Dadblog

Listened to the most recent Start the Week on the podcast this week. One of the guests was the FT’s John Lloyd who has written a report called “The Power of the Commentariat” with Julia Hobsbawm. The discussion essentially moved around the idea that media commentators wield an awful lot of power in this country, mainly because politicians seem to read and respond to them.

Two things struck me about Lloyd’s thesis. The first was that during this discussion there was not a single mention of the Internet. Nothing about blogs, nothing about social media, nothing whatsoever about the chattering cacophonies of online. Can you imagine a conversation about political commentary in the States not mentioning the Web? Me neither.

Secondly, it struck me again how traditional media commentators make enormous assumptions about the consumption of the media that is produced. In the discussion, Lloyd mentioned the “enormous power” of people like Trevor Kavanagh and Richard Littlejohn, because they control comment pages in the biggest-selling newspapers, the red-tops. But no-one asked: how much are these commentators actually read? No-one asked: what research has been done into whether Sun readers actually read Kavanagh’s columns? The assumption was that publication = readership. I find it instructive that Kavanagh doesn’t have a permanent link in the navigation on the Sun’s home page, but Mystic Meg does.

If we can have slow food, why can’t we have slow news? Why does everything around news have to be fast?

The “slow food” movement treats food as something to be cherished, something to spend time with. Our appreciation and understanding of what food is increases with the time we spend with it. “Slows news” would see us organising our news sites in a way to allow attention to be given to a news story over time, rather than just at the instant at which it is producing the brightest light. To some extent, the rise of the blogosphere has already given us this facility, but it’s diffuse and depends on additional tools and services - RSS readers, Google alerts, Twitter, whatever - to give an individual access to it. So why don’t newspaper sites provide for slow news?

Take, for instance, the front page of the Telegraph. No particular reason to pick on the Telegraph, I just plucked it from the air. As I write this, the following stories are being covered in one way or another:

• Global warming
• A father killing himself over a school place
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• Gordon Brown and the 42-day internment plan
• Boris Johnson “wooing” the LibDems
• Ian McKellen returning as Gandalf
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester United v. Barcelona
• Shoaib’s failed appeal
• House prices sliding again
• Calls for a “supermarket Tsar”
• BSkyB’s “secret weapon”
• Toll roads - Britain needs more of them
• Gordon Brown and the 10p tax rate fiasco
• The price of progress in Beijing
• A tasy recipe to get to your table in 10 minutes

And that’s just the stuff above the fold. Now, many of these represent a “story space” in which events will unfold. Some of these “story spaces” might even make sense as a navigational entity, say a “topic” page. Off the top of my head I’d say we’ve got the following “story spaces” represented in here:

• Global warming
• School admissions and the stress they cause
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• 42-day internment
• The London Mayoral election
• The remaking of the Hobbit
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester Utd. v Barcelona
• The Champions League
• Shoaib’s cricket ban
• House prices
• Supermarket regulation
• BSkyB
• Digital TV competition in Britain
• Tax in Britain
• Poverty in Britain
• Gordon Brown
• China
• Recipes

See the problem? From an IA perspective these are all over the place. Global warming, house prices and 42-day internment are all obvious topic pages. But what “level” should the Shoaib cricket ban on? And what’s the best way to organise all the coverage around an individual football match? From a human perspective, these story spaces make perfect sense. I’d love the Telegraph to provide me a single destination on, for instance, supermarket regulation. And I’d love that page to include a bit more than just the most recent stories that fall into that area. I’d love it to include some analysis, some data, some stuff from the web. I’d love it to be “slow.” Which causes another problem. Who does that editing? And how is the page maintained and updated?

Some sites, notably the NY Times, are using “topics” to provide a kind of slow news experience. But for me these topic pages are simply dressed up archives. They do of course provide a valuable service, both to the user and to the site publisher in the form of SEO. But they’re not necessarily all that pleasing as media experiences.

