Talking Towers

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Yesterday's Arabic Al Khaleej features an extensive feature by writer Mustapha Abdulraheem. Rather brilliantly, it is penned the form of a chit-chat between the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Shopping Festival. This comes to us from the newspaper that once memorably interviewed that little yellow bundle of fun, Modhesh Al Modhesh.

"I feel happy because I was born as the tallest, most important Emirati, Arab and international building ever made by man on this planet. There's nothing in the universe to match my pride and how it rises,' the building gushes. 'My days start in the morning when I am wakened by the clouds. I praise God and I thank him for being born Emirati. I look over the world through twelve telescopes fixed on my platforms. I look through one of them and I can see the skyscrapers of New York and Malaysia as well as the pyramids.'

The iconic tower was surprised, apparently, on the 28th January to see fireworks as well as smelling the scent of musk from the city's streets (sadly, the piece doesn't explain which aspect of the construction is responsible for its olfactory senses). Not unnaturally, unsure of what the fuss was about, the Burj turned to Dubai Mall and the Burj Al Arab and asked them what's going on. They laughed, we are told, because the Dubai Shopping Festival was with them.

'I'm a big success that has lasted for 15 years,' DSF tells the inquisitive young Burj, going on to talk at some length about what a tremendous symbol for Dubai's success and progress it is. It's not, it would appear, the humblest festival in town, but then it's trying to big it up to the world's tallest tower.

At this point in the dialogue the Burj smiles and DSF asks him why. 'Has my presence and name added to the attraction of you as a festival this year?'

'Of course, says DSF. 'You are the pride of every Emirati and Arab. You have a wide audience, considering that your opening night was the best international event this year and you are the tallest building this earth has ever known!'

The Shopping Festival then takes the Burj Khalifa on a tour of Dubai (after talking at some length about its success and importance and its regional leadership of the festival industry) but, sadly, the iconic tower had eventually to return to its guests, making a promise to visit again next year.

What a wonderful piece to inspire everyone! One notes there is once again a series of awards for journalism during this year's Dubai Shopping Festival. Mustapha must be a front-runner for a gong and perhaps even a cash award as an appropriate award for his excellent work.

Twitter and the Crash

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News is flooding Twitter regarding the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET409 off the coast of Beirut as I write this. There are persistent tweets about survivors, but no confirmed MSM (mainstread media) reports of any survivors as yet. There were 90 people on board, 82 passengers and 8 crew - Ethiopian Airlines was very fast indeed to get a press release out, proving neatly that the BBC had flubbed and reported the wrong passenger/crew numbers as 83 pax, 9 crew. A small detail, but the devil's in details.

The 'plane itself had just been bought from Irish low cost carrier Ryan Air, apparently, and was delivered in December. Specialists in aviation were soon tweeting detail like that, which together with eyewitness reports and breaking news from websites like CNN, made for the usual compelling viewing of a news event unfolding on Twitter.

Tens of people are dead and we're using words like compelling viewing. What's happened to us?

We're involved in the story now, of course. I saw the tweets from Beirut as I settled down in the office and passed on the most pertinent of them. It was interesting that people were being more cautious than they have before in annotating tweets with 'unconfirmed'.

Having sent out the 'heads up' and given links (thanks to @SpotOn) to a couple of journalists who were covering events, I stopped passing on news. The passenger names being Tweeted out (albeit they had been read out on LBC TV, a departure from the European practice of letting civil defence notify families before names are broadcast) nagged at me, along with details like the number of bodies that had been fished out of the sea at such and such a point.

And yet this is how our news comes to us - on the second, from the event, unfolding with each new fact, supported by a community that has formed around its common interest in the event, brought together by a hashtag.

I found myself thinking of the image of Iranian student Neda Soltani, whose last sight on earth as her eyes flickered closed may well have been the cameraphone lens pointed in her face. There's something terribly comforting about being in a mob that I don't like.

No Comment

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Hetta e-magazine court case (reported by Gulf News here in case you hadn't heard of it) is a worrying precedent.

A judgement against Hetta (Hetta is a headscarf or Keffiyeh) has been reached by the Abu Dhabi Court of Appeals in the defamation case lodged by the Abu Dhabi Media Company (the owners, interestingly, of a number of media outlets, including newspaper The National) . The case centres around a comment made on an article by a reader. This is the important bit, the article linked here (you'll have to spikka da Arabi) attacking Abu Dhabi Media Company's hiring policies, is not the issue - the alleged defamation came as a reader-submitted comment posted against the article.

That precedent would potentially mean that any online site (including, *gulp*, blogs) in the UAE would be held legally liable for any content posted by commenters to the site. That would have an immediate and drastic effect on any form of open or free speech (no, I'm not interested in arguments about how little of that there is). It would also make us all moderators, or 'censors' of content posted on our sites by the public.

“The decision taken in this case against an independent news website is clearly disproportionate,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement, in full here. “Why close an entire website for a month when only a few comments posted by readers were at issue and only its editor was being blamed? And before going to court, why didn’t the plaintiff ask Hetta.com’s management to remove the comments in a spirit of conciliation?”

Why indeed. And a media owner, at that.

Hetta's lawyer is taking the case to the top, a final appeal is to be filed with the Federal Supreme Court, according to GN, so the fat lady hasn't sung. Let's hope she's got a reasonable tune when she does.

If you add to this the result of the defamation case in the UK against Gulf News a while ago, you also have a precedent that anyone who has business interests in the UAE and considers themselves defamed in the UAE by any commenter on any global medium accessible here, they could possibly launch a case in the UAE court. Far fetched? Oh, do I hope so.

This alarming judgement, by the way, comes a week after Jordan's decision to apply its press and publishing law to online activity. That law, similarly, would hold bloggers and other online sites responsible for user comments made on articles - treating them effectively as letters to the Letters Page of a newspaper - an editorial responsibility.

But here - this is possibly the really interesting bit that affects millions rather than a raggle-taggle bunch of bloggers and online publishers - we reach the edge of gibbering insanity. If I'm responsible in law for what you write on my blog, am I just as responsible for a comment you leave on my Facebook page?

