Twitter Outrage Shock Horror

Dubai's tittle-tattle-tastic tabloid treat 7Days today jumps the shark and manages to be the first paper in the UAE to completely stand up a story on Twitter. 'Beach snaps land Terrys in hot water' is the stuff of tabloid dreams and is based on England and Chelsea captain John Terry, on holiday in Abu Dhabi with his wife Toni, 'frolicking' in their hotel swimming pool and beach. The 7Days story is based on a number of mildly, in my opinion, invasive snaps run by the Daily Mail (the original snaps are linked here so you can throw a brick through the screen or write to your MP or whatever it is you want to do, but I do warn you that they contain a woman wearing a skimpy bikini so clicking on the link does rather imply that you wish to see this kind of thing)  last weekend.

7Days' story is classic tabloid stuff: "The Twittersphere has been set alight by a diatribe of disgust at photos..." it starts out - rich stuff, indeed! You'd have thought it trended or something, but of course setting the Twittersphere alight (the Twittersphere? It sounds like someone's dad trying to be cool and 'rad' with the kids. I hate the neologism as much as I hated Blogosphere) isn't really about empirical evidence of a tide of opinion so much as being able to pick out a few ranty tweets and fling them at a page of type. Which is, of course, what 7Days has done: the negative comments have been plucked from an almost negligible trickle of reaction to the Mail story on the 9th June, you can see how the Twittersphere can be 'set alight' by a handful of tweets by clicking this here link to a Twitter search of "John Terry" Abu Dhabi.

Of course, the 9th June Tweet from 7Days' own Twitter feed, @7DaysUAE  "England and Chelsea footballer John Terry spotted in Abu Dhabi: http://goo.gl/Abubm" now takes us to an empty page. Can't be seen to be stoking too much of that shock and outrage, can we chaps?

So what about the 'diatribe of disgust'? Take a look at the Twitter search above - there's very little beyond the tweets that have been selected by 7Days. A couple of people wonder how genuine Terry is, a few more discuss Toni's skimpy bikini. One person said, incorrectly, that the Terrys behaviour would have been treated more harshly in Dubai and one lady called Toni 'a WAG doormat'.

Two things we can learn from this:

One, a newspaper will stand up a half page story echoing a tide of righteous public disgust on an infinitesimal sample of Tweets. This distortion of expressed opinion coming, let us not forget, from those who purport to give us 'context and analysis' and help us poor rubes to understand what's going on by filtering the facts for our convenient consumption.

Two, if you're a-tweetin', there's nothing to stop a newspaper using your tweets in a story. You have spoken and done so in public and on the record. And like anyone who goes on the record, your opinion can be used in any way whatsoever, including out of context or as part of a story that distorts your intention. That's what makes going on the record so potentially dangerous.

By the way, I do not doubt most people here find the images at best vaguely incongruous and at worst offensive, but let us not forget that these people were in a private hotel beach, where a different standard of dress and yes, to an extent, behaviour has long been accepted compared that expected in public places, including public beaches, in the (highly tolerant) UAE. And they didn't choose to make these images public.

(I have to record the POV of one cynical pal who thinks actually they did choose to make these images public in a bid to court publicity. Who knows?)

The Arab Media Forum's Elephant

Image via WikipediaThere's going to be a pachyderm* in the room at this year's Arab Media Forum 2011, the event that sparked the very birth of this little blog. It's not a new elephant, but it's been getting bigger every year. This year, it's going to be interesting to see if a single delegate gets to squeeze in.

It's the Internet and the way in which our media landscape is not only being changed, but torn up and remodelled - not just by social media, but by our new information consumption habits. It is not, according to today's Gulf News and previous reports, a topic up for discussion. In fact, Gulf News' subs reach a new low today. Failing to stand up a headline with the story is one thing, but when you're failing to stand up sub-heads, my but you're in trouble. The sub-head in question, 'Social Media' is followed in the story by anything but any mention of social media at all.

The GN story's headline sort of frames the story: "Forum to look at impact of Arab Spring on media".

Isn't it interesting that the Arab Spring (sic) is having an impact on media rather than the other way around? I do wonder if the many portentous debates between 'important media figures' will include the appalling mendacity of the region's media when faced with the challenge of change - not least the Egyptian media's craven cries of 'Lalalalala' when faced with the stark facts of Tahrir.

