Business Issues: On 2DayFM and the death of a woman in London.

When looking for culprits in any suspicious death,  it is safe to assume someone running away from the scene, has something to hide. On Saturday, two of Australia’s largest companies,  Coles and Telstra were seen running away from Southern Cross Austereo’s radio station 2Day FM with indecent haste after one of Sydney station’s prank calls apparently led to the suicide death of a nurse in a faraway London four days later.

It is safe to assume that despite their infantile behaviour with the prank, 2Day FM DJs Michael “MC” Christian and Mel Greig never intended to cause harm to any of the participants. After being hiding for several days, the company wheeled them out to tell their stories to Channel's 7 and 9 tonight. They have both apologised which is more than can be said  of station management and its legal advisers who reviewed and approved the tape before it was played on air. No doubt the justification for not spiking it was the media attention it was going to get for so easily breaching royal security.

Today seems so far from last Wednesday, when two jolly 2Day FM station hosts were conducting the breezy on air patter beloved of  morning FM radio stations across the planet, They told listeners they had hold of the telephone number at King Edward VII Hospital in London where Kate Middleton was  staying. Michael “MC” Christian informed listeners they would “try and get Kate Middleton or even Prince Wills on the line”. They did not tell listeners this was not live.

Michael was to act the role of Prince Charles, Mel was the Queen and another staff member provided the yelps for a royal corgi.  How the hospital did not see beyond this half-baked plot remains a mystery especially when the fake upper class accent of Greig (supposedly the Queen) asks to speak for “Kate, my granddaughter.”

Nurse Jacintha Saldanha  didn’t ask for any further proof of identification (glossing over the fact the Queen is not Kate’s grandmother) and passed the caller onto Kate’s ward. There another nurse was further duped by Mel, Michael and the corgi’s increasing ludicrous vaudeville acting into revealing matters of the patient’s health.

Saldanha may have died of the shame of being so duped and breaching a trust of confidence but no one comes out of this smelling of roses.

This is astonishingly poor risk management by Austereo, particularly as they must have known they were dealing with material of international important given the worldwide prurient interest in the Royal Couple and their future baby.  There is a case the material should be in the public domain, particularly as an expose of poor hospital security protocols but Austereo presumably didn’t think they could make money that way.

So they played it for laughs.  There was some negative reaction in the days that followed but mostly they got away with  it.  Grandfather-to-be Prince Charles joked about it asking newspaper reporters “How do you know I’m not a radio station?  Meanwhile British newspapers gleefully repeated  some of the juicy titbits the second nurse gave to 2Day FM.

Then Saldanha died on Saturday, and no one was laughing. British media  and social networks became holier than thou and launched a firestorm of protest against the station and its two DJs. Mel and Michael were whisked away into hiding and their twitter accounts summarily deleted.

Others fled quickly too with reports of Telstra and Coles speedily ceasing their advertising with 2DayFM (but not Southern Cross Austereo’s other stations).  Telstra told AAP they had suspended “advertising on the station until an investigation into the issue has concluded”. Neither they nor Coles issued media releases to confirm their actions. A check of Coles newsroom boasts “there’s always something new happening at Coles,” but they didn’t see their abandonment of 2DayFM in their moment of crisis newsworthy of a media release.

What Coles did do was put their justification on Facebook.

“We understand Australians are clearly angry and upset by what appear to be tragic consequences of the 2Day FM UK hospital prank,” the retailer wrote.

“We have wanted to let you know we have instructed 2Day FM to remove all Coles group advertising from the station as soon as possible.”

That post brought almost 2000 comments with also half the respondents thinking Coles’ reaction was over the top.

 “It was a funny joke, get over it", said Anthony Paino before reminding Coles of other things they should boycott. ‘ How about your remove all caged eggs and pork from your shelves," he said.

Helz Jessop asked would they stop selling alcohol if they killed someone drink driving while Abbi Hamilton was looking for patriotism: “Why not do something proper and remove all imported food and drinks from your aisles?" she said.

Phil Young said it was advertisers like Coles that  made the radio stations "untouchable and unaccountable,” Young said. “Now that Coles have suddenly got a conscience they might look at some of the other stuff they are involved in that causes harm.”

Coles can attempt to take the high ground with their move. But the fact remains they only boycotted it after Saldanha’s death - they presumably thought the content was not objectionable at the time as it was played.

The big companies' rapid stampede to the exit after the media firestorm on Saturday caused the station to cover their tracks similar to the way it handled stablemate Alan Jones’s “died of shame” comment. A spokeswoman for Austereo, Sandy Kay,let the cat out of the bag when she confirmed to AAP that there would be no advertising on 2Day FM over the weekend. 

"We have suspended advertising at least until Monday on that radio station in Sydney out of respect to advertisers until business issues can really be addressed,' Kay said.  It was respect to advertisers Austereo was worried about, not respect to the dead woman.

And what did Kay mean by “business issues” that could be resolved in a couple of days? Perhaps she was thinking the Jones boycott lasted only a couple of weeks and advertisers were desperate to be associated with their high-rating product no matter how juvenile or crass the consequences.

Mel and Michael were idiots but they were just doing what the station and their advertisers expected of them. As radio DJ Jason ‘Jabba’ Davis said audiences want to be in on the joke.

“As broadcasters we want to make people laugh, but we need to pull it off without dishing out grief to the undeserving,” Davis said.

  

 If you are feeling suicidal, don’t mess around. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14

Olympics 2.012: NBCfail and the future

Photo via Nick Trask

LONDON is currently hosting the last Olympics of the twentieth century as well as the first of the 21^st.  It is the last of the 20^th century because it is the last to be dominated by the century’s most important technology: Television.  London is also the first 21^st century Olympics as it is the first one where the audience has talked back to the organisers and their broadcaster partner proxies. Come Rio in 2016, the Olympics is likely be a very different spectator sport thanks to social media, the power of the Internet and a global movement for more audience power. 

The professional Olympics are huge money and have become partly slave to its sponsors who take ridiculous steps to ward off ambush marketing.  However in London as in previous Olympics, most of the shots are called by the television companies who broadcast the games. They pay an extraordinary amount of money to the International Olympics Committee and local Olympic Committees for the rights.  In America, the largest of the old-style TV hegemonies NBC has had the rights to the summer and winter Olympics since 1988. Four years ago they paid the AOC and IOC $2.2 billion for the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. NBC made the London Games the most-watched Olympics ever by tape-delaying marquee events to air in US prime time, maximising viewers and advertising dollars. 

Yet they are likely to lose money despite the large audience they have congregated for advertisers.  NBC lost $223 million on Vancouver. It was on tape delay despite being in the same timezone as LA. This allowed NBC to maximise ads but it frustrated audiences who for the first time were seeing results in real time through the Internet and social media. For the TV companies who had the content but who could no longer control the message, these external forces had become,as Jeff Jarvis called them, a "gigantic spoiler machine".

The spoiler machine has been on overdrive in the 2012 Olympics. London is four hours east of the US east coast and also on tape delay and the response has been overwhelmingly negative. NBC refused to show the opening ceremony in real time because it was “too complicated to watch”. An NBC statement defended the indefensible thus: “They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them. We will be providing clips and highlights of each ceremony online so viewers know what to look forward to in primetime on NBC.”

But when it got to actual competition, the “award-winning production team” stuffed up again. They advertised an interview with swimming champion Missy Franklin before showing her gold medal-winning race. These abject failures and others led to Steven Marx creating the “nbcfail” hashtag which went berserk.  But it was UK Independent LA-based journalist Guy Adams who led the most high profile attack with a series of criticisms online which eventually saw NBC call in favours at Twitter to suspend his account. 