Both of these moves are subject to a final decision, so there's a chance for reason to prevail. But it's never been more likely that those cautious little green shoots of commentary and dialogue could well be snuffed out in the Middle East.

The New Media Nightmare

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This is a guest post contributed by online pal and fellow writer of books Robb Grindstaff.

Robb and I originally encountered each other on Harper Collins' authonomy peer-review writer's site thingy and we've been, along with a group of like-minded peeps, keeping in touch and bouncing stuff around ever since. By day, Robb's a newspaper editor in the US and, as he mentions in the post, we've been talking a lot about the future of writing, both in terms of fiction and daily news media. This is his take:

A conversation started recently among a group of writer friends with this article, which discusses the new distribution methods for music and books and the effects on the content producers (musicians and writers). The conversation then segued into this article about the Associated Press and News Corp telling Google and Yahoo! it’s time to pay up for the news content they aggregate and distribute.

From the news media perspective, particularly the newspapers where I’ve worked for my entire career, online distribution has become the death knell for newspapers when it should have been the saving grace that eliminated the high costs of 'traditional' printing and distribution.

In the olden days (say, the 1700s up to 1989), journalists held the power. Newspaper publishers were the kings of the hill in their cities, making or breaking politicians and business/industry tycoons with the power of the pen. They sold the newspaper for a nickel, or a quarter or a dollar, everyone read it, most cities had two or three major competing newspapers and many people read more than one newspaper. The newspaper owned/controlled the content and content producers (journalists), the publishing (printing presses), and distribution (paper boys and newsstands). To this great mass market of readers, advertisers flocked and paid lots of money to get their ads in these newspapers that were delivered and read each day by virtually everyone.

There are books that could be written (and have been written) on the in-between parts, how we got from then to now, but today it’s looking like this:

• Journalists are unemployed in the thousands.

• Aggregators of news, such as Google and Yahoo, are the new distributors.

• Aggregators don't employ or pay a single journalist. They take content from everyone else. They have virtually no overhead in comparison to media. Their overhead is primarily computers servers which reach hundreds of millions for cents. They don't have to print and deliver a newspaper to every doorstep every day, pay reporters or camera crews or videographers or producers.

• Readers are wired and the Internet provides instant news rather than waiting for tomorrow morning's newspaper. Readers can find newspaper depth to stories (as opposed to the typically thinner reporting prominent on TV), but delivered instantly 24 hrs a day (the advantage of TV). Even better as it's delivered on demand. You don't even have to make sure you turn on the TV at a certain time to catch a certain newscast or news story.

• As readers have moved online, so advertisers have migrated to Google/Yahoo/etc., because that’s where the eyeballs are also aggregated.

• In the meantime, newspapers are going broke, bankrupt, closing, and laying off thousands of journalists as they've lost advertisers to online. Even though newspapers also operate their own Websites, they are by definition mostly local (other than the New York Times and a small handful of others), and the Internet is global. Readers don't feel a need to make sure they get their news from their local newspaper or local TV news. World and national news has become a commodity, and readers expect it for free, at their fingertips.

This worldwide access to information should be a boon to freedom and democracy.

But what will the aggregators aggregate, what will the distributors distribute, and what will consumers consume when all the journalists are gone? And when the level of competent journalism has declined to a certain point, who will be the watchdog over the government and major institutions on behalf of citizens and taxpayers?

That’s the thought keeps me up at night as the new world of media figures out a business model.

Magic? Not really, no...

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UAE telco Etisalat yesterday unveiled the new 'HTC Magic' smartphone, a device based on Google's Android operating system. There's no sign from today's newspapers that anyone at yesterday's press conference chose to press the telco that likes to say 'ugh' on the massive network outages that have taken place over the last few days. We're all 'on message' today.

This is the third device that the telco has announced it will support and sell in a reversal of the decision, taken back in the early '90s, to liberalise the UAE's terminal equipment market. Etisalat also sells RIM's BlackBerry (the source of the great spyware scandal) and Apple's iPhone. That decision, formalised in comments to media yesterday, is a tectonic shift in the market and deserved more coverage than it got. But perhaps its importance wasn't blindingly obvious enough for it to be picked up.

Gulf News' slightly breathless coverage is eclipsed by Emirates Business 24|7 (which is now, of course, only published five days a week, making it Emirates Business 24|5, but we'll let that go), which trumpets 'Etisalat to launch own branded mobile phone'!

The Emirates Business story on the HTC Magic mixes it up confusingly with the news that Etisalat is going to go back into the 'own brand' terminal market, with a new 'phone being brought to market under the 'Etisalat' brand.

Gulf News' story provides a great deal more clarity, information and depth on the HTC touch, which is a nice surprise. It also points out that the phone will ship with 'Goggle' applications such as mail, search, maps and Google Talk.

Goggle. Nice one, GN subs.

The telephone's 'connectivity technologies' include HSDPA 7Mpbs and HSUPA 2Mbps, reports Gulf News with a charming and complete lack of context.

HSPA is the 'next generation' of telecom protocols, at times referred to as 'beyond 3G', High Speed Packet Access. it comes in two flavours Downlink (HSDPA) and Uplink (HSUPA) and supports hyper-fast mobile data rates - today's HSPA networks can pump over 20Mbps down to a mobile, while HSPA evolution is going to more than double that. So we're talking about hyper-fast network access, streaming video, rich content downloads and all that good stuff. Except, of course, at Etisalat's rates, the whole proposition is utterly ruinous.

At 7 Mbps, you would eat through 1Gig of data in a little over two and a half minutes, taking 25 minutes to munch through the 10Gigabyte package that will be bundled with the HTC Magic contract (reports, uniquely, The National).

Worse, you'll be paying a smidgen under Dhs75 per second for data access when you're roaming.

Yup - at Etisalat's ridiculous roaming fees of Dhs2.5 per 30 Kbytes of data, you'll certainly be loving that old high speed download Magic!

(If this post seems unusually grumpy, it's probably because my lowly 384kbit 3G Nokia has been cut off by said telco because my bill is over Dhs1,000. Or two seconds' worth of Magic!)