Looking beyond the half inch of Methodist near-beer that is the debate about the Arab Spring and its impact on our media, you'd perhaps be forgiven for wondering why the impact of the online revolution that preceded, helped to drive and then was accelerated by that self-same spring isn't worth debating and highlighting. Perhaps it's not 'media' within the narrow definition of a Press Club. Although the people served by the media are increasingly deserting the paper form for online sources - and changing the way they consume media and the types of information they access.

It's a fundamental change in human communication that has helped to reshape our region, driving change across our societies and challenging many aspects of our media - including the practice of journalism, legislation, individual and collective freedoms, activism and responsibility. There is no greater challenge to our media, in fact. But it is obviously not the right 'media' for this forum. This year, we haven't even seen reports of a token blogger to lighten the mix.

Giddy up, Jumbo!

* Apropos of nothing, many, many moons ago, Gulf News reported on an mistreated elephant at Dubai Zoo. The picture caption, thanks to that strangest and most malign force, the GN Subs, referred to 'the unfortunate pachyderm', which triggered a scramble at Spot On to see who could fit the word into a piece of client work that day. Carrington won with brilliance, although I don't remember quite how.

The Unbearable Ubiquity of Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseI have now seen a number of friends taking nervously to Twitter, stumbling around for a while blindly and then giving up on it only to return a while later and find things generally easier and more productive than they ever would have thought. From being critics of the 'I don't want to know what you had for breakfast' school, they have become rabid adherents.

The increasing ubiquity of Twitter fascinates me. Its role in spreading news, information and opinion with blinding speed becomes ever greater - from small events of interest to only a few (Google's Android Market will expand to 99 countries, excluding the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - the region's three largest markets. Thanks, Twitter) through to its role in the 'Arab Spring' alongside cousin/rival/deadly enemy Facebook.

All this stuff is leaving 'traditional media' rather racing to catch up. The Arab Media Forum this year, Gulf News tells us, is to discuss the way in which events in the region have impacted regional media - rather tellingly, there's no discussion of media's role in those events.

I was disconcerted while in the UK to hear Sky News telling me that "the British Foreign Secretary has tweeted he is to meet Hillary Clinton". That one really gave me pause for thought - a national news channel reporting on a tweet? And it's now commonplace for journalists to 'stand up' stories on tweets - not just the Hollywood gossip tabloid stuff, but serious news stories. Mind you, I was equally disconcerted (not to say amused) to learn that Pippa Middleton's bum had its own Facebook page before the wedding was over!

One area where I do have increasing issues is in media reporting the weight or movement of public opinion by citing Twitter. One story in Gulf News today on the possible accession of Jordan and Morocco to the Gulf Co-Operation Council (the Middle East equivalent of the EEC) tells that 'a number of Twitter users specifically targeted Morocco for criticism...' It's by no means the only example of media citing Twitter as 'public opinion'. Fanboy that I am, it's not.

While undoubtedly true, 'a number of tweets' is hardly empirical evidence of a shift or trend in public opinion. But then we're all beginning to accept it: if it's not on Twitter, it didn't happen, aren't we?

Talking of traditional media, today's Gulf News piece on the newspaper that removed Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomasoni from the now-famous 'White House Situation Room' OBL picture because they may be considered 'sexually suggestive' is rather coy about quite WHICH newspaper did this. It was this newspaper, a Brooklyn based orthodox Chasidic Jewish newspaper. Presumably GN felt it couldn't for some mad reason use the word 'Jewish'. I do feel somewhat misled - I'd originally thought it was perhaps a Saudi paper... but I had to find out the crucial (remember 'when what when where why how'?) details myself online.

Context and analysis? Nah, I'd rather trust Twitter...

Middle East Expert

Image via WikipediaWatching Sky News last night, I was infuriated to see, once again, a random person interviewed and billed on the strapline as a 'Middle East Expert'. It's something I hate with a passion, to the point where I got told off for talking at the TV again. Yes, I really am turning into a grumpy, spittle-flecked old bastard.

This awful, lazy habit of validating people with a label rather than a credential is a major problem with mainstream media. When we've got The Observer trotting out the canard that we need 'proper' journalists to give us more trustworthy sources of information than 'citizen journalists', we're obviously being told to sit back and trust our media, take whatever they feed us as gospel and meekly accept that someone who Sky News calls a 'Middle East Expert' is, indeed an expert. And on the Middle East, at that.