Adams had tweeted the email address of an NBC executive in charge of Olympics coverage, when he was upset over the quality of that coverage, encouraging others upset to contact the executive.  “The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com.

 

Twitter claimed this breached their guidelines as it contained Zenkel’s email. Adams retorted Zenkel’s corporate email address was widely available.  The response to the ban was scathing. Novelist Irvine Welsh said the ban illustrated three tendencies of hegemonic power “1) hates criticism, 2) takes itself seriously 3) no sense of fun.”

NBC Sports Chairman Mark Lazarus claimed they understood the problem but his words betrayed they hadn’t. “We listen. We read. We understand there are people that don't like what we are doing, but we think that is a very loud minority and the silent majority has been with us for the first six days," Lazarus said.  Well of course the “silent majority” have been with NBC for a week because they have no choice if they want to watch the Olympics. Silence is not assent. Not everyone took to Twitter or Facebook to complain but as they realise they can, more will.

As in drugs, the technology to beat the TV companies is changing quickly. The BBC offers a comprehensive ad-free service of the Games courtesy of British TV licence holders and the British taxpayer.  On the Internet they use “geoblocking” based on IP address to ensure only British audiences can view the content.  But just as the Chinese get around geo-blocking to access banned political sites, anyone across the world can view the BBC content by masking their IP address using a virtual private network.  As Melbourne's Monash University copyright law teacher Rebecca Giblin said broadcast television is a dying industry. As growing number of people are no longer willing to watch TV on someone else's schedule," Giblin said. "They want to watch it on their own terms when and where it's convenient for them."

With the US delaying the opening ceremony, dodgy sites like VIPBox.TV sprung up to fill the void.  It provides high quality live content at a price. As Mashable noted,  VIPBox.TV wanted to install a proprietary MPlayer on your computer “which comes with a bunch of crapware that you will want to decline, and it is one of those sites that can turn into a bit of a pop-up monster.” VIPBox.TV are the bootleggers of the 21st century. They flourish only because of prohibition.

 

Author, editor and futurist Jeff Jarvis said NBCFail showed how the people formerly known as the audience have found a voice to complain about the time-shifting “We in the U.S. are being robbed of the opportunity to share a common experience with the world in a way that was never before possible,” Jarvis said.  He said the argument that the time-shifting was done to make more money does not stand up. Instead it should have super-served its audience by giving them what they want rather than what Mark Lazarus and Gary Zenkel thought they wanted. “I ask you to imagine what Olympics coverage would look like if Google had acquired the rights,” Jarvis said “It would give us what we want and make billions, I’ll bet."

EIDOS Brisbane conference: Social media in times of crisis

(Kym Charlton of QPS speaks at Eidos. photo: Fiona Muirhead)

One of the predicted outcomes of climate change is more frequent and intense severe weather events (today’s report in The Australian predicting exactly the opposite should be treated with caution due to the paper’s well documented ideological biases.) Given the likelihood of such events increasing, a conference called “Social media in times of crisis” held yesterday in Brisbane was timely. Organised by the Eidos Institute, the conference brought together a number of speakers from academia, media, public relations and public affairs to discuss the use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook in crises, particularly in the 2010-2011 Queensland flood event.

First speaker Kym Charlton was ideally placed to talk to the topic. Head of Queensland Police Service media unit, she was responsible for the delivery of a service that set the gold standard in crisis response. Charlton told the audience she set up the QPS Facebook Page in May 2010 without asking the powers that be for permission.

She admits it was a risky move in a notoriously risk-averse organisation. Without telling anyone about it, the page grew slowly through word of mouth. Charlton eventually realised she needed high level signoff for the page and approached her boss Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart (who would later play a critical leading role in the flood response). The tech savvy Stewart agreed to trial the page for six months and by December 2010 the page had 6,000 likes. Early experiments such as live-streaming the funeral of an officer who died on duty failed, but the experience gained was crucial.

Then on 15 December as Charlton laconically put it, “it began to rain”. Many people, myself included, signed up to the QPS Facebook feed in the days that followed as it sent out reams of useful and relevant information covering the flood events across a huge area of the state. Then on 11 January, a torrent of water rushed through Toowoomba and into the Lockyer Valley below. Journalist Amanda Gearing would later take the conference through a harrowing blow by blow of events in the region from her eye-witness perspective.

There was a desperate need for credible and quick information about missing family and friends. USQ’s Kelly McWilliam told the afternoon session how one person’s page Toowoomba and Darling Downs Flood Photos and Info was set up within an hour of the flood (well ahead of scanty official responses from the Toowoomba Regional Council) as a repository of photos and information about the missing. It remains the most popular site with 37,000 fans.

QUT’s Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess measured Twitter use of the #qldfloods hashtag. They noted a huge spike in tweets on the day marked “Lockyer” (there would be an even greater number marked “Brisbane” in the days that followed.) The ABC’s Monique Potts told the conference how the national broadcaster used tools such as Ushahidi to map crowdsourced incidents in the flood (and later cyclone) region.

On the day of the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flood, the QPS Facebook page was a crucial resource. Suddenly as Kim Charlton said, their facebook page feed was on the pointy end of social media. 16,000 fans of the page became 160,000 in just 24 hours as people across Queensland, Australia and the world desperately sought to get information about those in the disaster zone. There were 39 million views of the page in that day, over 450 views every second. “Thank heavens it wasn’t our website,” Charlton said. “January 11 blew us out of the water.” The pressure remained intense to get timely and accurate news out all week as the wall of water headed towards Brisbane. Just as valuable as the information sharing were the QPS “mythbuster” posts and tweets which punctured the many rumours that were rife at the time. Then “after a week off” as Charlton put it, tropical cyclones Antony and Yasi struck the north coast pushing the QPS team into overdrive again.

It was an astonishing effort for a team with just one acknowledged social media expert in an organisation with no official social media policy. Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader Eileen Culleton (herself a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when it took days to let the world know what happened) would later tell the conference that setting a social media policy was a must for all organisations with a public presence. Culleton noted how the Brisbane City Council galvanised the "mud army" to help with the clean-up with their use of social media.

But for Charlton the QPS social media updates were simpler still; it was something they had to do to save lives. The conference's final speaker UQ’s Mark Bahnisch put these usages in a social sciences context of “social resilience”. Disasters, said Bahnisch, expose our social structures more sharply than any other important event. They unsettle us by taking us out of our normal rituals. But panic is rare, Bahnisch argues and there is a social good of new communities created out of the common bond of crisis. Social media go a long way to help creating those communities, not to mention as the QPS found out, saving lives.

Telling Taiwan from New Zealand: Anatomy of a thoughtless tweet

This is a cautionary tale based on the biggest ever blunder I’ve made in cyberspace.

My mistake happened yesterday because of the photo shown above. The photo is from a landslide which fell on a Taiwanese motorway in 2010. Unbeknown to me until yesterday, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in the ocean north of the Philippines struck the port city of Keelung in north-east Taiwan on 26 April 2010. My ignorance of this event and photograph of the motorway landslide there would get me in trouble.

Yesterday morning, I was taking a break at work and looking for online images of the deadly Christchurch earthquake which struck a day earlier. I was feeling relieved at the time as a mate of mine from Christchurch had just gotten online to say he and his family were safe. I was now searching the #eqnz hashtag on Twitter for interesting Twitpics of the earthquake. I found some amazing images but one really stood out. It was the picture of the Taiwanese landslide above, but purporting to be from New Zealand.

