Doing Words

Israel’s indefensible act: censoring Gaza flotilla journalists

// June 3rd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Media, Other news, World Peace

I wasn’t going to write about the tragic incident between Israeli forces and the Gaza relief flotilla — this is usually a blog about my work and the issues facing my profession. And so much of it seemed inevitable from the moment the flotilla was first organised — a motley collection of dodgy vessels carrying people representing a broad spectrum of issues would limp towards the Gaza coast, it would be intercepted by the Israeli military, who would arrest those on board with maximum gusto, jail or deport those on-board, confiscate everything and then claim it’s own investigation would prove that it had done nothing wrong. Initial condemnation of Israel’s action in the West would be limited to strong words, the pro-Israel community would try to explain that the State of Israel was indeed threatened by a few liberals and journalists and a rusty Turkish cruise liner, and then to finish up, we’d see a reaction to that suggesting that the event might not be as black-and-white as “Israel = bad, flotilla = good.”

Andrew Günsberg’s post, “Reading Then Thinking Speaking Then Listening” is a great example of the latter. He discloses his conflict of interest up front and encourages his readers to think twice, that it might not be all black-and-white and good-versus-evil. He encourages them to read a book about the background to the occupation of Gaza and talks about how the Israeli population isn’t always in favour of the way its government and its military behaves.

It’s all good, reasonable stuff, but it misses a crucial question: what was the only action committed by the Israeli forces during this incident for which there’s no justification? Firing shock grenades and tasers at the occupants of a foreign-registered vessel while in international waters? Use of high-velocity paintball rounds and live ammunition at close quarters against non-combatants? Taking foreign nationals from outside Israel’s borders and detaining them indefinitely or deporting without access to legal representation or appeal?

No. The only indefensible act of the state of Israel in this matter was the effective and almost total censorship of all communication arising from the incident so that the only significant record of events will be that provided by Israeli military video crews.

Flotilla activists interviewed immediately prior to the attack

Flotilla activists interviewed by a journalist immediately prior to the attack (AP Photo/IHH)

According to eyewitness accounts, journalists were the first target of the Israeli action, including blocking cellphone and satellite communications from well prior to the incident to well after it had concluded, to prevent video, audio and text evidence being broadcast from the scene. Two Australian ABC reporters were immediately detained, with one, photographer Kate Geraghty reportedly tasered as she tried to upload images via satellite.

These Australian journalists aren’t Hamas apologists, anti-Israeli propagandists or easily-duped greenhorn reporters. They are both seasoned, professionally unbiased reporters working for an international broadcaster with an unblemished and rigidly enforced code of non-bias and independence. Israeli forces had been informed they were on the vessel, they identified themselves to the commandos storming the vessel, but they were nevertheless assaulted and had their equipment not just confiscated but methodically destroyed, even to the point of tearing up the notebook journalist Paul McGeough had been writing his reports into once satellite and cellphone communication had been blocked.

So far, Israel’s government has refused widespread calls for an inquiry into the incident from many UN nations including Australia, so maybe an inquiry will never happen. But if there ever is an inquiry by the Israeli military or anyone else, the only significant body of evidence will be eyewitness accounts and the video footage recorded by the Israeli military’s own video teams. You can easily discount the evidence of the flotilla’s eyewitnesses as being the rantings of terrorist sympathisers, as Israeli military inquiries habitually do. Which leaves the only version of events those recorded by the Israeli military itself.

Sorry, but I’ve got a degree in journalism and media studies, and I know how easy it is to influence opinion by selective editing, or just by pointing the camera one way and not another. The only hope we ever had of knowing the truth of the flotilla incident would be to compare and contrast the Israeli military’s own footage with that supplied by the independent professional media accompanying the flotilla. Now that there’s only one source of video footage, there’s no hope of knowing what really happened.

I’m as prepared as the next realist to remain open to the idea that Israeli forces may have done their best to minimise casualties and separate combatants from non-combatants on-board the flotilla vessels. That injuries and deaths on board happened accidentally and without intent in the heat of the moment. That some of the flotilla’s occupants were aggressors and initiated some of the violence that occurred. Perhaps even that Israel would have delivered the cargo of aid intact and in a timely fashion as they’d offered to do if the flotilla diverted to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

But — and it’s a huge but — there’s only one motivation I know of for blocking independent news coverage of the incident, and that is to hide the truth of what really occurred from the world community, from the international Jewish community and the citizens of Israel.

If you feel like being realist about this incident, by all means reserve judgement until ‘we know more about what happened’ but ask yourself who’s made sure you’ll never really know for sure, and what their motivation could possibly be.

Paul McGeough on the rise of Hamas, while remaining independent, unbiased and unassaulted. (ABC Fora)

Is there really any difference between PR and journalism any more?

// February 24th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Media, Media relations

Good mate Lloyd Shepherd wrote a great post this week about the news that veteran British journalism Richard Sambrook has announced he’s joining PR firm Edelman.

As Lloyd says, PR people and journalists have in the past been on opposite sides of a vast gulf of distrust.