And yet that's a great deal less validation than I'd expect of a source on Twitter, say. Who says he's an expert? What's the measure of expertise? Why not give his title, which presumably would be Dean of Middle Eastern Studies at London University or Middle East Analyst at the United Nations? Or is the problem that he's a lobbyist, baker or perhaps a candlestick maker? Don't get me wrong: I don't care if he's a candlestick maker if he's making sense and putting forward a credible argument. But I still want to know what he is so I can filter my judgement of what he's got to say.

I see this process all the time myself. I'm the Group Account Director of Spot On Public Relations. I'm a PR guy. I'll accept communications consultant. Media don't like to put 'PR guy' out there against their nice, glib commentator, so they like to change my job title. I have been a 'social media expert' (ugh) and once, to my extreme, squirming embarrassment, a 'social media guru'. I have been, on many occasions a 'blogger' and even a 'prominent blogger' and, again once, a 'leading blogger'. Would you trust a 'leading blogger' or a 'PR guy'?

It's a no brainer, isn't it?

When I shot a scene for Piers Morgan in Dubai, I gave the producer my business card. On the segment, I appear in the desert with the immortal words, 'Ex-journalist and blogger' under my name. Not 'Group Account Director' or 'Public Relations Professional'. 'Ex-jounalist' neatly rubs away the vague, if evaporating taint that comes with 'blogger'.

So you can only begin to wonder at the vested interest disguised by 'Middle East Expert' or 'Defence Expert'. It infuriates me precisely because I know how very dishonest the practice is - from a media that insists on telling us that it is the only trustworthy source out there these days.

The Tent Next Door

Image via WikipediaAmerican President Lyndon Johnson once memorably said of J. Edgar Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

It's a quote that often comes to mind when I see the behaviours of the UAE's newspapers. A journalist on one of the Arabic papers many years ago told me memorably that the trick to being an Arab journalist is never to piss in your own tent. Always do it into next door's.

It's remarkable to compare the coverage of the Sharjah Taxi Crisis in today's Dubai-based Gulf News with that in the Abu Dhabi-based The National. I posted about the issue earlier this week - basically Sharjah taxi drivers are being charged to drive at a rate of Dhs0.52 per kilometre, rendering their ability to make money, already limited by fines, charges and high commission targets, almost untenable.

Gulf News buries the story as a side panel to the page 3 piece, 'Abu Dhabi taxi drivers' protest continues'. In the side panel to the main Abu Dhabi story, GN avers that residents are having problems getting a cab as Sharjah taxi drivers 'refused to work for a third day in a row'. The story is also way down the pecking order on the website - Tom Cruise gets a great deal more coverage. I can't find the Sharjah nib on the website at all. But the extraordinary lack of detail in GN is neatly exposed by The National's reporting.

'Hundreds of cabbies quit over new fuel deal' is The National angle. A bit more dramatic than residents finding it hard to get a cab, isn't it? The National story is well worth a read - according to the paper over 400 cabbies have walked out and the regulator is quoted as saying that 'not even a quarter of the 4800 cabbies are on strike' which I take to mean, because I love phrases like 'not even', that at least 1,200 cabbies are refusing to work.

I don't know if I'd be brave enough to go on strike if I were a cabbie here, particularly if I had a family back home dependent on my remittances. I have posted many, many times about the iniquitous and draconian regime of the taxi companies here, specifically in Sharjah because I have my 'inside man', the lugubrious Mr. G. If you're interested in the full picture, here are those very posts. To actually stand up and defy them must take guts - or desperation.

Sharjah's Gulf Today, of course, merely burbles ridiculously about bus driver standards and training in today's edition because covering possibly the largest labour dispute in the Emirates' recent history is in no way in the public interest (Yes, I know the public interest has nothing to do with it, I'm just saying).

Gulf News deserves to be held to a higher standard than Gulf Today, though. And in this, it has failed. Its silence is nothing less than shameful - and its shame is clearly exposed by The National. Which itself fails to mention the ongoing dispute between Cars Taxis and its drivers in Abu Dhabi, now into a second day of strike action according to Gulf News.So The National hardly holds the moral high ground here.

The lesson in this is clear, though: if you want to find out what's really going on these days, pop over to the tent next door for a gossip. But don't forget to wear rubber-soled shoes.

When Words Fail

Image by thismanslife via FlickrToday's soaraway 7Days reports on the American swimmer, Francis Crippen, who died on Saturday during the Fina swimming competition held in Fujeirah. A world class swimmer and an experienced athlete, Crippen had reportedly told his doctor he wasn't feeling well but had decided to continue his swim. He didn't finish the race and his body was found in the water.