I found it from a tweet by Frangii, one David Frangiosa from Brisbane which was then retweeted by Shotz Digital Prints also of Brisbane.
It read “Tragey in #EQNZ but this looks like it could be an add for a 4WD http://twitpic.com/42qv28” You can't find that twitpic now, it no longer exists. Te spelling alone should have alerted me to a problem. The bit about “an add” also suggested it might have been photoshopped. Yet I was simply gobsmacked by what I saw. The scale of the landslide was massive and it was all too easy to imagine there might be dead people buried under the immense pile of rubble. For reasons I can barely fathom, I simply wanted this to be true.

I didn’t take a screen grab at the time so I can’t remember what the exact text of the caption was in the twitpic. I do remember it had #eqnz tagged against it but that was too small a token of authenticity and no excuse for what I did next. Without further research and still mesmerised by the photo, I went to twitter and forwarded the twitpic on with this tweet: “this #eqnz motorway damage photo is almost surreal http://twitpic.com/42qv28”.

I then went back to my work and thought nothing more about Twitter for another hour or so, though I couldn’t get the image out of my head. While I was gone, I was unaware many others would see my tweet. I had committed two classic mistakes. Firstly I hadn’t taken the time to authenticate the photo and secondly I did take the time to remove the attribution.

The photo was more surreal than I gave it credit for. It took off and would be retweeted a further 90 times with the vast majority quoting me as the source. I would be later notified in a tweet from Trends NZ that my twitter handle was trending in New Zealand. By then I knew I was in trouble.

A quick look at the retweets showed me what had happened. Initially I was followed by six retweets with no comments. Then people started adding “holy hell”, “oh hell”, “WOW" and “Theres a mountain in my hwy”. In turn these people’s tweets were retweeted by their followers. A classic network pattern was emerging where I was the hub of the information. My "almost surreal" tweet was attracting a lot more attention than Frangii's original "add for a 4WD".

Finally some of the re-tweeters started to question its veracity. 18 tweets after mine, came the first question from @CNell_NZ in Wellington saying “You are kidding me”. One tweet later @flukazoid added “o hai photoshop”. But the next 16 settled back into admiration until @jesidres put the record straight with this tweet: “http://twitpic.com/42qv28 - It's not actually from #EQNZ- the image is at least 6 months old.”

@Jesidres didn’t mention my name but the next seven did, all retweeting my comments or the additions to them without question. @lukechristensen also knew it was fake and admonished @nzben for retweeting it but not me. @BabetteNOS took the conversation into Dutch while still saying these were images of New Zealand: “Heftige beelden uit NZ http://twitpic.com/42qv28, Correspondent @RobertPortier is onderweg, maar twittert even niet omdat hij rijdt. #EQNZ."
There were three more “wow” retweets of my mine when I got the first direct response saying there was a problem. @LMRIQ wrote “This is actually a really old photo pre-2011 RT @derekbarry: this #eqnz motorway damage photo is almost surreal http://twitpic.com/42qv28”.

Still the reinforcing retweets came with another seven variants on the “Wow” theme.
Finally Elpie put Frangii straight about where the photo came from. “@Frangii http://twitpic.com/42qv28 - This image has nothing to do with the #Christchurch #eqnz. Its Taiwan, April 2010: http://bit.ly/gSnaRb”. Elpie didn't send it to me so I remained in the dark about its provenance. All I kept getting were nine more retweets which maintained the “holy hell” line. A questioning few were changing in tone. @carorolyn asked “only almost?”. A full 28 more tweets maintained the wow factor before @merrolee begged to differ. “I don't think so - this is not Chch..The ChristChurch earthquake buried this highway. Amazing image - http://alic.am/dKKoR3 #eqnz”. Yet right to the end, people swallowed the NZ line until Franjii deleted the photo.

The level of scepticism was higher among those who responded to me without retweeting the photo. This from @blisterguy: “@vavroom @derekbarry @cjlambert that's not actually anywhere near Christchurch, or New Zealand, for that matter #eqnz”
This from @simongrigor - “@derekbarry is that photo even NZ? Doesn't look familiar??”
And @Nathanealb - “@Sephyre @derekbarry @DDsD That photo is not #eqnz ...”
And @vebbed - “@ViewNewZealand @vavroom @derekbarry @cjlambert that aint NZ”
And @surgeInwelly “@sarahlalor @phoeberuby @derekbarry where is it exactly?... are you sure it's genuine?”
lmsmith - “@derekbarry @cadetdory STOP RTing that, it's not in CHch.”
altwohill - “@derekbarry except it's not exactly #nz, is it?
@mellopuffy - “@derekbarry @nzben that looks like a fake pls check before retweeting #eqnz”
And on it went. Some pointed out the cars were going the wrong way, Others that Canterbury was flat and had few six-lane highways. It was possibly Europe said one, possibly America said another until someone finally gave me the Taiwan link.

Some were angry I had posted it with a #eqnz tag conferring legitimacy (as the vast majority of the retweets seemed to swallow). “Don't know who started it, but it was fear mongering and stupid. Makes me sad,” said one.
I knew then it was time for a retraction. I went back online to post this: “apologies all about the motorway pic. Its a fake. A nano-second of research before sending it would have helped.”

The retraction was wrong too; it wasn't a fake. The photo was real but wasn’t New Zealand. I was right about the research though. Particularly as a journalist I should have known better. Too often I’ve laughed at the Richard Wilkins and Kochies of this world whose tweets get them into trouble and now here I was making an ass of myself the same way.

I showed naivety, lack of thoroughness and no care or attention to the consequences of my actions. In one sense it was a minor error, but it may also have helped to spread misinformation about a major tragedy. The death toll is approaching 100 and likely to far exceed that. I apologise to anyone I might have offended with my tweet. The power of Twitter deserves much better.

And there it rests: Lessons from Twitdef

On Tuesday, News Limited attempted to draw a line under its latest battle with new media which went under the tag of #twitdef. In a terse and tired sounding article by media writer Caroline Overington, The Australian admitted Canberra journalism academic Julie Posseti probably didn't commit a crime when she live-tweeted the words of a speaker at a conference. The broadsheet made the admission after it heard the audio evidence about what Asa Wahlquist said at the recent Journalism Education Association Australia conference in Sydney. Posetti, said Overington, had produced a “fair summary”.

Mitchell had earlier threatened to "unremarkably" sue Posetti for defamation (though given his well documented climate change agnosticism it was never clear what Mitchell thought he was defending his reputation FOR). Few people would have have been surprised to hear Wahlquist, who recently quit News after many years as a journalist, faced intense editorial pressures to conform to a party line when reporting on climate change and other political matters. It also corresponds to what I have personally heard (off the record) from other News Ltd journalists when they file copy.

Defamation was always an idle threat in this exercise. Mitchell’s real intention was to project power by creating a chilling effect in Twitter. It didn't work because Mitchell has no idea how the medium works. His non-apology apology via Caroline Overington claimed Wahlquist told Mitchell her comments were taken out of context and Posetti “should have contacted him to get his side of the story.”

Apart from the blundering suggestion Twitter must follow the conventions of “he said, she said” journalism, Mitchell also refused to accede to the truth of the matter. He still maintained Posetti had defamed him though the ambiguous sounding “And there it rests” suggested he was not going to take the matter further. After the Twitterati picked this ambiguity up, Overington issued a coda saying it simply meant “she had no more” to offer. It allowed Mitchell to maintain the pretense of keeping his legal avenues open.

Mitchell couldn’t apologise properly to Julie Posetti because it was not in his nature. Stephen Mayne sussed him seven years ago when Mitchell was first appointed editorial boss of The Oz.
“[He] is known for his hardline political views and aggressive style - The key to understanding Chris Mitchell is to know that he is a right-wing social engineer who happens to be a journalist," Mayne wrote perceptively.