“…Journalists and PRs found themselves locked into a transactional process where “market value” was reflected by the quality (and uniqueness) of the information being traded. Journalists thrived on exclusivity, because that’s how they gained both attention and also self-worth: if they broke a unique story, they were professionally validated.

PRs sometimes thrived on exclusivity (when the story was big enough), but normally craved ubiquity, because that meant more eyeballs. Journalists saw themselves as gatekeepers and purveyors of truth; PRs saw journalists as opportunities and as obstacles. No wonder they rarely got on.”

Not only has the line blurred between news and editorial and public relations in recent years, but the internet has allowed anyone with an interesting story to find their own audience without having to go through the gatekeepers of public relations and journalism.

“Anyone with something interesting to say can get it into the public forum, as the politicians are beginning to discover. But once it’s out there, a new set of skills is needed to get significant attention to it. These are communication skills, and they include such things as optimising for search, incorporating reader input and responding quickly to new information.”

Lloyd asks: what motivates a journalist to move to PR? What might motivate a good PR to move to journalism?

Now, I’m no Richard Sambrook — there would be perhaps 20 people in the world who’d remember my journalism, and still fewer who’d remember my PR, but if I’m truly anything, I’m an early adopter. I first switched from journalism to PR the first time for entirely venal reasons: it was the late 1980s, greed was good, and most PR people earned more than most journalists. I wanted RayBan Wayfarers, Italian suits and a convertible BMW. Everybody I knew did. I could hardly get out of my punk-era lifestyle fast enough. Ugh. It still shames me.

(Now I’ve returned from washing my hands compulsively for an hour, let’s return to our story.)

A few years later, I switched back from journalism to PR because as a journalist, I was sick of people pretending I was a demi-god visionary who knew more about the future of the industry I covered than anyone actually working in it. Like many, I thought the industry really cared about my opinion, when really they only cared if they could influence my opinion.

A few years after that, I left PR once again when I realised I would always be held accountable for the results I achieved for my clients, even though the results I achieved for my clients were so influenced by random factors outside my control that my worst work was often my most successful, and vise-versa.

I could have gone back to journalism but the interwebs beckoned, and with it, the opportunity to create not just new content but a new medium for it to be created in.

However, much of the work I’ve done since has been so close to journalism and public relations, particularly my work in social media. The big difference has been the ability to communicate with an audience both one-to-many (as in a blog post) and one-to-one (as in a messageboard) or both at the same time (as in Twitter).

There’s an ancient distrust of ex-PR people in journalism, and an ancient respect for ex-journalists in PR but that’s the only barrier to switching and it’s legacy code — no longer makes any sense today.

Neither profession is very often able to write or say what they think, both professions have an additional agenda or two in the back of their minds when communicating, both professions are held accountable. Neither is able to define the scope or composition of their audience anymore. And both have experienced a collapse in the centre of the bell curve graphing salary against number of salary earners in their industry.

It’s going to piss some people off, but I say there’s no significant difference between journalism and public relations now. Prove me wrong if you can.

Apple’s tablet might change the way writers and photographers are paid

// December 3rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Media, News, platform

Today I watched an amazing video demo from Time Inc., showing some of the things they can do with Sports Illustrated magazine when it’s available on devices like the rumoured Apple Tablet. The video in question is reproduced just below, for your future-reading pleasure. While watching the reader navigate their own way around the publication not just on a page-order basis but subhead and by image or video, it occurred to me: this could really change the way ‘real’ (read: print) journalists and photographers get paid for their work.

At the moment, most of the journalists in the world who still have paying work are paid by newspapers and magazines. And most of those journalists — whether on staff or freelance — are paid either by the number of words or pictures published, or paid a salary.

When you watch this video, take a moment to consider how much the reader is able to customise their reading material. It’s almost like no reader will read the magazine the same way. When you think about it, that’s probably true with most readers of print publications today; most of us start at the front and flip pages, but many of us start on a favourite section and hop around from section to section. (more…)

Crikey, I’m coming back

// September 25th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Media

Will people pay to read Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers online? Not if they remain unresponsive to reader needs and keep pushing out pap. It doesn’t mean newspapers are dead, for readers have been paying for good-quality news and commentary online for a long time.

I remember buying my first annual subscription to David Frith’s CDN news email service back when there was no such thing as a web page and it was delivered by fax. There’s still no website for CDN that I’m aware of — each morning it goes out as a PDF attachment to an email. Despite having no home on the web, CDN’s closely-targeted, exclusive stories mean it’s a small but long-lived business that pays mortgages (though not mortgages the size of Rupert’s).

I remember speaking to Stephen Mayne’s wife (though I forget her name) a decade ago about putting an advertisement in Crikey, which was then only available as an email newsletter because CMSs were huge, bespoke, expensive things small businesses couldn’t afford. I wanted CPMs and CPCs and monthly unique visitor numbers and the best poor Crikey could do back then was tell me how many email subscribers they had — there wasn’t even such a thing as an open rate metric back then.

The ad got a great response because Crikey had a small but homogenous audience, they were exactly who I needed to reach, and they were engaged enough to pay for a subscription.