The response of the executive director of the UAE Swimming Association, as reported by 7Days, seems almost incredibly unfeeling. "We are sorry that the guy died but what can we do. This guy was tired and he pushed himself a lot." are the words the paper attributes to Aymen Saad.

I have to confess the callousness of the response to an event that the President of Fina called "A terrible tragedy" amazed me. Then I read Gulf News' report of the same official's response to the tragedy. GN quotes Saad as saying: ""The medical report from the doctor corroborates the fact that the swimmer was extremely tired and that is the reason why he lost control during the competition. He died due to the effort he made to finish the race."

The difference in tone is remarkable. From callous, offhand and unfeeling to appropriately factual and sober in the face of tragedy. We have two stark choices here - and I am deeply concerned that two papers can report one man's words so differently. So which one is wrong?

And what DID the official say?

Observer - Sex Shock or Crap Shlock?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This article in today's Observer (the Sunday newspaper of The Guardian) did rather strike a chord. I'm not much of a Dubai apologist but have to confess that having lived here for the past 17 years (I've been travelling around the Middle East for the past 24 and yes, thank you, I do feel old) the old place must be doing something right to keep me here.

I'm not about to set myself up ready to leap to Dubai's defence as everyone points out how crap it is. I spend enough time pontificating in various media already without adding 'official apologist' to my job title. But the Observer piece by 'William Butler', apparently recently returned after four years in Dubai, really does take the digestive.

There is a thriving sex trade in Dubai and I have seen it with my own two eyes. A great deal more could be done to address said trade, without a doubt. But if you really clamped down on that trade, along with many other trades in the city's margins and hideaways, you'd start to peck away at the principles that make Dubai a pleasant place to be in - that we're all pretty much left alone to do whatever we want as long as we're reasonably discreet and don't take it too far. That has always been at the very core of the Dubai I have been travelling to and living in since the eighties. They like to call it 'laissez faire'. I'm not arguing that this is perfection, but it's a damn sight better than an across-the-board 'No, you can't'.

So it's not that the piece is wholly inaccurate, it's just that it's peppered with silly errors, sweeping statements of fact that are unsustainable and unfounded assertions. So a piece that could have been a well-argued, explosive investigation into the trade and its many victims is, instead, a badly cobbled together and sloppy tissue of baseless assertion. What a wasted opportunity.

'I asked her what she did for a living. "You know what I do," she replied. "I'm a whore."
I know this is one man's word, but I wouldn't write that line into one of my books.

"It was obvious that every woman in the place was a prostitute. And the men were all potential punters, or at least window-shoppers."
Every woman a prostitute and all the men punters? In a five star hotel bar? Must be a different bar to all the ones I've gone to over the years... How is a prostitute 'obvious' in this way? The burden of proof here is met by some bloke's idea of what a prostitute looks like? What next from the Observer? "It was clear they were all gay"?

"Dubai is a heaving maelstrom of sexual activity that would make the hair stand up on even the most worldly westerner's head."
I'm really, really sorry but I must have been living an unusually cloistered life, a 'heaving maelstrom'? What have I been missing out on all these years?

"It is known by some residents as "Sodom-sur-Mer".
No it's not. Certainly not by anyone I know. Maybe to William Butler and his best friend Yeats. It's a daft epithet and too wooden to be popular.

"Western girls fall for handsome, flash Lebanese men"
This is simply awful. Is the Observer telling us that Dubai, the place where young people from all around the world come to seek opportunity,  is responsible for inter-cultural relationships? Pity the poor ugly, boring Lebanese men, too...

"most of the "romance" in Dubai is paid-for sex, accepted by expatriates as the norm"
This is absolute rubbish. Quantify 'most of the romance'. Nobody I know of accepts paid-for-sex as the norm. Why is this man allowed to assert such complete tosh in a national newspaper?

"Virtually every five-star hotel has a bar where "working girls" are tolerated, even encouraged, to help pull in the punters"
More baseless assertion. We aren't told how hotels encourage prostitutes to help pull in the punters. Most hotels are more than happy to give incentives to FaceCard holders, Emirates staff. But encouraging prostitutes? How, precisely?

"it would be hard to take into account the "casual" or "part-time" sex trade. One recent estimate put the figure at about 30,000 out of a population of about 1.5 million"
Whose estimate? I've got no problem with the number, crumbs, double it if you want - fill your boots. But prove it - at least have a source or a credible figure quoted. Again, we wouldn't let a press release out with that kind of fact standing up a story and I wouldn't expect it to last ten minutes out there if we did. Why the hell is a respected paper running this sort of thing?

