I am still not sure what I think of Salon’s feisty political blogger Glenn Greenwald but there is no denying that he has a way of punching just the right buttons with just the right amount of vim (plus a little vigor for good measure). Greenwald’s most recent target, CNN’s John King, has risen foolishly to the bait and has made himself look quite silly. Its a lesson for journalists everywhere (and people for that matter) on how not to reply to criticism, and it makes for an entertaining read. And the comments (502 at last count) are just as good.
Thanks to brother Jonathan for the link.
Richard and I are in the midst of relaunching the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, the Daily Monitor (motto: Truth Every Day) so we are probably unusual in that we are currently die-hard followers of the news that comes out of Kampala. Uganda is a haven for good, hard-hitting political journalism. Partially of course, this is because extraordinary events happen in East African with an unfortunate frequency (in the course of the three days that we were there last month Ebola was discovered and the opposition leader’s brother died of mysterious causes) but its mostly down to considered, serious-minded reporting that makes the most of relatively limited resources.
When I read the “exclusive” PLOT TO KILL QUEEN FOILED splash in the Sunday Express yesterday I recognised a story that was originally broken — on December 1st — in Uganda by one of the many talented reporters at the Monitor.
What surprised me about this wasn’t that it was in The Express, given their obsession with royalty but that it took all of six weeks to percolate through the web to the Express newroom and that when they did get the story they didn’t do it better.
Once this was understandable: there simply weren’t the resources (or the patience) to wade through the reams of newsprint produced all over the world. But now the internet makes it simple to get a local perspective and to take advantage of experienced reporters on the ground.
If you read the Monitor’s version, it is filled with detail and context that the Express story misses. Its also instructive to know, given Uganda’s worsening media freedoms (see Roy Greenslade’s post), that the Monitor’s rival, New Vision, which is majority-owned but not run by government, didn’t (as far as I can see) print the story until yesterday following the Express’ lead.
Like that gentlest of dons, Quijote, they were wont at the very least to damage useful windmills in the name of dragomachy. (John Barth 1966).
Dragomachy is dragon-duelling - Don Quixote’s motivation, of course, for tilting at windmills.
It came to mind while reading the Guardian’s latest six-part sales booster running all through this week: The Greek Myths. In Saturday’s booklet, Origins of the gods, there is a foreword discussing Hesiod, Orpheus, Pindar and modern Promethean mythology by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, before the main narrative begins.
This is penned by James Davidson, who I think must be the rather dazzling young Reader in Ancient History at Birkbeck. Here’s an extract:
But Cronus was king now, lording it over his elder siblings, and he had a plan to escape the fate that Uranus had decreed for him. He overpowered his sister Rhea and fathered on her new gods, Olympians: pure Hestia whose realm is the fireplace and who always stays at home, Demeter goddess of agriculture, regal Hera, goddess of marriage, Poseidon lord of the seas, horses and earthquakes …….
Crickey, as Boris Johnson might say. It’s a far cry from whether Terry or Beckham should be captain in the Switzerland game.
Both daily and weekend papers in Britain now are becoming in their own way smaller versions of the cultural package that Peter Wright has created with his relaunched Mail on Sunday. In doing so, they offer a great deal more than news: DVDs, slimming guides, cheap flights, therapy - you name it. This makes good sense in an increasingly competitive and slowly shrinking market. I am sure other markets in other countries will follow suit.
The skill is to make the package coherent so that it reinforces something that your paper stands for and appeals powerfully to the heartland of your readership. Tangential appeal is never good enough in newspapers - brutish, blunt instruments that they are. Even the thinking man’s paper, the FT, found that its most successful circulation booster was a combined appeal to the stomach/wallet. I recall writing the blurb: Lunch at a Michelin starred restaurant for the price of a can-opener (or something like that).
It’s not enough any longer simply to include a voucher for a free frozen chicken (Mirror) or a packet of garden seeds (Express). The offer has to be original or exclusive. A new Prince CD exclusively through the Mail on Sunday is one way to do it well.
But the promotion team that I have come to respect most in the past year is The Guardian/Observer’s. The glossy posters are well judged and cling to many a Farrow and Ball painted kitchen wall, the bespoke Christmas wrapping paper is annoyingly clever and the occasional guides to Wild Camping or to Magic Tricks seem to me perfectly pitched to the readership and a clear incentive to buy. In the Guardian’s booklet series the first, Great Speeches, was probably the best. All have been strong.
