking to the images, anyone over the age of 10 can imagine them from the suggestive headlines.

But this one from nzherald.co.nz is perhaps the most tittylating: Dominatrix tells of ‘bad feelings’

Phhhwhhhoaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alas, it too is no more than an advertisment – this time for Metro magazine.

Second point: After all the fuss about British Nationalist Party goon Nick Griffith’s appearance on the BBC, why is stuff.co.nz giving space to our local Nazis?

Far-right leader Kyle Chapman returns

Go figure, it must a slow news day [Labour day long-weekend in Aotearoa]  and sex sells.

Take your pick of editor’s cliched responses; I’m going back to bed.

Actually, I’m not: I’m going whale watching on Hauraki Gulf.

In the meantime, “no platform for fascists”

Journalism and blogging: leave it to the machines?

In science and science fiction there’s a moment when it all goes to custard for the human race. It’s the singularity – often defined as the time when machines begin to out think humans.

We’re not there yet and I’m comfortable with predictions that it might happen 200 years after my demise. But you can never really trust futurist predictions.

We’ve already got smart(ish) bots hurtling around the interWebs chewing up data and spitting it out again in a clickable and commercial form, so I’m not too sanguine about what’s gong on in the DARP labs and other murky salons where “mad” scientists and uber-smart geeks tend to gather.

Anyway, there is evidence of not-so-smart machines out there already aggregating, redacting and posting prose that fills the holes between advertising links on some remote outposts of the blogosphere.

Take, for example, Biginfo, the website with the unbeatable cyber-catchline: “All of your info, on one page”.

Isn’t that the holy grail of the Internet? Isn’t this slogan the absolute bottom-line misison statement for Google?

We won’t need humans any more if Biginfo succeeds.

I  know about Biginfo because the site has linked to a post here at Ethical Martini. As you do, I went to check out why the site was linking and pushing some traffic my way.

This is what I found:

What is More Ethical Blogs or News Media?

20 October, 2009 (15:10) | News And Society | By: admin

// your advertisement goes here

We are chance more and more that readers conceive the aggregation contained in Blogs is more trusty than the indicant programme media. (I don’t conceive a candid comparability between the electronic media and Blogs makes such sense, so my comparability is direct: cursive touchable vs. cursive material.) While I encounter this agitate in ‘believability’ to be somewhat surprising, I staleness adjudge that I don’t conceive I personally undergo anybody that reads the production without a nagging distrustfulness and a taste of doubt. Even more, I move to be astonished at the ontogeny sort of grouping I undergo that do not modify pain to feature the newspaper.

The long post goes on in this vein for some depth. Here’s another of my favourite paras:

I module substance digit appearance on the supply of blogs vs. newspapers. A blogger, aforementioned me, is attractive the instance to indite most an supply that I poverty to indite most and that I see passionately about. Question: so, what most the mortal of ethics? Answer: I do not hit a deadline, I hit no application that is biased, and I modify intend to indite my possess headline!

I am willing to believe that this is a machine-translation of something written in another language (possibly Chinese?) by a blogger or someone and that in it’s original iteration it makes great sense. Also, if it had been translated by a moderately proficient human it would probably also be readable and cogent.

Are we redundant? Should we retreat and leave the web to dribblejaws who find it a convenient medium to feed their conspiracy theories and ugly prejudice?

I certainly hope not, continue reading if you’d like to know more about the singularity.

A useful account of Twitter and tweeting journalists

My Australian colleague Julie Posetti at the University of Canberra has written a good piece in The Walkley Magazine about how journalists are, should and might make use of Twitter as a tool.

Why journalism’s all a-Twitter, Walkley Magazine Oct 2009

Julie’s piece highlights some of the professional and ethical issues that arise when Twitter enters the newsroom, but I agree with her that attempts to stop journalists from using Twitter is over-kill.

It raises a difficult issue though: when using social media, where is the line between a professional and a personal persona?

Baby herbal soup: the Internet for sick fc*ks

Ok, so I thought we’d nailed this long ago – BABY HERBAL SOUP IS A VIRAL INTERNET HOAX.

I’ve just come across another sick chatroom thread about the perennial ‘baby herbal soup’ hoax photographs that continue to circulate and to get more and more graphic. This is a new thread, it only went up on 20 October 2009.

That this happens is not really surprising, but the ignorant and racist comments that these posts generate is the really shocking aspect of this story.

The Furaffinity site - click to check PGA warning

This site claims to have the story from an online news source The Seoul Times and sure enough, the story is there, complete with all the nasty fake photos.

click to read Seoul Times 'baby herbal soup' story PGA

It’s one thing for this viral meme to circulate in chatrooms where ignorance and prejudice seem to rule, but for a news site to run it as a straight news piece is pretty disgusting.

It’s another argument in favour of having some form of trained cadre who can verify and check and against the idea that somehow the “bottom up” Internet is going to improve on the mainstream media. It purports to be a letter to the editor and it’s dated 30 September 2008, so now it’s recirculating thanks to Fur Affinity.

I have contacted the Seoul Times editor asking her/him to remove this piece, or at least to acknowledge that it is more than likely a hoax.

I encourage you to do the same.

You can simply copy and paste this text into your email browser. The address is seoultimes@gmail.com

Dear editor, I was shocked to see that you are running the Chinese baby soup story as if it were real and verified.

This is an internet hoax and you have been fooled into running this story which feeds prejudice and racism against Chinese people.

