Monthly Archives: May 2010

Are “Digital Journalists” really “scabs”?

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Sylvia Paull has an angry post headed “The new scabs: digital journalists”.

ABC announced a layoff of hundreds of journalists this week and said it would work instead mostly with “digital journalists,” people who can do a variety of tasks, such as blog, tweet, and take digital photos. This is the first time I’ve heard the term “digital journalist,” and I’m not sure what distinguishes such a journalist from every other journalist who now must use the Web to report and communicate except that they are certainly much cheaper to hire.

A digital journalist probably doesn’t accrue vacation time, sick leave, or a pension. A digital journalist probably works on a contract basis and like many of the freelance journalists I know who once worked for a news organization, they write for several media rather than just one.

I wonder whether graduate schools of journalism now produce journalists or digital journalists. And can someone go from being a journalist to being a digital journalist, or does the journalist have to downgrade his or her reporting and communications skills first?

I can understand her anger/irritation, but the mindset implicit in her terminology is revealing. Mass-media print publication was a mass-production culture: and it prompted the rise of trade unions to provide protection from employees employed to work on what were effectively production lines. The term ‘scab’ (i.e. strikebreaker) comes from the early history of campaigning by unions who used withdrawal of labour as a weapon.

But the era of mass-production print is drawing to a close, and with it most of its associated baggage, including large bodies of unionised workers. It’s difficult at present to see what will replace the print system, but you can bet that it won’t be the licence to print money represented by ownership of printing presses and distribution networks in the analog age. A new business model for journalism will, I’m sure, eventually emerge, but it won’t be one that generates the vast profits enjoyed until recently by many traditional publishers. It’ll be leaner, more innovative, less stable and more competitive. So when leaders of the print culture portray the Net as the great destroyer of journalism, what they’re really complaining about is that it’s a destroyer of their cosy old local monopolies. For them, the undermining of journalism is just collateral damage.

None of this is meant to imply any enthusiasm on my part for what ABC has done, btw. The big danger in all this is that a new set of monopolists (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) will turn everyone into sharecroppers.

Paxman’s nemesis

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For me, the most memorable moment of the election campaign so far was not Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” but Jeremy Paxman’s humiliation at the hands of the economics spokesman for the Welsh Nationalist party. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a great admirer of Paxo, whom I knew slightly (and liked a lot) when I was the Observer‘s TV critic. He’s one of the ornaments of the UK journalistic scene, and a great adversarial interviewer. His Newsnight interview with Michael Howard is one of the classics of the genre. He’s also — unusually for a TV professional — quite a good writer.

But he met his match the other night. At first, the interview appeared to be following the standard script. The Welsh Nats are a joke in metropolitan circles, of which Newsnight is the epicentre, and Paxo’s approach embodies this contempt. The question implied by his body language is “Who is this provincial hick and why are we bothering with him? Oh well, let’s get it over with.” And note the elegant sarcasm implicit in the reference to the “august position” of the interviewee, who is chairman of the Principality Building Society. I ask you — a building society!.

But then… Well, see for yourself.

The most revealing bit is Paxman’s exasperation at being asked to consult pages of tedious statistics, and his pique at being accused of not doing his homework. His interviewee is daring to hold him — Jeremy Paxman — to account. But imagine how his inquisitorial indignation would be stoked if a politician sighed impatiently when asked to examine a page of statistical evidence containing what Paxo regarded as clinching evidence of malfeasance.

Memo to future Paxman interviewees: master the detail and stick to it. Challenge him on statistics — the more detailed the better. Remember that grandees like Paxman don’t do detail. It’s below their pay-grade. And make sure the result goes straight onto YouTube — in case the BBC pulls it from iPlayer.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

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This morning’s Observer column.

Sadly, there is no cure for megalomania. But venture capitalists ought to start funding the search for a cure, because it’s costing many of them a lot of money, and is likely to cost even more in the future.

Here’s how it works. A smart entrepreneur – a Harvard dropout, say, or some guy who made a lot of money by selling off his last venture to some clueless multinational – starts up a web business which grows like crazy by attracting millions of subscribers who use its services for free. Pretty soon, it's got 400 million of them and everyone is saying: “Wow! 400 million users! That must be good for something.”

Then several things happen. Firstly, the proprietor of the sensation du jour starts drinking the Kool-Aid and contracts the aforementioned megalomania. He begins to fantasise that he could own the whole internet. Secondly, thousands of other entrepreneurs think “Wow! He could own the whole internet. We need to make sure our stuff has hooks into his stuff. Otherwise, we’re toast.” And then the mainstream media, whose insights into this could be written in 96-point Helvetica bold on the back of a postage stamp, are going around saying, “Jeez, this stuff is the real deal. How do we get onside?”

The polo-mint election

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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/5516949/]

Well, well. Someone suggested last week that this should be called the “polo mint campaign” because it’s got a large hole in the middle of it: the silence of all three parties on what they will do to reduce the deficit. I ranted about this the other day. Today the Financial Times, no less, wades in on the same theme. Its first Leader, “Winning office but not a mandate,” says, in part:

This week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies quantified the size of that silence. It revealed that the Liberal Democrats were the most forthcoming of the main parties, but even they had only told voters about one-quarter of the retrenchment that they would impose upon the country. The UK’s politicians are suffering some kind of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed, the parties are not only refusing to address the deficit problem. They continue to promote expensive hobby-horses. The Lib Dems are pushing a large tax change and the Conservatives pledge dear public sector reforms and tax cuts. The Tories, in common with Labour, also promise not to cut some large departments.

Little wonder that opinion polls show voters still believe that “efficiency savings” alone can rein in the deficit. But they are in for the shock of their lives – and will respond with fury when they learn the truth. Their anger, moreover, will not be directed at bankers or bureaucrats. It will be aimed at the politicians who hid their plans from the public.

Britain now faces a period of public austerity without any detailed consensus about retrenchment, and no broad public support for it. That will make the task of balancing the books more difficult and poses a risk to the credibility of any future plan to rein in the country’s gaping fiscal deficit.

Whoever wins this election will not be able to claim that they have a mandate to cut the state. That will, in part, be their own fault for choosing silence and short-term electoral advantage over outspoken courage. The public might not like hard truths, but they were barely given a chance to hear any. The next government’s silence in this election campaign could cost them the election. After this.

It’s not every day the Pink ‘Un and I find ourselves in agreement. So let us celebrate unanimity while we still can.

Reincarnation and the bond market

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In Acropolis Now, my post about national bankruptcy, I referred to something that James Carville had once said about the bond market.

No wonder James Carvill (Bill Clinton’s electoral guru) once said that if he were to be re-incarnated he’d like to come back as the bond market, because then he could do exactly as he chose.

But I was quoting from memory and writing without an internet connection. Today, the Guardian has a piece in which the Carville quote is given in full. This is how it went:

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody”.

I got the general drift. But the actual quote is better.