The Arab Media Awards Changes

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Changes have been announced to The Arab Media Awards, a move that at least partly explains the stream of decidedly odd tweets emanating from the Dubai Press Club Twitter handle yesterday.

According to reports today, the awards are going to change to take more account of online media and young professionals. The inclusion of young journalists has been accomplished by adding a new award for, wait for it, 'Young Arab Journalist'.

As for online, the new focus for the awards, recognising the tectonic shifts that are shaking the world of print media around the world, has been accomplished by removing the word 'print' from the name of the awards.

If the story is complete, then there's no new award or category of awards for online journalism. Just the removal of the word 'print'...

So that's it. That's the evidence that these awards now recognise online journalism and which justifies Gulf News' headline, "Revamped award to cover all aspects of journalism".

US Public 'No Confidence' In Media Shock Horror

Image source: Pew Research Center

A poll carried out in the USA and published this week has shown that the US public have no faith in the credibility of media. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll found that some 71% of respondents did not feel that media got the facts straight in news reports, 63% felt that information from the media was ‘often off base’. Only 26% of people surveyed believed that the press took care to avoid bias.

71% of people depended on TV as their primary news source. But, this figure really fascinated me, 42% depend on the Internet (people could pick more than one medium, so you’re not going to add up to 100). And only 33% on newspapers. That Web figure compares to the 6% that relied on the Web ten years ago, incidentally.

This all takes place in a year when Google’s Q1 revenues equated to total US print advertising spending – and where newspaper ad sales dropped by some 29% in the first half of 2009. Did the Internet drop ‘em or the recession drop ‘em? It’s academic – Internet revenues went up so, whatever you slice it, print (and, incidentally, television and radio) is being eclipsed by the Internet.

It’s been a slow erosion of confidence, not an overnight one. Back in 1985, 55% of Americans believed their media generally got things right – this year, that’s down to 29%. The report shows a general consensus emerging regardless of political belief, but also highlights an average increase of 16% in people who do not believe the press is professional.

70% of those surveyed believed that news organisations ‘try to cover up their mistakes’. 74% of people believed that the press was biased in favour of big business and powerful people.

So we have a broad and growing distrust of mainstream media that you would have to consider to be close to fundamental and a clear movement to increased reliance on online media. That’s not rocket science, but these is numbers.

It’s always nice to be able to back your beliefs with numbers.

Shortest

This might be my shortest blog post ever.

Here. Read this. It's Etisalat giving its side of the BlackBerry story.

See if it makes you angry...

Incompetence or arrogance?

Image by Loutron Glouton via Flickr

Respected security analysts and consultancies have now confirmed what many industry watchers, pundits and commentators suspected last week - that the 'upgrade' pushed to tens of thousands of BlackBerry mobile devices in the UAE by telco Etisalat was, in fact, not what it seemed to be, an 'upgrade for Blackberry service. Please download to ensure continous service quality.'

Interestingly, this rather flies in the face of the somewhat belated statement made by the telco itself, which I reproduced in full here at the end of last week. That statement rather annoyed a number of BlackBerry users who found it facile and lacking the one element that tens of thousands of frustrated customers whose mobile devices were affected wanted to see - an apology. Many of those users say their BlackBerrys were rendered inoperable or suffered significantly downgraded performance. A number reportedly bought new batteries for their BlackBerrys, believing the battery was at fault when, in fact, it was the software update they had accepted from the operator.

A press release was issued on the 15th July by security company SMobile Systems. The company, which positions itself as 'the leading provider of security solutions for mobile phones and maker of the only antivirus and antispyware applications in the world for BlackBerry devices, has released a solution for the (in their words) 'recent spyware-laden update sent out to BlackBerry users on the Etisalat network'. That press release in full can be found here.

The company's release claims, 'The BlackBerry Spyware, which intercepts email and drains battery life quickly, was pushed as an update to BlackBerry's on the Etisalat network. Sent to users as a wide-area protocol (WAP) message, the Java file intercepts data and sends a copy to a server without the user's knowledge.'

That is an extraordinary claim to make regarding a piece of software that Etisalat's official statement says was software 'required for service enhancements particularly for issues identified related to the handover between 2G to 3G network coverage areas.'

It is perhaps worth noting that the Chairman of SMobile Systems, quoted in the release, is a former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and so, we must reluctantly admit, carries some weight.

SMobile is not the only expert testimony that claims the notorious update is other than it seems. Besides the many people who believe that the Etisalat network is 100% 3G now and therefore does not present 2G to 3G cell handover problems, there are also a number who point out the fact that BlackBerrys haven't experienced cell handover issues for some time now - in fact, the only online references I can find to the handover issue date back to 2006.

Added to this, you have those who have examined the code - Qatar based programmer Nigel Gourlay was quoted widely in the initial coverage of the issue, but his assertions that the network update was in fact an attempt to install monitoring software have been backed up by respected security blog Chirashi Security - a white paper analysing the code in some detail, written by Sheran Gunarsekera, is linked here.

That white paper asserts that the code is a monitoring application. It also points out that the application was not properly implemented, pointing out that the application developers had not used any form of source code obfuscation - in other words, it shouldn't have been as simple to trace, upload and analyse the code as it in fact was. The code, according to the White Paper, is set up to hide itself from the user, attach itself to network events and report these to the service-provider's server and look out for control messages that enable interception of user messages. If enabled, the application will forward a copy of emails sent by the subscriber to the service provider's servers.

Damningly, the White Paper asserts that the code 'was not mature enough to be deployed. This is especially relevant if Etisalat planned to conduct full-scale legal interception on BlackBerry users.'

The Chirashi White Paper is scrupulous to point out that the application only forwards outgoing emails and not other message types and then only when the application has been enabled to do so - it does not report on emails by default. But it does make the point that the version of the interceptor software it analysed should not have been deployed - particularly not as part of a legal interception.

