Arab Media Forum Faces New Media Challenges. Shock Horror.

This is in no way a gratuitous plug for the 'book of the blog,' you understand.

This blog, as readers of Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years will know, started around The Arab Media Forum 2007. This was mere coincidence, not by any means a result of the forum which I have never attended and likely never will attend. In fact, as the first post attests, we were sitting at home eating Lebanese takeaway.

There seems to be even more intense debate at this year's forum (judging from the reports one sees on Twitter) about the 'role of new media' and all that. It's an interesting debate - some may argue taking place a little late in the day - particularly in this region, where reporting is so very dangerous and the conflicts so very real - and, as all conflicts necessarily are - polarised and messy. Making sense of these things is tough, dangerous and hard - journalism, true journalism, is a thankless and wearying job. But some people are just plagued with that need to delve down to uncover the truth and then get it out there into our hands so we can make more informed judgements about the world around us.

Shame there are all too few of these in the Middle East, but that's the breaks.

The Great Debate, of course, has moved on. It's no longer about whether digital media are relevant, but whether traditional media is relevant. You'd hardly have thought that from the Forum, which includes the session, "Digital Media: Authority Without Responsibility". Apart from a few 'digital heads' the debate at the Forum remains principally analogue and although there are nods to a process of transition, there is no sense that this transition could easily well take the form of disintermediation.

The Forum's first session was, in fact, "Conventional Media vs. New Media" - the program outlines the problem as this:

News industry is remarkably challenged by the emerging “new media” platforms. This synthetic prelim produced unprecedented dilemma for traditional journalism and undoubtedly added more complications.

Quite.

Of course, what the debate lacks is a sense of where humanity's eyeballs are going. Are people consuming as much local media as before? Does it carry as much weight with the public? Is the Arab News media seen as credible compared to online and first hand sources? Where are people going for news these days? Gulf News or the Daily Mail Online?

That research could have underpinned a viable and vibrant debate framed by the scale of the challenge facing print media and the practicses of print media journalism. Events in Syria and even the recent Beirut bombing which I posted about at length here, comparing Twitter to a Lorenzian water wheel, have shown that trying to adapt conventional 'big' media reporting to Twitter and YouTube can have disastrous effects - and have arguably eroded the weight we give to mainstream media. Never has there been more need for careful, considered journalism - and never have we seen so little of just that.

Instead, we have the same old ground being gone over - with a distinct under-representation of the 'new media' everyone is so upset about (although nice to see Maha from Google there). Although it's nice for everyone from the region's media to get together for a chat, I can't help but feel the actual eyeballs have, well, moved on...

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.

Sky - That's Better!

Sky was getting properly into the swing of things last night: lots of stories on how communities were coming together and managing to cope with the flooding disaster.

I can only hope that my profound indignation, in the spirit of a butterfly in Beijing, somehow transmitted itself to London and changed a few synapses in the mind of a senior production team member. But sadly I have to admit that it's more likely that they simply came to their senses...

Ainsworth 1 Sky News 0 - They're Still Getting the Tone Wrong!

Following my wee rant about Sky News and how I think they’re getting the tone of their reporting on the floods in the UK wrong, I was delighted to watch Sky’s Jeremy Thompson interviewing Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Ainsworth last night. Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m no Tory. But long-time anchor figure Bowen started to rag Ainsworth about David ‘I wash regularly, actually’ Cameron going to Africa while his constituency was underwater. And that brought Ainsworth out of his corner fighting like Tyson on crack cocaine. Ainsworth slammed Thompson for Sky’s ‘blame game’ reporting, pointed out that we all had more important things to worry about and that the community was getting itself together and didn’t need Sky carping and pointing fingers right now thank you very much.

Thompson (whom I respect, incidentally) took a huge whack to the chin. And there I was cheering a spokesperson on again…

Meanwhile, talking about the weather, as the deliciously eccentric Alison Goldfrapp tells us: “It’s a strange day, no colours no shapes”. Today we woke up to the washed out colours of a summer Shamal, everything around rendered indistinct by the whirling sand, the air thick with the fine, pale dust. It gets up your nose, in your ears, in your hair, dries your skin and enervates your spirit.