"Although strictly illegal under United Arab Emirates' and Islamic law, it is virtually a national pastime"
Virtually a national pastime? WTF? We are, surely, losing the plot here...

"A few drinks with the lads on a Thursday night, maybe a curry, some semi-intoxicated ribaldry, and then off to a bar where you know "that" kind of girl will be waiting. In the west, peer group morality might frown on such leisure activities, but in Dubai it's as normal as watching the late-night movie."
No it's not. This is rubbish. And, again, it's uninformed opinion.

"Middle-aged men in responsible jobs – accountants, marketeers, bankers – who for 10 months of the year are devoted husbands, transform in July and August into priapic stallions roaming the bars of Sheikh Zayed Road."
This is amazing. I am quite sure that some of the 'summer bachelors' do indeed go astray, but this image of a city filled with 'Priapic stallions roaming the bars' every summer is bunkum. Lonely drunks, maybe.

"In my experience, many men will be unfaithful if they have the opportunity and a reasonable expectation that they will not be found out."
Why superimpose your experience of morality on everyone around you, particularly when it is quite so egregious? This 'experience' says more about the author than we perhaps need to know...

"Above all, there is opportunity. There is the Indonesian maid who makes it apparent that she has no objection to extending her duties, for a price; the central Asian shop assistant in one of the glittering malls who writes her mobile number on the back of your credit card receipt "in case you need anything else"; the Filipina manicurist at the hairdresser's who suggests you might also want a pedicure in the private room."
Singling out the nationalities like this is also telling. I have never heard of an Indonesian maid who extends her duties - certainly not willingly. I know one Sri Lankan maid who'd probably give you a good smack for even suggesting anything of the sort. And as far as manicurists (does she have to be Filipina, Observer?) go, those I know would be hurt and offended at the very idea.

"Cyclone, a notorious whorehouse near the airport, was closed down a few years back, but then it really did go too far – a special area of the vast sex supermarket was dedicated to in-house oral sex."
This is clearly crap. Cyclone was a nightclub, albeit one increasingly notorious for the 'working girls' to be found there. But it was not a whorehouse - and it was closed before 'William Butler' came to the UAE. So he is just (as he does much of the time) reporting overheard tittle-tattle rather than researched or sustainable fact. In the latter days I avoided Cyclone, it was never really my kind of place (being a middle aged Priapus every summer, you understand), but I'd love to see the evidence for an area of 'the vast sex supermarket' (whaat?) being dedicated to anything of the sort. And let us not forget, Cyclone. was. shut. down.

It's simply not good enough. This is not great journalism, this is not investigative reporting. It's a poorly hacked together, ill-informed job from a freelance former expat that a lazy editor has just unquestioningly jacked into the system to fill a page or two and it is the sort of thing that people here will point to when arguing that media freedom is a bad thing.

It's interesting that comments are not enabled on the online version. The Observer not willing to countenance another wave of clarification of the sort that expats have helpfully contributed to previous Dubai bunkum pieces?

I'd love to see this shameful rubbish referred to the PCC...

Turbulent Times

Take a look at the adword placement below the headline. Neat, huh? The Du ad is, BTW, by no means the first time that their clap-happy strapline has been at odds with the news it appears against!

The Times of India yesterday reported that Emirates' EK530, the plane that hit heavy turbulence en-route to Kochi, 'dropped 15,000 feet in a few seconds'. This, the key fact in the TOI story, seemed pretty unbelievable - 15,000 feet is nigh-on three miles and you'd have to be dropping at above the speed of sound to do that in a 'few seconds' (about 15 seconds at Mach 1), which would, incidentally, be way above the likely terminal velocity of an airliner. Wow! Do I win anorak of the year?

In fact, a short period of heavy turbulence, including a reported drop through a 200ft air pocket, meant minor injuries sustained by some 20 passengers. Things could have been a great deal worse and EK's pilot certainly deserved the round of applause he apparently got when the plane landed.

The TOI piece, obviously in error, still hasn't been corrected and a lot of people took that amazing fact at face value - you've got to admit, a 15,000 foot hellish power-dive is a great story and was likely the one fact in the piece that sent it global with amazing rapidity (Twitter was all a-Twitter, of course!). Without that attention-getting 15,000 feet, we'd just have a minor incident.

