UK book price – fixed or variable?

I’m busy setting up a print-on-demand publishing agreement for Fraudcast News with Lightning Source, part of my ongoing and rather haphazard marketing and promotion efforts for the book.

I’ve been told Lightning Source will be a better bet than Lulu, my existing choice, for distribution and trade catalogue services, amongst other things. The idea is that that will help get Fraudcast News into bookshops and elsewhere. I’ll only know for sure once I’ve tried. I failed to tick some box or other when I got started on Lulu which meant that up until now, the book has not shown up via conventional retail channels.

The process is a tedious, time-consuming one, not least because I have to get a new ISBN to identify the book. What would cost me £126 for a block of 10 in the UK is a free service in France, where I live. Amazing that the UK charges so much money for the right to exclusive use of a few digits to identify your publication. Total rip off, if you ask me.

I then used a free online service to convert the new ISBN into a bar code, throwing up the question of what the sequence of digits actually means. I now know that the subsidiary line of code 90000 tells a computer a book has no suggested retail price.

Given that Fraudcast News is free to download as a PDF, it all gets a bit complicated. All the more so given the possibilities of people buying via different retail channels in physical bookshops, online via retailers or direct from Lightning Source itself.

While trying to find out if I had to set a price via the bar code or not, an answer that still escapes me, I came across this interesting piece about national fixed-price book rules versus a free-for-all. It includes the following:

Recently three French economists produced a study comparing 12 European countries, some with fixed price laws and some without, and concluded, “Over the past decade, the growth rate of book prices is weaker in countries with fixed prices than in countries with free prices” and “the increase of new titles is stronger in the countries which have a fixed price.”

At the same time, I’ve also been lucky to get some help from the good people at Positive Money with a re-design of the book cover, a much needed improvement to my own DIY effort.

The result is the following image, which I like a whole lot better.

Why the media don’t understand money

This is a recent talk I gave to the annual conference for the non-governmental organisation Positive Money.

A word to make clear my interests: Positive Money is an organisation whose work I greatly admire and for whom I have done some volunteer work in the last year or so and for whom I may do more in the future.

I choose to do that work, while also being a journalist, because I think the structural failures of our governance systems are such that they are an integral part of any story political journalists should be covering. That is true of debt-based money, the issue raised by Positive Money, but also of other issues such as poverty, inequality, incessant Western war-mongering and environmental despoliation.

Our leaders’ feeble attempts at regulating banks, international finance and global markets have totally failed, leading to ongoing financial crises since the global meltdown of 2007-2008. The false debates created with regard to conventional economics, and our policymakers’ fixation with a sterile definition of prosperity as determined by economic growth, are major barriers to change. Conventional media themselves fail to convey the extent of these governance problems, or even to appreciate that governance issues are the problem.

The question I was tasked to answer was why conventional media don’t “get” the idea of debt-based money. My answer could be easily adapted to fit these various other issues, as I make clear in Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.

Panel discussion: Conventional media have failed us – the case for and against

I’ve pitched this panel discussion idea to the Global Editors Network 2013 News Summit, to be held from 19 to 21 June 2013 in Paris.

Cat’s chance in hell is the expression that comes to mind. Well miaou!

The case for:
Conventional media have woefully failed to dissect the lack of any true, public accountability in all layers of modern western government, from local to global levels.

This collective failure plays out across all major areas of government. It encompasses the vast bulk of reporting on governments’ economic and fiscal thinking, their responses to serial financial crises and pitiful efforts at regulation of global banks and finance. The problem extends to the superficial news treatment of political inaction over growing poverty and inequality, accelerating climate change and species and habitat loss.

Media literacy concerning the realities of representative democracy, versus politicians’ rhetoric, is spectacularly inadequate. That makes existing media part of the governance problem, not the solution.

Patrick Chalmers, an ex-Reuters reporter himself and author of Fraudcast News, will dissect the media’s failure to highlight people’s powerlessness. He will argue that journalists and their employers, far from being popular watchdogs, suffer the same problems of elite capture as politicians and governments themselves.

Yet he remains a dogged optimist, suggesting there are alternatives. They include mass training of ordinary citizens to help them revolutionise their democracies by revolutionising journalism, building from the grassroots upwards.

The case against: I’m sure you can find someone!