The White Paper also strays out of geekland into my domain when it asserts, in the context of requiring legal interception software to meet two criteria, to do no harm and to be thoroughly tested: 'A service provider should always be prepared for the worst. In case things do not work out as planned, there needs to be a dedicated PR team who is ready to step up and deal with the public. Users should not be lied to or ignored, they will accept it better if they know the provider is well within legal rights to perform such interception.' (The italics are mine, BTW)

Security company Veracode also analysed the upgrade last week, asking whether the fact that the implemented update contained both .jar and .cod versions was down to 'arrogance or incompetence?'. That's an area explored by a journalist from the region's leading telecommunications magazine, Comms MEA, here. Again, Veracode's Chris Eng reports that the clear purpose of the update, in his expert view, is to install a piece of software that, when activated, will forward user data to a third party server, presumably owned by the service provider.

All of this leaves me wondering quite what on earth Etisalat thought it was doing. And quite how our media is standing by and allowing Etisalat to simply claim that the great big elephant in the cupboard is in fact a pair of shoes.

Nobody I know has a problem with legal interception. I think most of us would recognise that it is highly desirable that the security agencies employed by our governments have access to the information they need in order to protect society in general. Those agencies are constantly monitoring network traffic, legally and within the charters and frameworks that govern their activity. We need them to be competent and we desperately need to believe in their competence and efficacy.

Similarly, we need to trust our telcos. As a commercial entity operating in a regulated and competitive free market environment, even the biggest telco has a duty towards its subscribers and a duty to tell the truth - not only to earn the trust of its customers, but to underpin the level of trust required by investors and multinational companies who wish to trade in that environment. Mendacity and silence are not good enough - people are still facing problems with their terminals even now because there has been no clear attempt to reach out to customers and fix this issue - let alone roll back the update. There are critical issues related to privacy and security that the operator has refused to address - and questions are now being asked by a wider community about the long-term implications for BlackBerry security in general as a result of this whole farago.

Finally, there is the issue of responsibility. Someone was responsible for this Keystone Cops attempt to police BlackBerrys and the subsequent lack of timely and appropriate response that turned a customer service problem into a full-blown case study in how fumbled issues management rapidly evolves nto crisis management and how ignoring a crisis simply, in today's commercial environment, won't do.

Trust

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Many journalists working for 'traditional' or 'mainstream' media have been arguing about social media, particularly Twitter and its lack of dept, context, analysis or comment. There's also an argument that social media platforms (blogs, Twitterings, Wikis, Forums) don't necessarily derive the truth in quite the balanced and reliable way as a trained journalist.

There's a counterpoint to that, with respected journalists taking to online like whale sharks to aquariums and aiming to apply the (admittedly somewhat idealistic) standards of journalism to that environment. I'd argue it's easier for journalists to do that - and do it well - because online doesn't put the same pressures of proprietorial, commercial and reputational restrictions on the practice of the profession as 'traditional' media such as newspapers do.

The argument that we need journalism to filter the raw content out there is a seductive one, but it sadly flies in the face of increasing evidence that the filters are broken - and that we are actually happier filtering the stuff we are interested in ourselves. That's doesn't necessarily mean we want to filter everything ourselves, just the stuff we're interested in. And the more interested we become, the more it becomes apparent that the filters aren't quite what they're claiming to be.

Here's a great example. Emirates Business 24x7 today reports that 'Emiratis go online against Harvey Nichols'. Now, for those of you wot doesn't know, UK top-end retailer Harvey Nichols has been accused of putting a t-shirt on sale that depicts a bulldog standing on a UAE flag.

This is not generally considered to be a clever thing to do - in fact, whoever authorised putting the damn thing on sale should be considered dangerously incompetent and, at the least, keel-hauled.

"Emiratis have organised a campaign on Facebook and Twitter to boycott Harvey Nichols in response to an offensive T-shirts for which they were also pulled up by the authorities." trumpets EmBiz24x7, albeit in an unconscious echo of Churchill's famous "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put"

The story is clear, no? There's a significant grassroots movement of furious Emiratis against the retailer. Except the story, suspiciously, doesn't quantify 'the movement'.

In fact, when we look beyond the headline, and the story underneath it, EmBiz24x7's story is stood up on a Facebook group of 21 members with 2 wall posts. I can't find any evidence of a concerted campaign on Twitter, searching for Harvey, Harvey Nichols and HarveyNichols - and there are no Tweets bunched under #HarveyNichols, while the #UAE hashtag features no Harvey Nicks but quite a bit of Etisalat's BlackBerry PR triumph.

In fact, the reader is not given the information to make up his/her own mind about the relevance, force or weight of this online campaign. Given access to that information (for instance, the data I have surfaced in this post) we'd all file the story (wouldn't we?) under 'non story why are you wasting my time with this?' - the very filtering that is supposed to be taking place on our behalf, no?

Tags: Shoot. Foot. Self. Media.

Silence is Golden

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The Etisalat BlackBerry update story has started to grow little legs now, with the coverage from Gulf News and ITP.net yesterday joined today by a story from The National and a GN followup. Both of today's UAE dailies focus on the irritation of subscribers and the silence of Etisalat, an angle that The National, in particular, highlights:

"Etisalat does not lack the ability to talk to the public. It is one of the UAE’s largest advertisers and it would be difficult to spend a day without seeing one of its promotions in print or on television. Its public relations machine is well oiled, putting out press releases daily..." says reporter Tom Gara before launching into an entertaining, if slightly surreal, series of nautical metaphors spanking the uncommunicative communications company.

Now coverage has gone international, with stories from Wired and from the UK's rightly feared (or revered, depending on which side of the industry fence you sit on. Rather marvellously, its tagline is 'Biting the hand that feeds IT') The Register.

It is, yes, a wee social media case study, this one. A single user posts some stuff he found on a specialist forum, triggering the swift passing of that information among a frustrated customer base that is being poorly communicated with. The news is examined, refined and passed on again, a great deal of that traffic going via Twitter BTW, and now it's going wild. Many media reports internationally are focusing on one or two media reports locally - the role of a single Qatari software expert being key right now in the coverage from 'mainstream' media as it is picked up by media outlets. In fact, both Wired and The Register covered the story from ITP.Net. And now uber-blog engadget has covered it from The Register. And if that isn't as bad as ReTweeting, I don't know what is!