New York University's Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen probably hadn't heard of Mitchell in 2003 but he certainly knows about him now. He believes Mitchell’s social engineering is a major problem.
“I think The Australian is fast becoming a malevolent force and for some reason that I do not fully understand it is not met with the sort of public opposition it deserves,” Rosen told me by email yesterday.

I contacted Rosen because I was curious to know why he injected himself into recent News Ltd stoushes against new media such as the outing of Grog’s Gamut and now the hounding of Posetti.

Rosen told me he saw it as a critical part of a larger battle.
“As the Murdoch empire faces the loss of the emperor--his lost grip or his eventual passing--it starts behaving erratically and in that state it becomes rather dangerous: to itself, but also to other people and to cultural treasures like freedom of the press,” he said.

But the Empire has an Achilles heel, according to Rosen: “Murdoch cannot master digital.”

“He tried, but the thing has eluded him. That is unacceptable for a mogul. But it is also a fact. Put those two things together--an unacceptable fact that is also true--and you have a dangerous situation for a news empire. Rupert is trying to impose an order on the digital world that it does not have. This creates problems for his editorial employees. They have to believe in an analysis that is 'shitty' but also saintly because it comes from the top. They get into trouble when they try to prove the emperor right, and behave like little emperors themselves.”

Rosen said the dynamic is being forced down through the hierarchy so that it reaches the reporters at The Oz, “who think they can impose order, knock heads and,for example, demonstrate to the blogosphere which rules it has to obey."

“Notice how often people from The Australian say there's ‘nothing special’ about Twitter, or that it doesn't get a pass, that it isn't an exception. That's the echo, way down the line, of the unacceptable fact that is also true. ‘There's nothing different going on here. We got this under control.’ When they are criticised for taking what is, in effect, a party line, people from The Australian have a strange habit of hearing criticism as a charge of conspiracy. Then they laugh at the overheated image of a conspiracy which in turn protects them against the criticism.

Rosen agreed with my suggestion that Australia’s dangerously concentrated media landscape was a reason the Twitterati have been so feisty in opposition but said there was an important second factor.

“The above ground opposition is weak. Online, there is a lot of juvenile sneering at News Ltd. which reflects how rarely the respectable people criticize and investigate what's rotten in the empire. How many journalists who were there when Asa Wahlquist made her remarks spoke up about what they heard?" he asked.

"For the professional culture of journalism in Australia, which extends to the academic centres where journalism is studied, that is a significant number," Rosen concluded.

While the Oz attempts to thrash Posetti's reputation as much as their own via #twitdef, the climate change that started it all continues to be ignored. As another journalism educator Marcus O'Donnell pointed out today "even a threat of US walkout at Cancun is relegated to p15 of SMH".

Chris Mitchell, it would appear, is not the only social engineer running mainstream Australian media.

And there it rests.
====
(The full text of my question and answer session with Rosen is attached below)
====
DB: Firstly, given your geographical position in the intensely creative hub that is New York why would what is going on in the boondocks of Australian media be of interest to you enough to take part in the debate?

JR: Within the Australian press culture, blogging and journalism academic worlds, there's a decent number of people who are interested in my work, so I have taken an interest in what's going on there, especially after my latest visit. Twitter allows them to follow me and me to follow them, which is also a big factor. At a certain point you acquire enough background knowledge that you can monitor events in another country without feeling lost; after my last visit to Australia, during the elections in August of this year, I felt I had reached that point. I know what Telstra is. I know about the marginal seats in western Sydney. I've watched Tony Jones on Q&A.

Finally, I think The Australian is fast becoming an malevolent force and for some reason that I do not fully understand it is not met with the sort of public opposition it deserves.

DB: Is there lessons from the Australian experience in the current old/new media "war" for the American mediascape?

JR: As the Murdoch empire faces the loss of the emperor--his lost grip, his inability to master digital, or his eventual passing--it starts behaving erratically and in that state it becomes rather dangerous: to itself, but also to other people and to cultural treasures like freedom of the press.

DB: Are the likes of Chris Mitchell just being Canutes trying to stop the tide or can the Murdoch Empire really stamp its authority over the old/new media landscape worldwide?

JR: Here's one hypothesis: Murdoch cannot master digital. He tried, but the thing has eluded him. That is unacceptable for a mogul. But it is also a fact. Put those two things together--an unacceptable fact that is also true--and you have a dangerous situation for a news empire. Rupert is trying to impose an order on the digital world that it does not have. This creates problems for his editorial employees. They have to believe in an analysis that is "shitty," but also saintly because it comes from the top. They get into trouble when they try to prove the emperor right, and behave like little emperors themselves.

This then draws ridicule in the new media environments they disdain but also have to participate in. Which enrages them, causing them to say and do stupid things, as Chris Mitchell did. The dynamic is being forced down through the hierarchy so that it reaches even the reporters at The Oz, who think they can impose order, knock heads and, for example, demonstrate to the blogosphere which rules it has to obey.

Notice how often people from The Australian say there's "nothing special" about Twitter, or that it doesn't get a pass, that it isn't an exception. That's the echo, way down the line, of the unacceptable fact that is also true. "There's nothing different going on here. We got this under control." When they are criticized for taking what is, in effect, a party line, people from The Australian have a strange habit of hearing criticism as a charge of conspiracy. Then they laugh at the overheated image of a conspiracy, which in turn protects them against the criticism. Sally Jackson did this just the other day:

http://twitter.com/Sally_Jackson/statuses/9104914064084992

In the case of Matthew Franklin, I documented the pattern here:

http://jayrosen.tumblr.com/post/102744512/massively-multi-player-denial-when-do-we-grok-the#comment-84775968

Even after I showed it to him, he had no idea what I was talking about.

http://twitter.com/#!/franklinmatthew/status/26621708341


DB: Is it perhaps because the mainstream Australian media scene is so dominated by one publisher, that the underground movement as represented by Australia's Twitterati is so lively?

JR: Also the fact that the above ground opposition is so weak. Online, there is a lot of juvenile sneering at News Ltd. which reflects how rarely the respectable people criticise and investigate what's rotten in the empire. How many journalists who were there when Asa Wahlquist made her remarks spoke up about what they heard? For the professional culture of journalism in Australia, which extends to the academic centres where journalism is studied, that is a significant number.

Why Media Watch is wrong about journalists and Twitter

Australia’s most important watchdog on all matters media made a rare lapse last night. ABC’s Media Watch got its message badly wrong in a segment where they warned off journalists from making controversial statements on Twitter. Little-known journalist Adam Turner was the scapegoat new host Paul Barry (no relation) chose to pillory to prove a badly flawed point.

According to Turner’s bio he is an Australian freelance technology journalist who was formerly Melbourne deputy editor of Next and the business IT sections of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He left The Age in 2005 and has been a freelance journalist ever since providing “news, features, reviews, blogs and podcasts to various business and consumer technology publications.”

Turner is a regular user of Twitter with over 2,000 tweets to his name. Like many involved in the media he was online on 21 August as the federal election results were coming in. Turner was an avid contributor to the #ausvotes tag with at least 50 tweets on the day (including two mentioned by Media Watch that have since been deleted). Like most people in this particularly conversation, Turner had an opinion and was not afraid to share it on Twitter.

It was obvious Turner was no fan of Tony Abbott. There were tweets like “If Abbott wins, New Zealand will be swamped with boat people on Monday” and “If Abbott wins, helicopter waiting to fly Kerry O'Brien off the ABC roof as coalition forces close in”. His tweets were clearly partisan but hardly noteworthy. They were also little different to hundreds of other similar tweets that night from those supporting the left of centre parties.