I think this “slow news” idea is one reason why Wikipedia’s coverage of news events is often so attractive. Firstly, Wikipedia provides a single and persistent URL around a story (which newspapers sites often, notably, do not do). Then that page starts to develop and grow. Information starts to attach itself to the URL. The page’s informational value increases at least partly because it’s a single page. And, of course, because of the nature of Wikipedia the “maintenance” question comes pre-answered.

Where’s the newspaper equivalent? I’m not sure I know. But I do think it’s worthy of consideration. At the moment, something happens and newspaper sites shine a bright, searing spotlight onto it. We get a tight, focussed dose of detail. And then the spotlight moves on to something else. If the original subject comes back into the news, we shine the spotlight onto it once more, and we often get the same detail or maybe a bit more. The problem is, to see the whole of a topic, we need some light shining on it all the time. A random series of superbright spotlights gives us a distorted picture of what we’re looking at.

So, slow news and consistent light. Maybe I should tag a few IA types to give some thoughts on this?

Didier Drogba is genuinely cross with Rafe Benitez who has accused him of going to ground somewhat more easily than is necessary:

“Perhaps he is looking for something to destabilise us before the match,” said Drogba. “Benítez was a manager I respected a lot. Until now, I found him not only very competent but also classy. But he has really disappointed me here. His words demonstrate a weakness. A top manager would never go so low to attack a player. Maybe he should concentrate on his own team’s game and if he wants me to stay on my feet, maybe he should tell his defenders to stop hitting me.”

Drogba had in mind the events of last week’s first leg, a 1-1 draw at Anfield in which, he claims, he was repeatedly manhandled by Jamie Carragher and Martin Skrtel, Liverpool’s central defensive partnership.

“In the first leg, Carragher and the other one [Skrtel] didn’t stop. And not just with me,” he said. “I finished the match with bruises everywhere. Last year, I broke a rib against Liverpool in the Champions League semi-final. Strangely, that escapes the statistics of Benítez. It will not affect me. If I fall, I will always get up. The best response I can give will be on the pitch.”

The thing is, do we think Drogba genuinely believes he doesn’t fall over at the merest sign of physical contact? That he feigns injury to try and benefit the team? I genuinely want to know. Do players go into the dressing room and slap each other on the back and say “lovely play-acting, darling, you really fooled them”? Or do they have to switch their brains differently to allow them to believe they genuinely were fouled? What with this and managers ranting about referees, I really think football could be the best example in practice of the effectiveness of neuro-linguistic programming.

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There’s some glorious bitching going on about Victoria Buckley’s upcoming book on Louis XIV, which has been pulled from launch after it transpired that the secret Sun King’s diaries she thought she’d discovered turned out to be an imaginative work from 1998. Oops. Not very smart. But it’s given the dusty old academics who’ve become annoyed at the rise of popular historical bios their moment in the sun:

“Thirty years ago this never would have happened. Then, people who wrote biographies were trained in how to carry out archival research. The same cannot be said of Veronica Buckley or many others like her,” said Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. “There is a whole industry now around historical biographies. Publishers know that they sell, but at the same time they will knock back book proposals unless an author promises something really racy.”

Ooh, get her. Obviously Mr Brotton would prefer to go back to a time when biographies were long, detailed, fiendishly accurate, and completely unread. And I just loved this barrage of self-importance:

A distinguished biographer earmarked to review Buckley’s latest for the Guardian had already returned the book as “not up to the high standards I impose on books I review”.

Oh, please tell us who that was, Guardian, pleeeeeeze.

Clay’s talk on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus is great in all sorts of ways, but I primarily loved it for how pissed off he sounds having to deal with another patronising mainstream media person. And this anecdote, of course:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

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  28 grand to demonstrate you’re not really racist despite what people say? Sounds like a bargain to us.
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Guardian goes meta, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

I’m having trouble unpicking this….