So here's the payoff. You're the TOI and you've got a story that is factually bonkers but which is driving huge traffic to your website. Do you correct it and lose your news value or do you leave it up and sit back to count the hits?

The New Media Law

Image via Wikipedia

This is a depressing column from Abdullah Rasheed, Gulf News' Abu Dhabi editor, today, written on the occasion of the much-delayed debate by the Federal National Council regarding the new Media Law for the UAE. I sincerely believe that Rasheed's words are required reading for anyone living here.

In it, he argues that media freedom has decreased in the UAE and calls for an end to the culture of censorship and silence in response to media that has become so common recently. "journalists battle to get even the simplest information due to non-co-operation of most official bodies" he says.

He points out that the number of UAE National journalists has dropped. And he points to a wide range of other major issues that are contributing to producing a national media that is uncompetitive. That international news sources and the Internet are sought as alternatives by those who feel un-served by the media. "Journalists are no longer doing their duty, meaning that the press is no longer monitoring the peformance of government."

The one point he doesn't make is that media struggling with all these issues are not challenging organisations in the UAE to respond as harshly as they could (and should) be - and the result of that is there is no culture of debate, argument or managing investigative media. You could well argue that a great deal of the negative international coverage has come about because of the inept way in which UAE organisations manage their relationships with international media - precisely because, of course, the counter-critical culture of the UAE is not mirrored elsewhere. To their surprise, UAE 'press officers', and the people they report to, discover all too late that journalists working for international media who are fobbed off or simply told 'there is nothing here' won't stand for it and will not only report, but do so with considerable vigour, too. Worse, they're being aided and abetted by social media. A leaky shark tank is not a minor problem with a malfunctioning valve when consumer-generated footage of an entire mall underwater is out there in the wild, for instance.


Decent spokespeople, sound media policies and sensible media relations can't develop in the absence of an empowered media. Those skills are critical, IMHO, to the future of the UAE as a player on the world stage - and so is a media that is allowed to get on with the job of reporting the facts in service of its readers, listeners and viewers.

Twitter and the Crash

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Gormenghast and the Future of Publishing

Image via Wikipedia

Longer-suffering readers of this silly little blog will know about Harper Collins’ authonomy website and my opinion of it. For those that weren’t around, this post pretty much explains things. The post was something of a bombshell in its time, BTW.

Authonomy was Harper Collins’ attempt to harness the process of change that the Internet is undoubtedly going to bring to publishing in a similar fashion to the change it is bringing the music industry. Although the company scrupulously avoided outlining any strategy, it is my opinion that the overall gameplan was to create a website that would attract authors and encourage them to put their books online (Authonomy), a website for readers (Book Army) and then allow the authors to ‘self publish’ for the readers by using a POD (print on demand) supplier. Today’s POD systems can create high quality single books at near-market prices.

The Authonomy deal was this: if you made it to the top five books each month on Authonomy, a Harper Collins editor would read and critique your manuscript, or MS. Getting an MS in front of a Harper Collins editor is a bit like getting ten minutes with Warren Buffet to chat about your new business proposal – and just as difficult. So it’s no wonder that the site soon attracted something in the region of 6,000 writers. You’d be surprised how many carvers there are living around Castle Gormenghast.

My ‘generation’ on Authonomy (before anyone starts squealing ‘sour grapes’, I made it to the top five and got a ‘gold star’ as well as a crit from an HC editor. You’ll have to read the ‘backstory’ linked above to see what I thought of it) was pretty much the first ‘wave’ of writers to discover the site and consisted of a heck of a lot of really talented people. With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop. Although there was a huge element of popularity and ‘plugging’ of books, we reasoned that if you could market yourself on Authonomy, it just proved you could market yourself in the real world too, so was fair game as part of the mix that makes a book.

It looked very much as if HC had created a site that was intended to do what the Internet does best – improve access and disintermediate the gatekeepers, in this case the agenting system that means that only books with obvious mass market commercial potential get through to publishers. Now it looked as if readers could actually vote for the type of book they’d like to see in bookshops – and if HC was to add authonomy winners to its lists, there’d be a new and wonderful outbreak of crowdsourced work to choose from. I can honestly say, BTW, that I read more work that I would buy on Authonomy than I have seen in bookshops all year. Really.

Of course, it was not to be. The POD plan lurked and I ‘outed’ HC when they sent a private email to some of us offering us beta list status. I accused the company of being insincere, in offering a clear ‘get published’ carrot when in fact it only ever intended to create a POD site to hedge against the tide of innovation. It is still my humble opinion that this was the case.