Turner's turning point came as Tony Abbott emerged to address his party and the country on live TV. According to the program transcript, Turner tweeted “Listen to this c-------er gloat when he hasn't even won” which he followed shortly by “this a---hole is trying to make a victory speech, complete with cheersquad”. I suspect Turner spelt out the words cocksucker and arsehole in his tweets though I can’t be certain as they have been deleted. On the night they would have been lost in a swathe of tweets with the same hashtag, many of whom would have had much harsher words to say about Abbott, an extremely divisive public figure.

But someone had it in for Turner and informed the ABC. Media Watch made it seem like the pinnacle of investigative journalism tracking him down as Barry announced “I think we have our man”. All they did was count his number of followers (as if that had any meaning at all in this age of Twitter mass marketing) and then grab the text off his bio that I’ve reproduced above. Both the bio and the tweets are openly available to anyone who looks at Turner’s Twitter page or follows him. There was no suggestion Turner had anything to hide.

So where is the problem? It seems as if Media Watch wanted to save Turner from himself. “Luckily Turner's not a political correspondent or he might now be unemployed,” Barry said. “But even so, why on earth did this seem like a good idea?” He compared Turner’s fate to that of Catherine Deveny who was sacked for breaching the taboo of discussing child sexuality with her tweet "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”. Leaving aside the sanctimonious outcry from rival media, the furore ignores the fact The Age probably wanted to shaft the troublesome Deveny anyway. More importantly it fails to acknowledge her tweets had nothing to do with her work at the Age.

Similarly with Turner. What he got up to on election night with a few bourbons on board may or may not have been a good idea but it was hardly unethical. It also had absolutely nothing to do with his work. Yet Media Watch felt the need to ask The Age’s editor Paul Ramadge about his freelancer. Ramadge’s reply was succinct “[Adam Turner] has received an official first and final warning.” Media Watch’s verdict was that it was an “embarrassing mistake”. Neither Barry nor his team seemed to understand the openness and conversation that underpins social media tools like Twitter.

This became blatantly apparent with Media Watch’s second target in the same segment. ABC WA journalist Geoff Hutchison was forced to delete his Twitter account after he too had a go at Tony Abbott during a Q&A program in the week before the election. Hutchison tweeted "Tony, why are you frightened of intercourse with Julia? Is it because we will be watching and measuring?"

This sarcastic offering offended someone enough to contact ABC management who ordered him to delete his account. ABC Radio spokesman Warwick Tiernan said the comments had breached the ABC's social media policy. "Geoff's comments, posted on a personal Twitter account, do not meet ABC social media guidelines and do not represent the views of the ABC," he said.

Media Watch claimed the problem with Hutchison’s tweets was it interfered with his job which is to be objective. Under ABC’s social media rules staff are directed not to mix "the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute" and not imply the ABC endorses personal views. But Hutchison was not working when he attacked Abbott, he was most likely at home on the couch. No reasonable person could imagine his personal comments could bring the ABC into disrepute. It is also an insult to Hutchison to think he could not be professional enough to leave his personal opinions to one side when interviewing politicians.

Media Watch inadvertently let slip the real reason why he was forced to take the punishment of deleting the account. “Stupid comments like that make it harder for him to do that job properly... and they're a gift to the ABC's critics.” What Barry is really saying is that this has nothing to do with left-wingers putting their gripes on the Internet and everything to do with not giving ABC’s right-wing enemies the opportunity to make tired claims about bias.

Typically Andrew Bolt (who like Hutchison is an able interviewer of politicians despite his own well-known political biases) was quickest off the mark lumping Turner and Hutchison together in a rogue’s gallery with Deveny, Marieke Hardy and Daniel Burt. “Yes, only five,” Bolt admitted in his final sentence, “but all attacking from the Left, with the ABC and barbarians [Fairfax] strongly represented.” Bolt avoided drawing any conclusions from his post allowing his audience do the dirty work for him.

If Barry and his cohorts are frightened off by streams of invective from "ABC’s Critics” like Bolt and his audience then we really do have a problem. Silencing Turner and Hutchison achieves no purpose. We desperately need more robust views not less. We need to know what our politicians and our journalists think, not frighten them off into platitudes. Guiding the social media policy should be an underlying philosophy of publish and be damned. There will be those who will damn the ABC no matter what they do or what their policies say. Media Watch should be standing up to them not for them.

Twitter and politics: The Penrith Debate points to the future

Among the 1,200 tweets with the #penrithdebate tag, the most retweeted comment of the day came not from a politician but from a journalist who has long been familiar with the medium: Joe Hildebrand. Hildebrand used the conventions of his craft to turn the debate into an ironic news headline “EXCLUSIVE: TWITTER DEBATE CONFUSED, NONSENSICAL AND UNPRODUCTIVE; PERFECT REPRESENTATION OF NSW POLITICS” At least 41 others liked Hildebrand’s contribution enough to send it on to their followers too (photo: ABC)

The joke was funny because it used the metaphor of the Twitter debate standing in for the entire panoply of governance in NSW. But if true, Hildebrand as a Sydney based News Limited reporter, is part of the problem. As one observer noted, “Twitter is too short, and with a lot of people tweeting to participate in the debate means that information just flies by without being properly looked and picked apart”. Yet journalists and other truth finders can easily pick through the bones of the debate after the fact.

The Penrith Debate was an exchange of ideas between NSW three political leaders using Twitter as the communication channel for 30 minutes ahead of a state by-election in Penrith on the weekend. Under the moderation of TV journalist Kevin Wilde, the leaders Premier Kristina Keneally, the Liberals' Barry O’Farrell and the Greens' Lee Rhiannon would use the 140-character format to debate ideas, issues and policies. Keneally made grandiose claims about the possibilities: “Twitter flattens democratic debate. Enlivens democracy. A great tool for discussion, info exchange.”

All of this is true after a fashion, but Twitter does not make for great theatre. Because of the tool’s shortcomings with multi-pronged conversation, the debate became more geek gimmickry than any flush of oratory. Tech and social commentator Stilgherrian picked up on this calling it “confusing and pointless” and said Twitter was “completely the wrong medium for a debate.” Stilgherrian made the point that following the three Twitter streams was almost like watching three TV stations. Yet he also said a filtered stream of the hashtag limited to the participants was available on the day.

Twitter may be flawed but we forget it is just one piece of the communication puzzle. Keneally used her iphone to make her Tweets while Rhiannon used Tweetdeck. Others used a bewildering array of tools that sit on top of Twitter to make their points. The stream is being tamed as people find uses for the vast amount of data it consumes. And the debate, though badly executed, contained the germ of an old and timeless ideal: public accountability.

Among the masters of public accountability are the Dutch and they held several Twitter debates a couple of weeks ago in the lead-up to national elections. The Netherlands went further than NSW with three party leaders, two ministers and three other MPs taking part. The commentary from Dutch-based John Tyler at HagueGuy showed there was a massive audience for this kind of interaction regardless of how chaotic the rapid fire exchanges got. While it was easy to get confused, the debates have added a vast amount of information for the likes of the HagueGuy and Hildebrand to work with when critiquing politicians.

It is too easy to overlook just how exciting this kind of interactivity is. Working at its best, the Twitterati operates like synapses, a hivemind that is capable of massive thought and concerted action despite its 140 character limits, inherent anarchy, spamming, non sequiturs and juvenile humour. The creative boundary of briefness means complex words and sentences are pared down to their absolute essentials and often chiselled into remarkably dense thought. Admittedly we didn't see much of that today but there will be other opportunities.

