End the Lobby cartel

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One of the most pernicious conspiracies between Westminster politicians and journalists is the ‘lobby’ system. In an interesting article in the Independent, Tom Watson, the former Minister for Digital Engagement, thinks that abolishing the lobby system is one of the first things a new Speaker should do.

Driven by the decreasing space allocated to Parliament in their papers, lobby journalists report only a fraction of Westminster discussions. Where, for example, can you read of recent debates on extreme solar events or addiction to prescription medicines? These and others were not reported because they were not the big story of the day – and all because a cartel of political editors convened over afternoon tea to decide that this was so.

Last month, Sri Lanka was the big story. This month, alas for the Tamils, it wasn’t. So Siobhain McDonagh’s debate on 12 June over the plight of 300,000 Tamil refugees was barely noticed.

The 238 pass-holding lobby journalists do not have an outlet for lesser stories, so they end up, pack-like, having to chase the same one or two stories each day.

Yet it is a stark reality of life in the internet age that parliamentary reporting no longer has to be constrained by column inches. The new Speaker should log on to see what is possible. See, for example, Ispystrangers.org. There you will read of discussions as wide-ranging as NHS provision in Cornwall and job losses on a missile range in South Uist.

The problems for the lobby are also compounded by absurdly out-of-date “you must wear a tie in the gallery” rules.

David Miliband has called for an end to unattributable briefings. He’s right. In the internet age there is no such thing as a secret. Over the next few months I will argue for a technologically enabled democracy, from e-petitions to digitally encoding each clause and amendment to every Bill. This will further open up Parliament.

Crack open the lobby cartel. Let in a new generation of online commentators. Share access to lobby briefings with a more diverse group of reporters. Rip up the lobby rules and put all briefings on the record. Do this, and a new Speaker can genuinely be part of a new era of accountability.

Can’t see this idea appealing to the Lobby hacks. After all, it would mean that they would have to do some real reporting, and wear out some real shoe-leather.

Manchester United’s latest three-letter word

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In an earlier post, I contrasted Barcelona FC’s sponsorship of UNESCO with Manchester United’s sponsorship by AIG, the well-known imploding insurance giant (now bailed out by the US taxpayer). Now comes a fascinating account in The Atlantic of how Man U found some new letters to embroider on its shirts.

When two executives of Chicago’s Aon Corp. went through their mail one day last fall, they each found a large package with a leather-encased box, containing, of all things, a soccer shirt with the company’s own logo emblazoned across the chest. The shirts appeared to be bonafide red home jerseys of Manchester United, arguably the most famous sports team in the world—or at least in the world outside the soccer-suspicious United States.

They had the red and yellow team logo and the Nike swoosh, and were obviously high quality, but they were just mockups. Aon, which is Gaelic for “Oneness,” had no relationship with the team. It doesn’t even have anything to do with its own hometown teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls, or Bears.

That overture led, eight months later, to a sponsorship and marketing deal in which AON paid a reported $130 million in exchange for having its logo on the jersey. The story of how this deal came about, and the benefits each party derives from it, offers an instructive look at the world of international commerce, where in the quest for global success, companies sometimes find themselves venturing into unexpected but auspicious pairings.

Footnote: ‘aon’ is Irish for ‘one’, not oneness (whatever that is).

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the piece.

Parliament’s ‘transparency’ trick

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This morning’s Observer column.

Many years ago, the Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law” to express the view that, in a digital world, private fences erected via software can undermine public law in all kinds of unanticipated ways. The recent antics of our parliamentary authorities in relation to MPs’ expenses have provided us with an instructive case study of the Lessig principle in action.

Their chosen tool for controlling our access to information is the computer code embodied in the portable document format (PDF)…

Twitter 1, CNN 0

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The Economist has been pondering the strange mix of information sources about events in Iran. Conclusion:

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.

Shirky on Twitter and Iran

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Here’s a fragment of an interesting interview.

Q: What do you make of what’s going on in Iran right now?

A: I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants; they’re passing on their messages to their friends; and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Q: Which services have caused the greatest impact?

A: Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. It’s Twitter. One thing that Evan Williams and Biz Stone did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down and now there are literally thousands of people around the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open.

Q: Do you get a sense that it’s almost as if the world is figuring out live how to use Twitter in these circumstances

A: Some dissidents were using named accounts for a while and there’s been a raging debate in the community about how best to help them. Yes there’s an enormous reckoning to be had about what works and what doesn’t. There have been disagreements over whether it was dangerous to use hashtags like #Iranelection and there was a period in which people were openly tweeting the IP addresses of web proxies for people to switch to — not realizing that the authorities would soon shut these down. It’s incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we’re seeing the medium invent itself in real time…

Networked journalism and the events in Iran

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Interesting post by Jeff Jarvis.

How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?