Now major international technology media outlets are repeating a story based on the stated views of one man following his comments on a local blog. Scary, in its way. I'm not denigrating that expert, BTW: Nigel (and original discoverer DXBLouie) are both chaps that certainly appear to know a great deal about what they're talking about - as does Steve Halzinski, whose post on BlackBerrycool here still contains his considered view on the nature of the 'network update' that apparently forced BlackBerries into meltdown as they scrambled to contact an overloaded server.

News expands to fill a vacuum. Particularly a social vacuum. For what it's worth, my prediction is that this story will grow - Etisalat really needs to fill that vacuum before it does, although I suspect that by now the genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Marwa. Mainstream Media Fail? AGAIN?

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Egyptian Marwa El Sherbiny lived in Germany with her husband. Subjected to verbal abuse by a Russian man, Alex M, because she wore a veil, Marwa eventually took legal action against him. She was in the courthouse in Dresden when the man walked across the room and stabbed her 18 times with a knife he had brought into the coutroom. She died in the attack.

Marwa was pregnant.

Her husband rushed to help her, but he was shot by a policemen who apparently mistook him for the attacker. Having spent three days in a coma, he is currently in intensive care.

The man who stabbed Marwa is to be charged with murder. Early reports on Bild apparently said that the charge would be one of manslaughter. Interestingly, the vast majority of reader comments on the Bild website were horrified at the crime and how the man could have been allowed into the courtroom carrying a weapon.

The Guardian, finally, tells the story here. The incident took place on Wednesday last week and I picked it up when colleague Mai tweeted the news. Her first tweet on it came on Thursday (sparked by a tweet she had received linking to a report on Egyptian blog Bikya Masr) and was part of a growing tide of horrified Tweets from around the world reporting the incident. The horror expressed was both at the crime and at the way mainstream media appeared to be largely ignoring the incident - outside local German media such as Bild, which carried a report on its website the day the attack took place - there were no files from the major European newspapers and nothing from news agencies, either. Reuters, in fact, didn't file until Sunday 5th July, when it deigned to release a picture story caption showing protestors holding placards that said things like 'Our blood is red too, not cheaper than yours'.

As Bikya Masr points out quite correctly, European media coverage didn't break until almost a week after, when mainstream outlets started to report the protests in Egypt that took place. Those protests, as The Guardian points out, were fuelled at least in part by the way that the European media was seen to have ignored the killing. The Guardian's story, its first, was filed yesterday.

So, once again, we have news that travelled around Twitter, Facebook and blogs, the social media I talk so much about, but that was not considered newsworthy by the newspapers and TV channels that form 'mainstream media'.

At a time when the debate in Europe over women wearing the veil has been refreshed and brought into sharp relief by comments such as those made by Nicola Sarkozy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that a horrific murder committed IN a courtroom against a pregnant woman because she was veiled would be 'newsworthy' - the many people around the world who picked up the story from social media sources certainly thought so.

Now, a week later, we are seeing coverage of the protests - those comforting images of screaming zealots in the streets chanting for revenge that help people in Europe to 'understand' the Middle East.

The real question is why we didn't get to see that a gentle woman was killed in cold blood last week, when it happened. It took Twitter and blogs to tell us about that.

Slim

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As various posts over the past eight or so months have noted, Gulf News has been cutting back on the carbs and has dropped its weight from a rather turgid 1.3Kg in November 2008 to an average 640g in Feb 2009, a downward trend continued through May, which saw the paper taking up regular exercise and slimming down to an reasonably regular 540g.

It's been feeling lighter recently and I have generally resisted the mildly obsessive impulse to weigh it again, but today's edition felt noticeably more feather-like. And it is - thanks to my trusty weighing scale (the best Dhs19 I've spent at Lal's in a long time) I can report that today's GN is weighing in at 440g, something like a third of its original weight. I have to add the usual caveat - a Dhs19 scale is hardly capable of atomic accuracy.

I think we can all agree there's a trend here - it's hardly rocket science. The fact that the trend is continuing is a worry, though. GN has already apparently shed a number of journalistic jobs - albeit fudging this news with an example of corporate responsibility and transparency that should inform any company wishing to call the skeleton in the cupboard a 'new market opportunity'. Few will welcome the news of more to come.

Tortuous

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Here's something I think is worth sharing. It came to me (and therefore to you) by a tortuous route, I found the link on a comment to an article on Australian marketing uber-blog, Mumbrella (sorry Tim, can't be arsed with the caps and things). But that's how the Internet works, no?

It's the story of how the UK's Guardian newspaper crowdsourced a complex data mining job, using its online readers to help it sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of public records. By making the whole exercise accessible and enjoyable to the public, The Guardian effectively managed to arrange for something like 35,000 people to help intelligently sift through over 170,000 pages of public records unearthed by the great Commons Expenses Scandal. The result was that The Guardian managed to comb 170,000 pages of data in 80 hours, extracting the valuable stuff for its journalists to work on.

It's here. The site, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is a must-add for your RSS feed if you have any interest at all in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.

I love this case study because it's a really smart application of technology in the spirit of the IBM PC and the Toyota MR2 (two of my favourite things, both originally cobbled together by inspired innovators on shoestring budgets raiding their companies' parts bins). I love it because it's a witty and smart piece of journalistic initiative.

But most of all, I love it because it shows how much more powerful you are when you enlist the help of your customers in the development of your product - which means respecting your customer enough to believe they are worthy enough to begin to possibly understand the arcane intricacies of your unique and difficult profession. Calling for feedback, input, insight or participation from a wider commuinty extends your reach beyond your own organisation's staffing capabilities and brings a wider range of heads to a problem - sometimes solutions to a problem can come marvellously quickly from the uninvolved. It has the potential to broaden your capability to innovate, creates a stronger sense of connection and ownership from customers and folds marketing neatly into product development.

The article on Mumbrella was, incidentally, this one, where News Ltd's editorial director is being a goof about Twitter.