Until now that is. In the constant battle against the dragon of falling sales I wonder whether a series on Zeus and friends is not a little Quixotic. (Magnificent though).
A long long time ago, I worked for a summer at my hometown weekly newspaper in South Carolina. The New Irmo News was based out of a strip mall in a little office sandwiched between Winn Dixie and a famous local restaurant called, of course, Lizard’s Thicket (the photo on the right is Huckabee campaigning at the Thicket). The man who ran the outfit, and who gave me my first job at a newspaper, was named Rod Shealy, an old time political man who started the newspaper basically because he could convince anyone of anything and wanted to prove it. He was quite a sight sitting behind his huge mahogony desk in his trademark Hawaiian shirt, feet up, cigar in hand. Sounds like a vision from stereotypeland, I know, but its true. He always called me college boy, mostly, I think, because he was proud that he never went to college. Instead he “got his education” running campaigns and, secretly, I was always jealous of this.
Now he says he is a “reformed bad boy” (and blogger) but he continues to be a political strategist of some standing. He ran Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in SC in the 80s and the notoriously rough and ready campaigns of former two-term Governor Carroll Campbell (as close as you get to political royalty in South Carolina). He also “studied” (if that is the right word) with Lee Atwater, the former Reagan/Bush strategist and author of some the bloodiest campaigns the South has ever seen (including the Willie Horton ad that basically knocked Dukakis out of the race in ‘88). If nothing else, Rod and Atwater are symbols for how campaigns work in the South, especially because South Carolina traditionally represents the beginning of the second, more nasty, phase of the primary cycle. As Rod said in a fascinating recent American documentary on Dirty Poltics, “when you are limping out of Iowa or New Hampshire, you pull out all the stops”.
And it has started already: there are reports of a Christmas card allegedly from the Romney family being delivered to SC Republicans that quotes a controversial Mormon passage on polygamy (which was outlawed by the church a 100 years ago), Obama is having a hard time shaking the spurious Madrassa claims, Mike Huckabee has been the victim of some nasty flyering on his anti-Southern credentials and so-called push polling has been widespread. The goal of this kind of smear is not to make everyone believe but to make it just credible and just prevalent enough to force the mainstream media to cover it because, as Rod says, “once it hits the nightly news, some people will believe it–not everybody, but some people”. Yes, even in a world run by bloggers–and this is partly Rod’s genius–the local nightly news still means something in the state-by-state political reality of the American presidential election.
What is particularly interesting is how the attacks in the South seem to concentrate on the spark points of religion, race, and national security. I suppose its no surprise. Take my homeland: South Carolina. It is the first state to vote with a significant African-American population, has a strong evangelical contingent and is home to several large and important military installations. Its the perfect mix for some juicy accusations. Just look at this Georgia ad directed against Vietnam hero Max Cleland who lost both of his legs and his right arm in the war. It starts with provocative imagery of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Huissen and goes on to question Cleland’s courage. Keep in mind he lost three limbs in war. If this and other dirty tricks are any indication, its going to be a nasty (and incredibly interesting) few months. I am sure Rod would approve.
For some time I have thought that my children will eventually read newspapers on e-paper. Now I wonder whether I might too.
Last week LG. Philips announced a demo of the world’s highest resolution flexible colour e-paper. Fewer people noticed that later this year they will also launch mono e-paper, which I guess is the format for reading text rather than primarily looking at colour pictures.
LG.Philips LCD will also unveil the highest resolution mono flexible E-paper which is similar in size to a B5 size paper and it plans to launch this mono flexible E-paper in 2008.
B5 is around the size of a hardback book.
If we knew how much a sheet would cost and how easy it would be to upload text (it needs to be automatic surely) then we could work out how long it will be before it is cheaper for a newspaper to buy each of its readers a leaf of e-paper than print thousands of copies on mashed wood.
On this first true working day of 2008 is this the first year anyone can remember in which all the best newspaper editors in Britain are…not editing newspapers?
Obviously this is not completely and utterly true. Firstly some brilliant young editors have recently been appointed. Secondly as long as Paul Dacre, Peter Wright, Alan Rusbridger and others are in their swivel chairs then one can hardly say that all the best editors in Britain are not editing newspapers.