More of these debates will be conducted in the trust economy of social media. Politicians will have to learn a new skill: how to become adept at ceding control. Twitter debates (or whatever social media format might follow) won’t decide the election, but with the right tools and the right filters, they can add to the general wellbeing of the body politic by getting tight messages out to a wide and engaged audience.

Greens participant Lee Rhiannon was in no doubt the debate was a success. “There would have been more people following this debate on line than would fit into many local town halls,” she wrote. “I am not saying they should replace public meetings but there is a place for online debates in the political landscape and we should encourage its development.”

While the debate format suited the Greens as it did not exclude them, Rhiannon is right – we should encourage their development. But we should not get too carried away; Rhiannon and the rest did what politicians do in any other debate on any other media. They spoke to their own themes and ignored pointed replies. It is politics, after all. It is up to us to go through the entrails to make sense of it.

Interrupted lives - A story of a Twitter Hack

Yesterday my Twitter account was hacked causing me to spam at last 100 of the people I follow with sexually suggestive Direct Messages. Apparently I was not alone in this phishing attack. There was also something similar recently in Facebook. In my case it was caused by rather stupidly clicking on a DM sent to me on Thursday night. I knew the person who sent it and had no immediate reason not to trust it. As Pete Cashmore said we're less wary when a link appears to be from a trusted contact. The message read “Is this you?” and provided a link (via a deceptively meaningless short URL) which I clicked on almost without thinking.

Almost instantaneously I regretted clicking although nothing happened immediately. Barely minutes later I saw someone’s Facebook warning that the “is this you?” message was malware and you shouldn’t click on the attached link. I was annoyed at my stupidity and hoped nothing further would come of it. But when I checked the Internet on Friday morning it was obvious a lot more had come of it.

Apparently what happens when you click on the link is that your Twitter password is sent to the attackers, permitting them access to your account. According to Cashmore, your friends receive the same message shortly after, which will look like it was sent out by you. I didn’t send out the same message (as far as I can tell) but the one I did send was a classic in its own right.

At approximate 7am yesterday morning, about a hundred DMs were unleashed from my account. Twitter has now cleaned out all the messages from my sent folder however someone however was kind enough to send me a screenshot of how it looked. In the message I was claiming to be “female/24/horny” and added “I have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name paris928love@hotmail.com” It is unlikely that any of the messages would have fooled their recipients. For starters they were all sent out complete with my name and headshot avatar which makes it blatantly apparent I am neither female, 24 nor horny (unless, as I wrote later by ‘horny’ they meant ‘scaly’).

I was blissfully unaware of this activity while munching my weetbix for breakfast. When I logged on an hour later, I became aware of the problem when I checked my regular emails and noticed quite a lot of Twitter DMs sent to me in return. These were all genuine DMs sent to me by friends who were either laughing at the absurdity of the message (if they knew me well) or warning me I was hacked (if they didn’t). When I logged on to Twitter there were many more messages.

“excuse me?”

“Just got a DM from @derekbarry that makes me think his account has been hacked.”

“Time to change your Twitter passwd. Ur sending our "interesting" DM spam. eg "..hi, i'm 24/female/horny...message me on my...”

“unless you are leading a secret double life someone is using your account for spam”.

“Derek, your account has been compromised. Unless you really ARE 24 and horny.”

“You don't look like a 24yo horny female to me.... :) I think you've been hacked!!”

“so u won't hit any "is this you?" messages in future? :) was caught by one back at Xmas. Mine sent out colonic irrigation tweets :P”

One person wrote to tell me he had received one of female/24/horny messages but he also had been hacked and was “going nuts” about how to solve the problem. While I was sympathetic, this was not a reaction I shared. I was momentarily embarrassed so much spam had been sent out in my name but looking at how absurd it was, I found it funny. It was also unwittingly the cause of more real interaction with people than I would normally have had if I'd been left alone.

I sent out a few Tweets apologising for the spam, joked about being scaly rather than horny and immediately changed my Twitter password. This in turn got a lot of responses most of which saw the funny side of what had happened. Here, I hope my reputation in Twitter allowed me to turn a potentially nasty situation into one which people could laugh at. And as far as I know, no one stopped following me thinking I was a spambot.

Within a half hour, I got an email from Twitter saying they believed my account was compromised. They forced me to change my password again and hopefully I’m now clean until the next time I accidentally click on a safe looking link. I say “next time” because despite my increased wariness I’m convinced it will happen again. Spammers are becoming more adept at mimicking convincingly real behaviours – though as my own messages proved they still leave a lot to be desired in matching physical attributes with the text!

Pew finds the young are deserting blogging for social media

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project has found blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults since 2006. The findings suggest that as blogging has matured as a practice, so has its practitioners. The survey was conducted as one of a series of reports undertaken by the Pew Research Center to highlight the attitudes and behaviours of American adults ages 18 to 29. The report brought together recent findings about internet and social media use among young adults and situated it within comparable data for adolescents and adults older than 30. Pew surveyed 800 adolescents and 2,253 adults in 2009 to get their data. (photo:eurleif)

The report found the Internet is a crucial “central and indispensable element” of the lives of American teenagers and young adults. 93 percent of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 went online, a number that has remained stable for three years. Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users go online every day. Families with teenage children are also most like to have a broadband connection (76 percent and up 5 points since 2006). It will probably surprise no one that the older you get, the less likely you are to be connected to the net. 74 percent of adults use the internet. But that number is skewed because younger adults (18-29) go online at a rate equal to that of teens (at 93 percent).81 percent of adults aged 30-49 are online while just 38 percent (but still rising) of those over 65 are hooked up.

Use of gadgets is on the rise as the Internet increasingly moves away from the desktop and onto mobile and wireless platforms. But again the growth is skewed towards the young. In September 2009, Pew asked adults about seven gadgets: (however they listed just six: mobile phones, laptops and desktops, mp3 players, gaming devices and ebook readers). On average, adults owned just under three gadgets. Young adults of age 18-29 averaged nearly 4 gadgets while adults ages 30 to 64 average 3 gadgets. But adults 65 and older on average owned roughly 1.5 gadgets out of the 7.

While the desktop or laptop remains the dominant way of getting online, newer ways of connecting are making headway. More than a quarter of teen mobile phone users use their cell phone to go online. A similar number of teens with a game console (PS3, Xbox or Wii) use it to go online. One in five owners of portable gaming devices uses it for Internet access. Perhaps surprisingly white adults are less likely than African Americans and Hispanics to use the internet wirelessly. African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among whites or Hispanics.

Less of a surprise is the fact that teens are avid users of social networks. Three quarters of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has been growing at 7 percent each year since 2006. Teenagers are also more likely to use it as they get older. While more than 4 in 5 online teens ages 14-17 use online social networks, just a bit more than half of online teens ages 12-13 say they use the sites. Pew says this may be due to age restrictions on social networking sites that request that 12 year olds refrain from registering or posting profiles, but do not actively prevent it. The other notable statistic is that differences in gender are evening out ending the previous dominance of girls on social networks.

Usage of social networks stays constant in the 18-29 age group but then drops off rapidly for those over 40. Adults are also more likely to have profiles on multiple sites. Among adult profile owners, Facebook is currently the social network of choice; 73 percent of adults now maintain a profile on Facebook, 48 percent are on MySpace and 14 percent use LinkedIn. Analysis by education and household income show that support for Facebook and LinkedIn rises with both factors validating Danah Boyd’s research into the subject.