Is Mainstream Media DOOMED?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Does the fact that social media has been leading the coverage of the Iranian protests mean the end of MSM, or mainstream media?

My post yesterday attracted a couple of interesting comments from The National’s Jen Gerson and Insurgency Watch’s Christopher Allbritton. Both are highly respected journalists with ‘form’. Jen’s points also led to a thought-provoking post on her blog last night.

So, to continue the conversation, I thought it might be worth taking their points as a Q&A...

Tonnes of the #iranelection tweets were rehashed MSM coverage
A lot of people were retweeting links to MSM pieces, yes. But if you were following close or primary sources, you were also getting the voice of people on the ground. Some of those voices, incidentally, are suspect. You have to take care over who you’re following and how much salt you take with each report. The skill in that is little more or less than a journalist would use to balance sources – and I do think that many people today have a refined enough news sense and awareness of the Internet to be able to make those judgements by themselves. We're big boys and girls now...

Having said that, a guide to decent breaking news is no bad thing - there are a lot of people out there Tweeting links to things that engaged or amused them - and when you start including hashtags, you have a good contextual stream. If you follow the right people, BTW, you get a better editorial pick than if you follow less acute observers. The choice, you will see, is in who you choose to follow. Same with journalism, same with newspapers. I read Jen because I like her writing and find it insightful. I follow @catboy_dubai 'cos he's a pal and is amusing. I like @deafmuslim because she’s a great writer and quite potty – and challenges my view of things. I choose not to read Germaine Greer any more. I loathe the Daily Mail. My choice of, errr, 'media'.

The awesome pics are from wire services
Images from wire services? Yes, of course. They're the images that most Middle East newspapers will use because they haven't got their own snappers on the ground. So I'll take a Tweet of a Getty/Reuters pic today over waiting until tomorrow

But there were also a lot of important images that weren’t wire service stuff. Like this image, for instance, that struck me so much. BTW, at the moment itself I don’t think we’re looking at sourcing halfway decent images – we’re looking at witness report that tells the story. Quality is not the benchmark.

Verifying information doesn’t mean waiting for a second Tweet. It means calling round sources or being an eyewitness yourself.
Although I am, by dint of my own background as a journalist and writer, minded to agree, I also think we’ve moved on a little. While there is undoubtedly room for sober, reflected, contextual analysis (something we see all too little of, BTW, in our regional media as well as international media) there is also room to take the stream of eye-witness report and form a view from that. If you’re seeing 30-40 people on Twitter saying that police are hitting the rioters hard and then getting Tweets detailing injuries, the flow of events would tend to suggest a measure of reality coming from the ground. Combined with real-time reports from newswires or other sources, you’ve got the story in front of you, but the story presented in a way that no broadcaster can equal – eye witness accounts of events unfolding, real people, real emotion, real reaction.

I do think that MSM often fails to meet that standard of journalistic integrity, BTW. Again, particularly in our region, good, balanced reporting that takes the facts, challenges them and searches for balance, completeness and the three sides to the story (yours, mine and the other guy’s) is often notably lacking.

Disinformation is a problem with crowdsourced media
Agree – because you’re actually in the crowd and so you’re as prone to each new rumour and report that’s coming through. Which is why, going back to your first point, it’s vitally important that we DO have people like Reuters and AP on the ground. Or people like yourself or Christopher. But that’s journalism, not media. I have RSS feeds of the major newswires and get the stories as they break. So I can verify the big stuff – which gives credence to the little stuff. And so I can quickly build a picture of which Twitterers are ‘on the money’ if I want to.

But this comes down to the point, I think. I don’t need CNN or Sky to see what’s happening – in fact, the whole #CNNfail thing was about thousands (tens of thousands) of people feeling strongly that CNN’s editorial judgement was deeply flawed in not affording these events top line coverage. I think many news outfits were unprepared, under-resourced and under-educated on the whole Iran story. So what's better, a young, unprepared cub journalist pitched into covering the Tehran story from the Dubai bureau, or witness reports from on the ground?

By the way, I will never forget seeing journalists in my hotel in Amman reporting 'from the Iraqi border' during the Iraq invasion. Not all journalism is bad, but the really woeful stuff has dented public faith in the credibility of journalism a great deal. And no, I don't like that at all.

Blogging triumphalists don't give us enough credit
I don’t much like the tag ‘blogging triumphalist’, you’ll probably be unsurprised to know. I and many, many other people I know feel that we are not being well served by ‘legacy’ or mainstream media. But it’s the media I’m talking about – not journalism. Journalism online can positively thrive, Christopher himself is a brilliant example of that and I’ll add my two personal favourites, AdNation’s Eliot Beer and mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows. Both are former print journalists who have taken their work online and who are part of a richer, faster, more agile and more diverse online media that are winning people’s eyeballs because they give us what we want, how we want it and when we want it.

The crucial difference is that we can select what streams interest us. We can follow the people whose work engages us, whether they’re bloggers, Twitterers, photojournalists, writers or videographers.

And, by the way, one of those streams is wire services – the very same ones that fill the majority of the white space on the dead trees that are shoved into the hotel rooms, houses and offices of disinterested readers all over the Middle East every day. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to read a watered down version of Reuters’ piece on Tehran, it’s on my desktop in two seconds thanks to RSS. And the pictures, too. AND the eyewitness reports that flesh out my own personal understanding of, and emotional attachment to, what's going on.

Twitter is one part of this emerging new media story, one of the information streams open to us thanks to the Internet. As consumers, we are increasingly using these information streams to customise and streamline the content we believe is relevant to us.

We don’t need translators or people to hold our hands and give us the context that we, poor mortals, are too dumb to seek ourselves. And if that’s journalism’s defence (I do not believe it should be, BTW), then God help journalism.

Twitter 1 MSM 0

Image by inju via Flickr

Yesterday was interesting. Twitter once again ruled the news agenda of mainstream media (MSM) networks as the world's editors finally woke up to the fact (where have you been, CNN?) that something enormous, potentially agenda-changing and highly significant was unfolding in Iran.