Over the years my subscription to both CDN and Crikey have lapsed, but today I started a new subscription to Crikey. I want to remain a writer, and if writers of the future will be writing for a paid subscription audience, I better learn more about the kind of writing my audience is willing to pay for.

Crikey, I’m back.

After a long absence, I am once again paying for my daily online news. Dwell on that, Rupert...

Looking for a few good iTunes Store content publishers

// May 7th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Media

No way around it: iTunes Store is a behemoth. Scribble some numbers on the back of a napkin and try to guess what Apple’s likely iTunes 2009 revenue will be from music, TV, movies and apps combined… well, let’s just say you need a wider napkin. It might stretch to USD5B in 2009, give or take a few.

While the immediate future of music is one of chaotic and disruptive change, the future of iTunes Store is about more than music. It’s about owning a distribution chain stretching from content publisher via an international network of iTunes Stores to people’s Macs and PCs and on to their AppleTVs, iPhones, iPods, and of course, Macs and PCs. Apple even owns some of the means of production (Logic, Final Cut, GarageBand, Pixar and a fair chunk of Disney).

So I’m looking for a few good iTunes content publishers (you may be selling music, apps, TV or movies) to join a small online focus group. I need you to help me understand what you need from iTunes. What sort of data do you need on how your content is performing? How do you need that data presented? What accounting or analytics systems does this need to talk to? How do you do all this now? In return for your assistance participants will gain early access and the chance to influence the direction of a new web platform that may help your business in these areas.

Is iTunes Producer your most-used app?

The group will be coordinated online so you needn’t be on Australian Eastern Standard Time. You should have some experience selling through your local iTunes Store and have a current iTunes Label Connect login. You’ll be asked to share your iTunes Label Connect .csv data, which will of course remain confidential.

Please leave me some contact details and I’ll be in touch with a few more details and a lot of questions.

Do CDs have a future in the developing world?

// June 23rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Mobile, Music

‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype – check it out

In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew – the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change – the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where? (more…)

This is not about me.

// January 30th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Social Media

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, ‘60 Minutes‘. And a lot more entertaining than ‘Girls of the Playboy Mansion.’ No, really.

Why is this so? How can smileys out-engage boobies?

The simple answer is that rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

But the complex-erer answer that I don’t yet have any evidence beyond a strong gut feel is that documenting the events in your life – and how that changes you – is an activity that doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Defining who you were/are/will be is as compelling as it gets.

Girls of the Playboy Mansion: come on, seriously, you can’t tell me this is entertainment…

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you will become as you continue on into the future.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s. Partly because network television quality can sink no lower, partly because social messaging and social networking is just plain fun.

But mostly because, way down deep inside, we’re learning about ourselves.

And nobody’s more interesting than me. Or you. Unless you happen to be me.

BBC’s Inside Dot Com: so not inside!

// January 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media

Initially I was excited to hear that The Beeb was running a documentary series, Inside Dot Com, following the trials and tribs of a few early-stage interweb startups.

But judging by the clips on YouTube, it stinks. It could only seem “inside” to someone standing very far outside, or perhaps someone standing inside but experiencing it all for the first time, from a video-editor’s visitor’s chair, like a documentary producer who’s previous body of work was on antique furniture or wildlife documentaries.

LOL: this crowd call in an “advertising agency” to tell them what consumers “think of the site’s design”. Like almost every time I’ve seen an ad agency give feedback on a website, the conclusions are all about the site’s graphic design – it’s brand feedback, not its user experience. A branding study is valid, but you should be conducting that before you buy a domain name and design a brand, and you should never, ever confuse a brand focus group study with a usability study.

Somehow, advertising agencies got away with pitching TVCs as storyboards and radio ads as scripts for so many years that they think it’s OK to test websites basically the same way. It is so not.

Classic moment: the ad agency guy presenting the focus group results says, “and my son didn’t even like it” as if that’s the killer blow. Any time I hear “I/my kids/my wife didn’t like it” I know it’s time to stop paying attention and wind-up the meeting. That’s a big, pulsating warning sign above your head that says, “I do not understand that this should be about something deeper than initial reactions to colours, shapes and styles. And I do not understand that this is about a target audience, of which I am not a member. Neither is my brat emo child, who hates me enough to veto all of my work.”

Disagree? Your honour, I call Larry and Sergey as my first witnesses. They certainly didn’t waste any time getting an ad agency to show a few A3 printouts of the Google homepage to 20 people prepared to spend an hour in a small room for $50 and a few sandwiches. Nobody in that room would have said, “Oooh, I like ‘google’ as a name. When I think of search I immediately think of the word ‘google’.” Nobody would have said, “I think showing each letter in a different colour is a great idea. And you can’t have too much plain black text on a white webpage, if you ask me!”

This one isn’t even an interweb startup – it’s a shop with a website – not even remotely the same thing. If The Beeb can’t appreciate the difference, I’m afraid watching the series may be a waste of time.

Final insult to our intelligence: the Beeb won’t allow YouTube users to embed these videos on their own pages (or I would have posted them here instead of linking them.) They’re not full eps, they’re just highlights. Ack!

Another example of the old media not grokking the new. Did we need another?