But it is worth considering who isn’t. Dominic Lawson, Roger Alton, Charles Moore, Kelvin McKenzie, Andrew Neil, Richard Lambert (the list could go on but one person I would definitely leave off is myself).
Two possible reasons: a) it really is a job for 40 year olds and all the gentlemen above are over 50 (but then so are Dacre, Wright and Rusbridger) or b) editing a newspaper isn’t as satisfying a job as it used to be - financially or intellectually.
At 6.00am this morning in London if you wanted to find out what happened in the Iowa caucuses, the natural place to go was the web. I wanted to see how the serious news organisations compared. Here was an event whose timing and significance had been known for months and months. There were no good excuses for not covering it well.
The BBC looked silly since the scrolling news ticker at the top of the page was still announcing that Obama “looked set to win according to media predictions” when its own news story below said that he had already won convincingly. The Beeb’s single story was okay, adequate, but like much BBC reporting it was blandly superficial. You didn’t get a sense of what was really going on. There was no analysis and no detailed count of results.
Andrew Ward for the FT in Iowa produced a straight news story leading FT.com’s world page by 6.00am but again I was surprised not to read any analysis or comment by the FT’s army of wise and opinionated staff both in the US and UK. Nor was there a full list of the results which, by that time, was easily available. For a serious international paper that brands itself as the leading global authority on business and politics and for a paper with the biggest US staff of any London paper it was disappointing.
It was odd to find the international edition of The Times online still leading on Kenya, though there was a photo of Obama saying “follow the latest from Iowa” but without indicating the result. And this despite the fact that The Times has one of the most experienced US correspondents of them all, Gerard Baker, in Iowa. The last entry of his blog did have a rather breathless account of the result as it had appeared at 3.52am - and then all was silence.
The Independent website was still leading on their splash about the true cost of cheap chicken. The Obama story was second but although it seemed to be a 6.00am version by Leonard Doyle in Des Moines, it clearly wasn’t since it was obviously written yesterday and had no news of the result or even a hint of a result. (It was quite a good piece by the way).
The Telegraph online did an excellent job. Will Lewis can give a pat on the back to Toby Harnden and Alex Spillius in Des Moines. Jointly they produced a sharp and authoritative lead story, far better than the Beeb’s, and by 6.00am there were two separate pieces of analysis, one written by each, on where the result left the Republicans and Democrats. This was exactly the stuff that one wanted to read. There was pretty good video. And although it was the obvious way to do it, someone had thought about it in advance, made a plan and carried it off well. The story was presented online as the splash and as breaking news. It all felt highly competent.
But I guess The Guardian, by a narrow squeak, was best. Why? Suzanne Goldenberg and Ewen MacAskill’s lead story was very good, marrying the colour, the drama and the facts. And Michael Tomasky, the editor of Guardian America, produced a good commentary on the spot about the Obama campaign. There was video for those who wanted it. And I think what pipped them to the post was that their US election blog was already gathering reaction and comment from around the world.
However just in case anyone thinks we Brits couldn’t have done an even better job, I took a look at the New York Times online. There, at 6.00am, were five stories on every conceivable angle of the result, all updated within 10 minutes and each written with considerable inside knowledge. There was plenty of video and there was live blogging going on. The full results were presented on a table on the home page.
Does any of this matter much? Wait a couple of hours and there will be more to read about Iowa than anyone can reasonably want or digest. I think it matters in this one key respect: in one of the most competitive marketplaces in the world (the British press) the people who are trying hardest are the ones to watch. How you deal with an event like the Iowa result is a sign of how hard you are trying.
To launch 2008 we’re changing this blog so that it becomes a Shakeup Media joint effort rather than Ryan Bowman’s personal blog.
We will restrict ourselves to chatting about media, since that is what Shakeup Media does but it’ll be media in the very broadest sense from big themes that occur to us to little tiny details that we notice on our travels.
Richard and I are in the midst of relaunching the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, the 
A long long time ago, I worked for a summer at my hometown weekly newspaper in South Carolina. The New Irmo News was based out of a strip mall in a little office sandwiched between Winn Dixie and a famous local restaurant called, of course,