You can see what I mean here. http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1004922/

I urge you to take this story down immediately and check for yourself that it is indeed a cruel and racist hoax.

http://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/baby-herbal-soup-update/

I would appreciate it if you reply to this letter so that I know you take your journalistic responsibility seriously

Thankyou

I will post any responses from the editor

Sean Plunket’s opinions not worth much

The employment row between Sean Plunket and Radio NZ over Metro magazine’s offer of a monthly column for the Morning Report presenter is a storm in a coffee mug moment really. [Stuff.co.nz: Plunket furore surprises editor]

After all, Paul Henry writes about cars in Metro.

The argument from RNZ seems to be that Plunket is essential to the credibility of the network’s news and current affairs brand and that to have him writing an opinion column in Metro would somehow blur the line and make people think that either:

a) Plunket’s opinions, on whatever topic his columns range over, might be read as being those of RNZ news and current affairs; or

b) Plunket’s opinions are likely to be so outrageous and damaging to his credibility as a news and current affairs presenter/interviewer that his second job offerings could  also damage the RNZ news brand.

I’m flabberghasted by this. Really I am. I think RNZ is being very precious in holding to such a hardline. In the modern world of news and current affairs there is no hard and fast line between news and opinion. In fact, Plunket is very opinionated on Morning Report anyway.

That’s why he generates so much emotion, heat and attention. Sometimes I find myself shouting at him because of the skewed line of questioning, or the ludicrous and conservative assumptions that underlie his interviewing technique. Sometimes I get annoyed at his pompous and inquisitorial style – particularly when he’s beating up on easy targets with that “holier-than-thou” tone and almost shouting loudness.

I can’t see how a column from him in Metro would be any different. I wouldn’t read it necessarily every month – though I have started buying the Auckland-centric monthly now that the deliciously wicked Felicity Ferret has been re-instated.

I also don’t see why Metro editor Bevan Rapson is so keen to have Plunket write a column. To be honest I don’t think it’s a very inspired or inspiring choice. And he doesn’t even live in Auckland!

In what way is Plunket going to add value?

Would his column be along the lines of Bill Ralston in The Listener: predictable, not-so-funny middle-of-the-road stereotype-bashing and not very enlightening. I can only hope that Plunket might use the column centimetres to reveal himself a secret National Party supporter, that would satisfy my own secret curiosity about him at least.

There’s always a dearth of good opinion-writing in the media and usually a very shallow and narrow pool of views that is constantly fished. I think Bevan could do a lot worse than quietly let the Plunket idea die down and seek some new talent from a wider gene pool.

So that would mean that Paul Holmes and his ilk should immediately be ruled out, but if Bevan’s interested, he can talk to my peeps, they’ll sort a deal and I can guarantee to be controversial – you can write that into my contract.

You can go here and here for more on this issue.

Ethical Martini 501 posts and still blogging

This is the 501st post on Ethical Martini, so I guess it’s some sort of milestone. I’ve been blogging now since April 2007, which roughly coincides with my arrival in Auckland to take up my current position at AUT University.

My first post was a bit crude and I’ve certainly learned a lot over the past 2.5 years.It’s also interesting to look at the traffic numbers – even though they’re somewhat unreliable.

The traffic has grown steadily, which I guess you’d expect, but EM has really taken off this year.
In 2007 I had 4261 visitors, in 2008 36777 and so far in 2009 103928 have dropped in for a peek.
My daily average has jumped from 17 per day in 2007 to over 350 in 2009.
Still not massive, but I’m happy enough with the numbers, at least for now. Though I’m not going to get rich quickly from blogging. At the average Google AdSense rate of about $7.00 per 1000 hits, so far this year I would have made about $727.36. That’s about 36 bottles of Bombay Sapphire bought duty-free. I suppose that’s roughly a year’s supply, or maybe a little longer if a bottle can last me around two weeks worth of Martinis.

Over the summer I am going to investigate establishing Ethical Martini somewhere else with a unique URL and a bit more functionality, design and sorting of topics – I don’t like that Martini Music and the general purpose of the blog – journalism and media politics etc – are all mashed together. It would be nice to have separate category pages. First I need to upgrade my account here at WordPress and then recruit some technical assistance with the redesign etc.

For now though, “Happy birthday” to me and thanks to everyone who visits and comments on this site.

I have also been keen for sometime to recruit another person(s) to share EM, so if you think you might fit the bill and can commit to regular posting on topics of your choice (suitably and tangientially related to the themes herein) I’d love to hear from you.

Dribblejaws need not apply.

The “godfather” of Chinese blogging: Isaac Mao in New Zealand

I’ve had the privilege in the last couple of days of spending quality time with Isaac Mao, the well-known Chinese blogger and social media enthusiast.

Isaac is in New Zealand this week on a speaking tour of J-schools generously sponsored by the Asia-New Zealand Foundation. Isaac’s passionate commitment to free speech and democratic ideals is clear from his thoughtful and fact-packed presentations. My only regret is that more of New Zealand’s blogging community didn’t take advantage of his two speaking dates in Auckland to actually meet with Isaac.

Despite the fact that a lot of people who should have known better chose to ignore what I think is an important event of interest to Kiwi bloggers, some media have taken a great interest in Isaac’s commentary on social media and the blogosphere in China.

Isaac Mao on Asian Report with Jason Moon National Radio 20 Oct 2009

more about “The “godfather” of Chinese blogging |…“, posted with vodpod

more about “World TV Ltd – www.wtv.co.nz“, posted with vodpod

You still have a couple of chances in Wellington, Christchurch and Rotorua, it is well worthwhile. Isaac is on his way to Los Angeles whree he is a speaker at UCLA’s 40th anniversary of the Internet conference. He’s also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.2009