Or to put the question another way: The New York Times keeps talking about how expensive its Baghdad bureau is and what a fix we’d be in without it. Well, the essential truth in Iran is that no one has a Tehran bureau (or if they do, it has been rendered useless by government diktat). So we have no choice but to replace that bureau with the people, with witnesses empowered to share what they see.

The New York Times, the Guardian, and Andrew Sullivan, to name three, have been doing impressive work with their live blogs, sifting through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, trying to add as much context and as many caveats as they can. The live blog is print’s equivalent of live TV; it is the way to cover a story such as this: process journalism over product journalism.

But clearly, in that coverage of and by the people, we are experiencing severe filter failure, to use Clay Shirky’s term. Look at the hundreds of tweets that emerge every minute and at the overuse of the word “confirmed” on them, which is meaningless if you don’t know who’s doing the confirming. There’s no way to tell who’s who, who’s there, who’s telling the truth, who’s not.

Note the repeated word: Who. The greatest value a news organization can add to this new news ecosystem is to identify, curate, vet, and train people. Ideally, that needs to happen before the big story breaks. But it can even be done outside the country, as I saw CNN do this morning, talking with a Columbia University student from Iran, who knew who was real and was there from her network of family and friends. Of course, even if you know the people you’re listening to, it’s impossible to know whether everything they say is true unless you can verify it yourself. But that’s the point: You can’t.

So you need to have the best head start you can have. The larger the network of people a news organization can organize, the better shape it will be in when news breaks, the better it can filter the reports that come – whether from people in that network or in the larger network of people those people know. The more people in the network, the more who can go to the scene of news or research closer to it – the more you can ask for help…

Dead data: charts and graphs

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I was musing about the uselessness of PDFs the other day (partly because of the MPs’ expenses story) and then wandered into a terrific talk by my colleague Tony Hirst in which he flashed up this striking slide from a presentation by Dorothea Salo.

It links to a pithy observation by Michael Kay:

“Converting pdf to XML is a bit like converting hamburgers into cows.”

Back to the future

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Many moons ago, one of my favourite cameras was an Olympus Pen. It was light, unobtrusive and had terrific optics. Well, guess what? Its spirit lives on.

Finally, Olympus has introduced its long-awaited Micro Four Thirds camera, and the E-P1 looks a lot like 1959. It’s a compact, slick-looking retro model that pays homage to the company’s PEN-series cameras that had their debut 50 years ago.

Think of the E-P1 as the love child of a point-and-shoot camera and a digital single-lens reflex. Olympus says the 12.3-megapixel E-P1, the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera, marries the image quality of D.S.L.R. models with high-definition video capabilities found on smaller cameras. It also includes 16-bit stereo audio.

The E-P1 will be available in July as a body-only option $750 as well as in two kits: one with a Zuiko 14mm-42mm f3.5-5.6 $800 3X zoom lens and another with a 17mm f2.8 $900 prime lens.

Police face prosecution for obstructing photographers

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Hooray! At last some sense of proportion. This from Press Gazette.

Lord Carlile QC, who reviews anti-terror legislation, said officers who use force or threats against photographers to make them delete images could face prosecution themselves.

Section 58A of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force in February, bans photographers from taking pictures of the police if the photographs could be useful to terrorists.

Lord Carlile said this was a "high bar" and should not be used to interfere with day-to-day photography of officers which is "as legitimate as before".

One photographer wrote to him to complain about being forced to delete an image from his camera of an officer on traffic duty.

In his annual review of anti-terror laws, Lord Carlile said: “It should be emphasised that photography of the police by the media or amateurs remains as legitimate as before, unless the photograph is likely to be of use to a terrorist. This is a high bar.

“It is inexcusable for police officers ever to use this provision to interfere with the rights of individuals to take photographs.

“The police must adjust to the undoubted fact that the scrutiny of them by members of the public is at least proportional to any increase in police powers – given the ubiquity of photograph and video-enabled mobile phones.

“Police officers who use force or threaten force in this context run the real risk of being prosecuted themselves for one or more of several possible criminal and disciplinary offences.”

About time.

Sunlight, not PDF, is the best disinfectant

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So Parliament has finally published the data on MPs’ allowances. Except, of course, that it hasn’t, really. Here’s an example: a part of the ‘return’ for Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton South:

Note that there’s no way of determining where her second home is. It’s the same story as one wades through her ‘receipts’. For example:

The more I look at this stuff, the more I appreciate how much old-style journalistic digging the Telegraph did. Knowing the address of Moran’s second home was just the starting point. So to denounce the Telegraph revelations as mere ‘cheque-book journalism’ is spectacularly to miss the point.

Oddly enough, this is also a case where networked journalism would have worked — if the data had been out there in non-censored form then we could have crowd-sourced the investigation of individual MPs.

UPDATE: The Guardian is already crowdsourcing the job. I’ve just spent a happy hour poring through the expenses returns of Ben Wallace, the Tory MP for Lancaster and Wyre. Wonder why he spends so much money on (a) IT services and (b) ‘executive’ cars.