From the beatings of students in their dormitories (a story that broke on Twitter, with Twitpics of damaged dorms and bruised students) through to the unfolding 'is it on is it off' drama of the march on Tehran by the green banner-waving opposition crowd (some estimates had it at 2 million and more), the news was happening on Twitter significantly ahead of coverage on the MSM.

This meant that major outlets such as CNN, ABC, Sky and the BBC were all reduced to referencing Twitter in their coverage. The actual Twitter output was massive, reaching several tweets a second going into the late afternoon, and the feeds started to get confusing with rumours spreading and people tweeting and retweeting new information almost regardless of its source. A colossal number of people used Twitter, blogs and Facebook to follow events in Iran yesterday simply because the traditional media failed so badly in understanding that we care about this news. It was a massive editorial misstep that you could argue was only avoided by the BBC which with its Persian service, was at least trying to stream live from the streets.

The news media on the ground, under-resourced, restricted and rightly fearful in the face of baton-wielding nasties in and out of uniform (Take a look at this chilling image of, I understand, government Basij militia from yesterday afternoon) simply couldn’t keep up with the flow of witnesses on the ground. Some quite organised student groups were using mobiles to text news from the crowd back to Twitterers who stayed online using their dial-up connections and switching proxy servers to keep trying to get the news through. It reminded me a little of Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger who kept information coming out of Baghdad in the face of the American invasion and Iraqi resistance.

Problems

This stream of information from a confused, dangerous and yet highly important series of events on the ground raises a number of problems. The first of these is provenance. How do you KNOW you’re watching a Twitter feed from a genuine Iranian student and not a hoaxer or, even worse, state-owned instrument of instability. For instance, a foreign intelligence outfit could quite nicely stoke up international concern and damaging coverage by pretending to be a witness – and we’re all credulous enough to take the bait because, let's face it, we want to see social media beating up the MSM.

So how do we know you’re real?

My own personal test is a website or blog. If the Twitterer links to one of those, you have the chance to have a quick browse and test an established track record and a history of conversation. Another test is personal relationship – if someone with whom I have an established online relationship can vouch for the new contact, then I’ll usually take that as a bona fide contact. And another is longevity - I prefer sources that were online and have a track record before the events in question took place.

Keeping a cool head can be hard in the face of the excitement, but there’s nothing worse than finding yourself accused of blindly repeating BS – or being unhelpful in your attempts to help. For instance, at the height of yesterday’s events, people were retweeting lists of alternative proxies. That was cluttering up the stream and generally getting in the way. If you’re based in North America and have no Iranian friends, retweeting a proxy server with an #iranelection hashtag is hardly going to add utility to the conversation, for instance.

Some MSM pundits were pointing out that the information on Twitter wasn’t reliable. I thought it was. Following the couple of simple rules above and waiting a little to have news confirmed by multiple sources, I got compelling information and images from on the ground witness sources often hours before the broadcast media.

The other thing I found interesting about yesterday was that the audience was self-selecting. Those of us that cared – because we have Iranian friends, relations, business interests or any other tie to the events in Tehran – could select the information we wanted and decide how we wanted to receive it. We could dip into the story for an update whenever we wanted, dedicating the appropriate measure of time we all wanted to give to updating ourselves. No advertising breaks, no filler stories about Ping Pong the panda and her lovely babies and no celebrity guff about Paris Modhesh or the like (you still there CNN?) getting in the way.

Was yesterday a great day for social media? Yes. Was it a worrying day for ‘traditional media’? Without a doubt, yes. Does this mean MSM is dead? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s a very clear signal that we are in a time of immense change and if big business news organisations don’t get it together fast, they’re going to get hit, hard.

People are finding a faster, fresher, more vibrant, immediate and real source of news and information. It's other people.

Gulf News. An Apology.

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In its editorial today, Gulf News exhibits an amazing mixture of ignorance and arrogance. I'm really not sure which is greater.

The paper's rant, the second* most idiotic piece of editorial comment I can recall in 15 long years of regular GN readership**, asserts that French company Alstom is 'defying international law' - presumably because it is working with the Israeli government (GN's madcap scribble asserts 'by seeking financial gains at the expense of justice and peace') on the Jerusalem railway project.

The paper then goes on to say, of Alstom, 'It must reconsider its position, and so must regional states that deal with the French company.'

States like the UAE, for instance?

• The 2,000 megawatt $2 billion Fujeirah power plant contract awarded by the UAE in August 2007? Or the 16-year maintenance contract for that very same plant it signed in 2008?
  

• The February 2006 $250million Dubal power plant contract? Or the power plant and fume treatment contracts with Sohar Aluminium Company and ALBA (Aluminium Bahrain)?
  

• The August 2007 contract for a $175 million 150Megawatt co-generation plant at Dubai's aluminium smelter, DUBAL?
  

• The June 2008 award of a $500mn tram network in Dubai (together with consortium partners Besix and Serco)? The Al Sufouh tramway is apparently under construction.
  

In fact, the most cursory search of Gulf News' own website reveals a long history of huge contract awards to the company in the UAE and the wider Middle East, with key and strategic elements of transport, power, water and other public infrastructure being supplied and maintained by the company across the entire region.

So what's the answer here? Are we really being subjected to the ranting of simian, gibbering idiots - or is Gulf News knowingly misleading its readers as to the extensive and ongoing dealings which the UAE and other Middle East governments have with this major multinational company?

Does it owe its readers an apology for its ill-considered and badly researched coverage of this issue? Or an apology for being craven in its 'clarion call'?


* The most idiotic award still belongs to the holocaust denial piece, which seems to have been taken down from GN's website.

** Jeepers. That's over Dhs 16,000 at today's rates! I want a refund!

Alstom and the Saudi Rail Project Story

Image by michallon via Flickr

Gulf News' remarkable cover story today is that French rail company Alstom is coming under pressure from a range of advocacy groups lobbying Saudi authorities to withdraw from their award of the Makkah to Madinah railway project to the company. Those groups, including the PLO and the PA, are angered that Alstom is building a light rail network in occupied Jerusalem.