The news is not so good for Twitter. Pew’s September 2009 data suggest teens do not use the microblogging platform in large numbers. While one in five adult internet users ages 18 and older use Twitter or update their status online, teen data collected at a similar time show that only 8 percent of online American teens ages 12-17 use Twitter. Pew did add a rider to say the question for teens was worded quite differently from how the question was posed to adults so the results are not strictly comparable. With adults there was a sliding scale of Twitter usage with age. 37 percent of online 18-24 year olds use the platform compared to just 4 percent of over 65s.

But while use of all other web2.0 platforms was on the rise among the young, the striking exception was blogging. Teenage blogging has dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent of all users in the last three years. The decline spreads to commenting on other blogs. 52 percent of social network-using teens report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from 76 percent commenting in 2006. Young adults show a similar decline. However blog as a whole had not declined as there has been a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults. The hard work involved in blogging is increasingly becoming an old person’s game.

Media140: Twitter and the Iranian election

A new study of Twitter in the Iranian elections has found that that the use of the social network was greatly exaggerated inside the country. British writer Charles Leadbeater and his team found there were less than 20,000 twitterers with an Iranian address and many of these included foreigners who changed their location to “Tehran” in sympathy with the protesters. The report also found only one third of Iranians have internet access skewed towards the younger and urban opposition supporters. According to Valleywag such a tiny proportion of Iranians on Twitter means any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless.

Yet it is also true to say the 2009 Iranian election was one of the most important moments for Twitter in its short life. NYU Professor Clay Shirky called it “the big one” and the first revolution catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. Leadbeater’s findings appear to dispute the transformation part of Shirky’s statement but the global impact is accurate enough. The US State Department deemed it to be so important, it twisted Twitter’s arm to delay a critical network upgrade in June so it wouldn’t cut daytime services to Iranian disputing the election result.

Introducing the third panel of the media140 conference in Sydney last Thursday, ABC’s Fran Kelly called the election a “watershed moment” for social media. The session was entitled “social media lessons from the Iranian uprising” and featured ABC’s Mark Colvin, Al Jazeera’s head of social media Riyaad Minty, UTS lecturer Tony Maniaty, SBS News Director Paul Cutler and University of Wollongong’s Dr Jason Wilson.

Mark Colvin kicked off the discussion. Colvin was an ABC foreign correspondent and in Iran at the time of the original Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. He said the slogans on the street “Marg Bar Amrika” (Death to America) have now been changed to “Marh Bar Diktator” (Death to the dictator) as protesters turned against their own government.

Colvin said Iran’s so-called Twitter revolution began abroad. Americans angry will the lack of coverage of unfolding events after the disputed election began posting comments using the hashtag #cnnfail. The 24 hour broadcaster had pushed out the official Iranian line that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election but failed to report on the disputed fairness of the ballot. Iranian authorities expelled the reporters of other broadcasters, such as the BBC for daring to cover the growing unrest on the streets of Tehran. Colvin said that cnnfail became a symbol for what was wrong with old media and Twitter began to take centre stage as people sought out alternative sources of information.

There were a lot of people purporting to give eye-witness accounts. Colvin used his knowledge of Iranian and journalistic nous to verify what was trustworthy and what wasn’t. In Australia and elsewhere he quickly became acknowledged as an expert on the topic. However, he acknowledges “Twitter didn’t really achieve much at all inside Iran.” The Social media buzz gave the protesters a sense that their protest was worth persisting with but it also helped spread rumours, false pictures and inflated protest tallies. Colvin said the revolution was defeated but there were two unexpected benefits: it made the people of Iran human in western eyes and it helped Iranians see that they were not alone. “The pretence [of religious rule] has been stripped away, and part of what did that was created by Twitter, social media, and the world wide web,” he concluded.

Jason Wilson also believes the revolution said more about Twitter than it did about Iran. Wilson said it was amazing to watch how people in Australia and elsewhere discussed the issue and invested emotionally in it, through the medium of Twitter. Wilson said it was an “intense” experience unlike any other he had witnessed in the web2.0 world. But focusing on Twitter alone underestimates the influence of the Iranian blogosphere, he noted. Wilson said the blogs were a crucial space for dissent and debate and responsible for getting the protesters out on the street. Facebook groups and old fashioned word-of-mouth also played a big role.

The Iranian experience also showed some of the potential flaws of Twitter. It was all too easy, said Wilson, to retweet something rather than check out its accuracy. The hype around Twitter also disguises the fact that its effect in Iran was overstated and its user base exclusive. Ahmadinejad’s rural and poor constituency (as subsequently confirmed by Leadbeater et al) are “the last people who are likely to fish up on Twitter” and therefore without a voice in the west. “We need to be reflexive about the nature of [Twitter’s] networks when we think about this platform as a source of information” Wilson concluded.

Media140: Julie Posetti’s Revolution

ABC RN Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly kicked off the second session on Day 1 of Sydney Media140 on the provocative theme of “death or salvation of professional journalism”. Kelly’s panel included fellow Radio National presenter Robyn Williams, Fairfax Digital editor-in-chief Mike Van Niekerk, Crikey editor Jonathan Green and Crikey media writer Margaret Simons. But Kelly’s first guest, and the subject of this post, was the conference’s indefatigable editorial editor Julie Posetti. (photo by Derek Barry)

Posetti is a journalist and academic based in Canberra with over 20 years experience in the media industry in radio, print and online. Posetti is an avid Twitterer and has been engaged in eight months of active research into how journalists use the tool. Posetti’s theme was It’s a revolution not a war. The name took its cue from earlier speaker Mark Scott’s recent “end of empire” speech aimed at the legacy media barons such as Rupert Murdoch.

Posetti’s argument was there are three crises confronting journalism at the moment: dealing with the effects of new technology, the failure of the economical model and a loss of public trust. She said that the latter crisis is not getting the attention it deserves among all the clutter of the first two crises. Yet it is not difficult to see why the industry might not want to talk about it. News is becoming increasingly tabloid, trashy and truthier as it seeks ever wider audiences lured by the lowest common denominator. Editors and proprietors know that people love hearing about scandals and outrage, and they will bring it to them if it means having to manufacture them.

But as Posetti notes, there is a nasty side effect to the sensationalism used to sell such news: loss of reputation. Journalists pay the price as much as the media they serve in this interest. The professional consistently ranks low in most trust surveys of occupations. They gradually transform from guardians of the fourth estate into lackeys of corporate media giants prepared to stop at nothing to get their grubby story. Meanwhile the major issues of the day are either incorrectly reported or under-reported or both.

Posetti says that journalists should wake up to this danger. Social media is enabling many new practictioners and many more who fact-check others. If journalists didn’t engage with these new players, they would lack credibility in online communities. Posetti said such credibility was crucial to sustaining what ever model exists when the first two crises are solved.

This means that we need to pay as much attention to the public good function, if not more, than either to the death of newspapers or the lack of profits online. To do this, argues Posetti, journalists must endure with their most sacred functions: “shining a light in dark places; speaking truth to power and doing so without fear or favour, but with a commitment to accuracy, truth & fairness.”

This means having a wider definition what constitutes news reporting and the ditching of the over-blown notion of objectivity. The social age has blurred the line between journalists and citizens. This is particularly true in Twitter with its open discussions and crowd-sourcing of information between all manner of professional and amateur media players. Some of this will be serious, some will be playful (witness how tonight’s #pwnednudierun played out across television, Twitter and Youtube). But whatever it is, it is something to embrace not fear or resist. “It’s vital to accept that this is a revolution, not a war,” said Posetti. “A time for transformation, revitalisation [and] reinvention.”

Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging

I’m just back from a Sydney two-day Media140 “news in the age of social media” conference. Due to Internet access issues and the vagaries of battery life, I didn’t get the chance to blog about it in Sydney. The conference generated a lot of discussion and argument (particularly between journalists and “new media” advocates) and I’ll add my take over the next few days. However, I wanted to begin with a comparison that struck me.

It seemed to me that the battles that dominated the backchannels this week reminded me of similar warfare waged two years ago. In September 2007 I attended the first (and to my knowledge, still only,) Australian Blogging Conference in Brisbane. Much of that conference focused on blogs and political reportage. Bloggers and academics lined up on one side of the argument describing how blogs were a crucial part of the public sphere. On the other side professional journalists reminded them that blogging was a practice as well as a platform and their craft skills were still needed to provide proper context to whatever information being made public.

The journalists had good reasons for their turf minding – they feared their role as sense-makers was about to be seriously diminished. Though the GFC was then unheard of, the media industry was already in crisis by 2007. As more and more people abandoned traditional media in favour of more disparate (and sometimes desperate) news sources online, it was becoming increasingly harder to harvest eyeballs for advertisers in sufficient quantities to justify the news expense of big media. That day in Brisbane, the argument raged back and forth over whether blogs would save journalism or walk all over its corpse.

With two years hindsight, it is obvious that blogging will do neither. The platform will continue as a popular venue of long-form thoughts for produsers, some of whom will be professional, some others amateur and more may be a mix of the two. All will likely continue to irk each other. But as the technology has matured, so has the argument. As blogging evolved, much of the heat went out of the battle. While a few journalists remain hostile, most are now either bloggers themselves or else see the blogs less as a threat than part of their arsenal of sources.

That hasn’t meant the journalists’ problems have gone away. On the contrary, journalists are move than ever under threat from corporate shareholder pressure to cut costs and demand thinner news rooms. The blogs are still eating away at audience along the long tail. Now more tools under the rubbery banner of “social media” are further muddying the waters. But thanks to the link economy, blogs and the social networks possibly bring as much traffic to old news sites as they take away.

Of the social networks it is Twitter that is causing the most professional angst. Twitter was a toddler at the time of the 2007 blogging conference and barely merited a mention. But its real time news function would prove irresistible and the subsequent explosion of growth and influence has pushed it to the centre of the argument. Ande Gregson coined the concept of media140 to launch a global discussion on what news in the social age means. I enjoyed the conference and the diverse set of speakers but the name riffing off Twitter’s character limit meant that the impact of Facebook (now 325 million users) did not get the attention it deserves.

What did come out was the same battle between new and old media proponents. The early adopters and academics showed how Twitter was changing the news landscape. The journalists asserted their right to provide an ethical, informed and contextualised take on the news in the new platform.

I suspect the outcome will be similar to the 2007 arguments. The (former) audience will be atomised into dialogues of the deaf and there will be less control and mediation. But journalists will prosper if they engage with Twitter, and carefully curate the data while showing a human and ethical face. Twitter, like the blogs, or Facebook, won’t hasten the demise of traditional media. As the wonderful fake Twitter account @BigHarto (based on News Ltd boss John Hartigan) pointed out late Friday afternoon: "In closing, I'd just like to remind #media140 participants that the future of journalism is whatever I fucking say it is." This may just be art resembling postmodernism. But it is also a reminder that real media power will not be tossed away lightly.

Stephen Fry, Twitter and the Fifth Estate

The Prince of Twitter dropped a bombshell to his near million followers tonight with his attempted Twitter quitter note. “Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it's been fun” he wrote. Looking back a tweet earlier and there was a more definitive statement. “@brumplum You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone.” @Brumplum was Richard of Birmingham, England. Richard’s blog “Plum’s plums” comes with an adult warning from Google but is otherwise unremarkable. Stephen Fry is not mentioned anywhere except in the Twitter stream. (photo adapted from the original by wilsondan)

It would seem that Richard and Fry are unknown to each other. But Brumplum mentioned in passing to another Tweeter today he thought @stephenfry’s tweets were ‘a bit... boring.... (sorry Stephen)”. For some reason this mild rebuke got under Fry’s skin as it caused him to reply to brumplum “whereas yours are so fascinating I can barely contain my fluids.” Two hours later, Fry made his announcement he was quitting.

Pity poor Brumplum. Within minutes of Fry’s announcement, people were flocking to his page for more information. Once Brumplum was outed as the Fry twitter killer, the Twitterverse was intent on proving Fry right about the aggression and unkindness. “Always nice to forever be known as the idiot who fucked over Fry”, said one person to Brumplum. “Look what you've done, meaningless piece of meat!” said another. “i feel i should say something horrible to you for you're stephen shunning” said a third. And on it went.

But the reality is that if Stephen Fry is going to quit Twitter it won’t be because of the boredom he caused Richard Nobody of Birmingham. Fry is a massive presence on the social network. He is on more lists (5,520) than most people have followers. He has 924,300 followers of his own. According to the Telegraph, Twitter has given him extraordinary power. He has used the platform as a bullypulpit on issues from Japanese shark fin fishing, to Westminster press freedoms, to getting a Londoner off death row in China. “On September 16, he demanded that Gordon Brown attend the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen;” said the Telegraph. “On September 21, Mr Brown announced that he would.”

Fry was also instrumental in the Twitter campaign to castigate Jan Moir for her homophobic column about Stephen Gately. In short he is at the centre of most Twitter storms. He deeply understands the tool’s potential to be a mouthpiece of the masses. But to his vast army of followers he is merely a funny and honest person who shares his life on a public social network. And so for all the people who tweeted for brumplum’s head, many times more simply wanted to show Fry their support and pleaded with him to continue tweeting.

Fry gave a sense of how the pressure to perform in the platform may be playing out with a brilliant essay on his own blog a couple of weeks ago. In “Poles, politeness and politics in the age of Twitter” he reflected with scorching honesty on his practice of “tweet first, ask questions later” in the light of the Moir affair. He also noted how an appearance on Polish television went badly wrong when he said something like “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.” It was an insensitive remark which he immediately regretted but the hatemail he got extinguished “any spark of apology”. This only made matters worse and he unreservedly apologised in the blog post.

Fry was finding out the hard way that he was now considered a politician and was being treated the way anyone with real power is treated. He was aware of his own influence in the Moir and Trafigura cases and noted “a shift in the very focus of democracy.” The “Twinternet” was becoming a Fifth Estate he noted (a label previously used to describe blogs) rescuing the media in its battles with the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. “A pleasant twittery microblogging service that I joined in the spirit of curiosity and fun has emerged as a real force in the land and it is of course fascinating and pleasing to see this,” he admitted.

Fry then attempted to undersell his role. He does NOT wield influence, he contended. He was late on the scene with Moir and Trafigura. There was occasionally better things to do than Twitter. “Contrary to appearances I have another life and do not spend all my time monitoring screens and detecting every twitch on the filament of the web,” he said. Twitter’s name is a clue to its meaning, he said. It is not called “Ponder or Debate”. Yet he also conceded it was a new and potent force in democracy and “a thorn in side of the established order of things”.

And Fry was getting fed up with the centrality of his role in the revolution. “Hundreds of requests pour in every day asking me to use my strange, new-found ability to connect to a lot of people,” he said “It is as if I own a billboard on the busiest road in Britain.” Fry was beginning to sense a paradox at heart of his power. The closer he gets to the centre, the more people pay attention to what he has to say. “Maybe the very fact that I have so many followers now disqualifies me from stating the sort of opinions all others are free to – as if I were a member of the royal family.” Perhaps accepting his now figurehead status, he concluded, “the best I can do is hope for a quiet week ahead.” If he does remain quiet in Twitter, it will be his decision.