The Mistral, the Khamsin, the Scirocco – the great seasonal winds of the world. And all we get is the miserable old Shamal.

The UAE’s Shamal whips up the desert and dumps it on the cities: sand streams across the roads and visibility drops, sometimes alarmingly. Shamal is Arabic for North and, perhaps interestingly, many people in the Arab World use shamal to mean left as well as yassar (right is yemin). Quite why North is synonymous with left is a mystery to me...

The beating hot wind, stinging with sand particles, is just what you need to add to that cheery summer feeling. Mind you, it could be worse. We could be 30 feet under in water.

Which is as neat a link as you’re ever going to get on this blog.

UK Flooding: The Spokesperson Bites Back

The recent massive flooding in the UK has been interesting for me, particularly because I’ve been able to sit here in the sweltering heat and watch how it’s been handled from a huge distance. And I have to say that the interview I watched recently between Sky News’ anchor and a complete unknown called Graham Bowskill had me cheering.

I spend quite a lot of my professional life coaching spokespeople who will be dealing with media. I spend a little bit of my time being a spokesperson talking to media, too. And so I guess, despite my pro-media approach to my work, I’m also inclined to ‘root’ for a spokesperson. Rarely have I found myself so involved in the moments of combat, because let’s face it this is a contact sport, as I was watching the Bowskill interview.

The story is simple: a huge volume of rain fell on areas in the UK again this week, forcing motorists to spend overnight in their cars on blocked motorways. Roads across the country were flooded and became impassable: whole communities have been flooded out with huge volumes of water - much of it now contaminated.

So when Sky News’ anchor starts to play the blame game and try to pin the misery of overnight stranded motorists and flooded homes on the Highways Agency, you’d expect spokesperson Graham Bowskill to stutter and witter, to try and defend his agency’s pathetic performance to the journalist who speaks for all of us.

Well, he didn’t. He spoke well, cogently and with dignity.

Now UK PR commentator The World’s Leading (Theo to his mates) has already made the point that spokespeople in the UK speak in a strange, strangled, doublespeak when they’re put on the spot. And Graham did that, for sure. But he also pointed out that his agency had issued major warnings to the media (and he didn’t say that the responsibility that the media bore was that of ensuring those warnings were taken as seriously as they were intended, but he might as well have, because the media does bear that responsibility) and that his agency had told people not to travel and his agency was trying to deal with a highly exceptional event. He went on to detail what the issues were and how his agency and its allied emergency services were reacting to meet the challenge – and he was doing that right up until the anchor, who had sensed she wasn’t going to win her moment of fame for nailing the twerp who was responsible for all our misery, cut him off while he was still trying to tell us how the services were dealing with the issue. She was wrong to have done so: and by God, I was (I swear, I was) on the edge of my chair cheering him on. Because a decent man, outlining a decent response - on all our behalves - to a totally unprecedented situation actually deserves our attention and our regard.

The fact is that Bowskill putting his strong case forward well actually played against everything that the journalist wanted – a cheap shot story angle that focused everyone’s rightful indignation and anger on the sucker being interviewed. And so he came through it all beautifully. It’s such a shame that nobody was there to point out how at odds with our common feeling at a time of crisis this style of ‘blame game’ journalism is. Because, of course, the media playing that game would never DREAM of facing public criticism that their response was inappropriate.

Several of Sky's interviews around the whole flooding disaster since have been in the same vein: alarmist and obviously ranging around and looking for someone they can pin blame on. Last night they cut an interview short with a chap who was telling them that the community had actually given up worrying and was taking it all lightly. Again, it's not what they wanted to hear and so they moved on and cut the interview.

And I do find it interesting that, as communities pull together in the face of this unprecedented disaster, Sky is just lobbing stones, being alarmist and generally plain unhelpful. It does seem to me that their tone of coverage is sharply at odds with public sentiment. I wonder if it will backfire on them...