But something else has happened as a result of authonomy, something rather wonderful. In fact several things.

One thing is that I have stayed in touch with a relatively close-knit group of writers I admire and respect, and we’re just as much in touch a year after we all wandered away from Authonomy muttering darkly (A huge number of people have left the site, disaffected with the whole game and the way HC has chosen to play it).

A much more important thing is that the disaffection and annoyance at the ‘traditional’ publishing industry and the way it treats writers has resulted in two groups of writers from authonomy creating real, truly important (IMHO) initiatives that I believe are much more about the true future of publishing than Authonomy.

Year Zero Writers

Dan Holloway is a lecturer by day and maverick by night. Actually, he’s probably pretty maverick by day, too, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The author of the evocative and hauntingly beautiful Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, Dan founded the Year Zero Writers group as a collective designed to pool resources and talent in a way that would enable writers to reach out to audiences with their books. You can find out more about Year Zero here. Dan’s Year Zero projects include Free-e-day (see the BookBuzzr link below) and (to my knowledge) the first ‘FaceBook book’ (The Man Who Stole Agnieszka’s Shoes was written in weekly instalments on a FaceBook group, taking the input of readers to mould the plot). has seen Year Zero growing in popularity, attracting readers and participants and spawning a vibrant writers’ blog that is attracting readers in a most satisfactory manner.

Four books have been ‘published’ by Year Zero and more are planned - one compilation of short stories (Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair) and three novels. You can go to the Year Zero site, interact with the authors, find out more about their work (it is excellent) and then either download a PDF (free - in other formats here) or order a printed copy (paid for) of those books (the links are to Dan's 'Songs'). Although not the most active member of Year Zero, I am deeply proud to be associated with it.

Dragon International Independent Arts

Diiarts is a small independent imprint founded by writer Sarah Jane Heckscher-Marquis, which on November 14th will ‘conventionally’ publish four books that were hugely popular on authonomy and that represent, along with the three books that Year Zero has announced, some of the first books to have been published as a result of the authonomy project.
SJ has taken the highly unusual step of getting so frustrated at seeing great fiction (and I would personally, having read large amounts of all of them, commend them most highly to you, particularly Paul House’s stunning work, Harbour) mouldering on the slushpile and being overlooked by the Groans that she has put up her own money to publish some of her favourite work from the site. With the avowed intent of creating and maintaining her own small list of high quality fiction, she has had the pick of the best stuff on authonomy and has, I believe, chosen wisely.

As SJ says in the diiarts.com launch press release, “We believe there is a great deal of high quality, distinctive writing out there, which the larger publishers are just not picking up. Not only are readers missing out, but we’re losing something of the richness and diversity of the English language. We’re in danger of losing the spirit of innovation and thoughtfulness that’s been the hallmark of the English novel since we invented it. What we’ve seen is that more and more authors are expected to compromise on their vision, their voice and their artistic values, to cut their work down at whatever cost to fit supermarket display racks. We believe—passionately—that our authors should be in control of their own work. When they are, great books are the result.”

What has me chuckling evilly is the fact that both of these initiatives came about as a result of Authonomy. And, of course, I believe they both represent different facets of the change that will eventually lead to the flooding of Gormenghast - 'e-books' and small, independent publishers who are passionate about books, not shareholders, together will forge what I believe to be the future of publishing.

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...

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

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!)

A Beautiful Failure

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My post earlier this week about the days of makeup and SprayMount drew a couple of starry-eyed comments from fellow ancients who could remember the smell of galley being pasted down onto board, which was lovely. But a link I got from Nieman Labs yesterday night really made me stop and think about these things. Bear with me, this might just be relevant somehow, in some way.

Digital design agency Information Architects took part in a pitch to redesign Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and lost the pitch in what they describe, rightly IMHO, as a ‘beautiful failure’. They had applied ‘new world’ design thinking to a newspaper. And golly, what an interesting set of ideas they presented. Their piece on it is linked here and I do recommend a read.

Newspaper design has long been predicated on the need to control the readers’ eyes, big bold headlines scream important story, type is arranged to give the reader a progression through the page, elements are balanced so that readers’ eyes find information in a logical, flowing way. Typography is used to denote importance – a bold cap in white space draws attention, an italic caption under a picture is an element we recognise and expect. In fact, if the text floating immediately under a picture weren’t a caption, we’d be wrong-footed by the discontinuity.