The page one lead story for some reason completely fails to mention that Alstom holds the contract for Dubai's Al Sufouh tramline. The contract, awarded by the RTA to the ABS consortium, is worth over $500 million, with Alstom claiming some $280 million of that value in the partnership with felow consortium members Besix and Serco (who, respectively, put the BS into ABS). In fact, it's one of a number of significant contracts that Alstom has won in Dubai and the Middle East region as a whole - Alstom is a major player in power generation, too.

The Dubai contract for the Citadis railway system is actually significant as it will trial a new air-conditioning system on platforms for the first time. Citadis has been installed in over 28 cities around the world, according to the company.

Gulf News merely mentions that the company is 'eyeing' business in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And yet the Alstom contract award, made in April 2008, is the first result you get by googling 'Alstom transport Dubai'.

How strange, is it not, that Gulf News' journalists missed that fact when researching such an important story?

(By the way, Alstom itself makes no secret of its work in Israel - in presentations such as this one, the company cites its work in Jerusalem as a case study. Like many other corporate companies around the world, Alstom works globally including projects in the Arab World and Israel. We do all know that hundreds, if not thousands, of corporates do this, don't we?)

Association to Stand Behind "Good Bloggers"

Well, it's official. Bloggers facing legal action will be protected by the UAE Journalist's Association if they abide by the ethical code of the association, wash behind their ears and are kind to small furry animals.

Mohammed Yousuf, the head of the Association, told Emirates Business 24x7's Dimah Hamadeh:

"Bloggers and "virtual" journalists have the right to be protected by the Journalists' Association, provided they abide by the ethics code, including stating of facts and sources of information, avoiding defaming without tangible proof, or provoking hostility arising from religious, sectarian or race discriminations."

Yousuf, displaying a remarkable lack of understanding regarding the 'online world', goes on to tell Hamadeh that audiences still mistrust online media, a lack of credibility that leads to online often being perceived as a channel for spreading rumours and destroying reputations.

Tell that to Arabianbusiness.com, Zawya.com and maktoob.com, will you? Or to the many, many people that intelligently sift online sources to arrive at an informed and wider picture than is often available through the 'traditional' media that Yousuf freely admits in the piece are subject to a greater degree of censorship than online media.

Yousuf tells Hamadeh (who must have been struggling to hold a straight face) that the Association's mission is to "invite bloggers and online reporters to adopt professional standards."

All this on the sidelines of a two-day event that invited bloggers from the UAE and around the region to discuss the role of new media and journalism. I didn't see anyone Tweeting from the conference and I don't know of any bloggers that were there. I certainly didn't get an invite (snif) - did you?

Isn't it funny that the UAE's bloggers NEVER seem to get invited to events where online and 'new' media are being discussed in... err... the UAE?

But I think we're missing quite a big thing in all this talk of protecting bloggers who abide by the ethical code of the UAE Journalists' Association.

Bloggers. Are. Not. Journalists.

The BBC's eminent Hossam Sokkari rather confounded the Arab Media Forum's Token Blogger, Algerian Issam Hamoud, by asking him if he had always wanted to be a journalist - as if being a blogger is something that can only be explained by a frustrated urge to journalism.

I know some excellent journalists that have become bloggers and some excellent journalists who blog alongside their more traditional, more papery, roles. And I know many excellent bloggers that are not, don't want to be and wouldn't dream of being journalists.

I do wish they'd get this into their heads! Bloggers. Are. Not. Journalists.

This is a new thing, not another face of an old thing. It follows new rules - and raises ethical questions and questions of practice that are not touched by old codifications of good journalistic practice.

While I'm sure the UAE Journalists' Association's offer is kindly meant, it's barking up quite the wrong tree.

UPDATE
This story in Gulf News today, that Saudi Arabia is mulling putting an electronic publications law on the anvil, is another and slightly more worrying take on this very topic. Take a look here.

The Inconvenient Truth

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‘Dark side of Dubai’ journalist Johann Hari made much of the reaction to his article in The Independent when he put up a piece on the influential Huffington Post recently, playing the ‘poor mouth’ and using the overblown language that caused Dubai blogger Chris Saul to coin the ‘transgression too far’ mini-meme that had so many of us howling with laughter at the pompous hack’s expense.

The Dubai authorities have decreed that the article must not be read says Hari in his post, written and placed carefully up on the Internet when he knew perfectly well that the ban was not a policy decision, was not total by any means and was clearly not an official act. All facts made clear in the blog post by The National’s Jen Gerson he links to as proof of his banning.

Any honest man would have waited to see what the outcome of this clearly confused and idiotic situation was before screaming ban. But not Hari.

He links to Jen’s post as ‘one of many bloggers’ who have been discussing the ban. In fact, only two blogs have discussed the ban – mine and Jen's. If anyone knows of any others please do let me know. Mine, of course – the post that first exposed the daft Du block - is critical of The Great Hari and so wouldn't get linked to.

Hari also makes the assertion in his Huff post that he has also been told that he would be arrested or turned away at the airport if he came back to Dubai.

Who told him that? Does he really think he figures so large in the scheme of things that his name’s on every national immigration computer ready for the day that he comes back to save us once again? Is that an official response to him or a warning from a credible source? Or just another empty assertion intended to demonstrate how damaging The Great Man’s Truth has been to this evil and morally corrupt state?

It’s an example of the way that Johann Hari treats the truth – anything that doesn’t fit his purpose is quietly dropped from his skewed and distorted accounts. And that includes balance. The inconvenient truths, that his piece was not banned as a policy decision, that the ban was not called for, let alone authorised at any government level, that the Dubai authorities have decreed nothing of the sort and that it is highly unlikely that anyone could be arsed to arrest him, are missing from his Huffington assertions. As is the very likely scenario - that 'authority' here would have been mildly horrified at Du for trying to block the piece at all.

But then there’d be no piece to demonstrate to the world that Johann Hari, scourge of the unjust and bearer of the torch of truth, is important enough to ban, would there?

And that, one suspects, would be a transgression too far...