But Information Architects did a brilliant thing. They designed their newspaper as a paper for a digital age reader, recognising the fact that our habits, our expectations of the format of content, have changed.

The first thing that really got me going was that they had put important text keywords in blue. I thought that was amazing. Although, obviously, paper doesn’t hyperlink, we now know what blue means – it means a keyword. Together with their decision to go for a big body text with big leading, this meant their proposed body copy didn’t look like a newspaper. But IA had already realised that: they took the conscious decision to throw out ‘conventional’ newspaper design – the idea that a newspaper should somehow follow rules that made it look like a newspaper.

They did a lot of other cool stuff, too – mixing column formats and using infographics, big pictures and left to right, top to bottom prioritisation of stories, much of which was informed by using a ‘web-centric’ approach to design. But it’s the blue keywords that would have been a ‘beautiful’ revolution.

While you obviously can’t click on the blue words in the paper, IA’s idea was that by scanning these keywords, you should be able to read the basic, core, news on the page in 10 seconds. The paper’s website would mirror these keywords with a link to a series of sub-links arranged chronologically. That’s a huge decision, meaning that the journalist, or in this unfair world the sub-editor, would have to pick out the keywords for the reader – a new skill in itself. And then the web team would have to work with those words to provide depth and context behind them (something you could see a technology like Zemanta taking a role in). It’s an exhilarating idea that links print to web and challenges the way that information is presented, managed and prioritised by the ‘traditional’ medium because it recognises the way we have changed in the way we browse, consume and identify information.

(Zemanta is a cool plug-in I use to provide me with contextual information related to blog posts - it selects copyright-free images for me to use and provides 'autolinks' for posts. I don't usually use the links but I did in this post both to 'blueify' it and also to show how a technology like Zemanta could be used to help automate the production of links for a project like Information Architects' newspaper. Okay, okay I'll be a good boy and get back to the snarky, goofy stuff next week, promise.)

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.

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?

Image by luc legay via Flickr

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.

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.

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.

Iran Media Coverage Fail

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Watching Sky News over the weekend just reinforced my growing irritation with ‘traditional’ media. There’s a big bust up over budget caps in Formula One racing and Ferrari, among others, is playing hardball with F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone – a news item repeated constantly through the weekend. At no point did anyone explain what the bust up was actually about. The repetitive coverage of the same news file means we never drill down into the story and so I end up having to Google it to find out the answers to my obvious questions - the questions, incidentally, of journalism 101 - what, where, why, when, who, how?

Similarly, there’s no analysis of Mousavi’s role in the Iranian elections, no depth on offer at all, just a number of sound bites filmed with over-excited girls in hijab. And so I have to Google him, too, to get the background I feel I need to form my opinion.

By Saturday afternoon, I've given up watching repeats of Tim and Ashish and I’m getting my Iran election news from Twitter – a good selection of opinions, breaking news and links to better and more in-depth sources than Sky. I’ve not even got a Twitterfall going on it, that’s just the commentary from Tweeple. And the Iranians among them are sharing links to articles that reinforce and deepen my knowledge of the elections, widening my horizons and engaging my (I admit, unusually active) curiosity.

Amanda Knox is standing trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher. That one’s repeated again and again, but there’s no coverage of her actual testimony. Whatever happened to the boyfriend? Again, Sky ain’t telling. Googled.

So I'm getting my news analysis from search, from Twitter and from online news sources. And increasingly I'm getting my news from these sources, too. Because Sky, an important UK news provider, simply isn't giving me the news I want with the information, intelligence and drill-down I want.

Increasingly, I’m finding that my, and others’, curiosity is finding itself satisfied by online sources and not news media. Other people are asking the same questions and the answers are easier to find online through social sites, searching news sites, using RSS. I’m getting more depth of information, a broader reach of public opinion – both international and local to the event – and talking to people about stuff as it develops.

This morning there’s a new Twitter hashtag - #CNNfail – and it's a top 'trending topic' on Twitter, a reaction from thousands of people using Twitter who are learning more about the elections and subsequent riots there from Twitter than they are from CNN - which has been apparently failing completely to cover the entire process.

As traditional newspapers continue to struggle, many depending on newswires that consumers are perfectly able to read for themselves and unable to deliver the breadth of witness, comment and opinion available to us online, I do wonder how long it will be before we finish with this pointless journalism/bloggers debate and recognise that our news media is changing in a fast and fundamental shift that will wipe out many of the less agile players.