Fraudcast News one of Green Left Weekly’s books of the year

Nice to get some positive feedback on Fraudcast News from Green Left Weekly’s Mat Ward.

For me, a truly great book is one that stays in your thoughts for a long time after reading it.

I thought about this book daily for months after finishing it, because its main argument seems to be at the root of almost every injustice in the world. Former Reuters reporter Patrick Chalmers gradually realised, through his job reporting on the European Union, that what is commonly passed off as democracy is anything but. Politicians are held accountable only once every four years or so, after which they break nearly every pre-election promise.

Chalmers wants truly accountable democracy, in which politicians are held accountable for every decision they make. In this endlessly quotable book, Chalmers says it is the job of every journalist to make accountable democracy part of the conversation. Technology may hold the key to eventually making it a reality.

Graphics journalism as real journalism

I tried but failed to register a comment this morning on an article carried by the Global Editors Network about how the Guardian covered US elections.

Something to do with captcha errors that I couldn’t be fussed to wrestle with. The piece was all about the whizzy things done by Gabriel Dance and his team, which seemed fine enough as far as they went but hardly very illuminating politically.

So this is what I said in reply:

“fun”, “interesting”, “creative”, “engaging”, and “different” – these are fine things in the race to capture eyeballs but they’re only of any use, from a journalism perspective, if the work informs and illuminates the audience about the underlying political realities. Otherwise it’s just showbiz.

So be all these things to get people to pay attention to the elections but also take some more steps back from the razzamatazz of the two main presidential candidates, their parties and the campaigns for all the other elected posts. Don’t get carried away with the wrapping, remember the substance.

I would like, for example, to see the real-time graphics comparing pledges in presidential debates to the realities. Obama or Romney says “security” – I want to see the graphics asking the question: “who’s security” and pointing to areas of US military actions around the world, including drone strikes and detentions. Inviting tweets from people in those countries might produce some interesting dialogues. Get beyond narrow debate parameters set by the candidates, remember your journalistic responsibility to people, not just US voters either.

The candidates mention budget priorities – I want to see graphics about the numbers of US voters in poverty and how that has evolved in recent years, next door to graphics showing subsidies to banks and financial markets (including bail-outs), to fossil fuel companies, to agro-industries and the military-industrial complex as well of estimates about the scale of tax evasion by individuals and companies.

Also, as backgrounders, I want to see graphics showing the running totals of campaign spend, Democrat and Republican, official and de facto, and where that money is coming from, where it’s being spent (TV adverts, etc) and which media conglomerates benefit. You could also invite people to tweet in about how they think winning and losing candidates might go about rewarding their sponsors after the election.

Graphics innovations and their delivery over the internet, not least via social media and to mobile devices worldwide, open up the possiblity of some fascinating global conversations that could better inform people about the realities of US politics, any politics in fact. They could be a great tool in bringing about what Dan Gillmor talked about in “We the Media” – of grassroots journalism turning old media’s lecture into a conversation. Your commenters and tweeters are part of those grassroots.

Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

‘We’ve created some feminists!’ … A study group on the Demand the Impossible course at Goldsmith’s. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics.

I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere.

Just in case such shameless self-promotion gets stripped off the comments section by the moderators, I’m pasting it here

Sounds great – shame the author had to pepper his article with leftie this, leftie that cheeky, chappy stuff.

This sort of teaching shouldn’t be classed as radical at all but part of a balanced, thoughtful education that teaches people to think for themselves rather than turning them into consumer automatons. Our existing system is all capitalist-, profit- and economic-growth driven.

You don’t get accompanying “rightie” this, “rightie” that when it comes to articles about Alan Sugar or Dragon’s Den as they vaunt the benefits of loadsamoney lifestyles that ignore what a complete mess we’re all in as a result.

That would be too “radical” for prime-time entertainment – too many people might get “the wrong ideas”. You’re not allowed to add together one + one to see the result of such thinking as consumer craziness and excess, tottering debt mountains, poverty, inequality, climate change, loss of green spaces, war etc. all that fun stuff which would make crap reality TV, piss off the professional politicians and frighten the business advertisers away. Oh no.

I would love to help out with this course – giving some insight from my own career as a Reuters reporter to talk about how our governance systems fail us and how conventional journalism is generally blinkered to those failures. On the upside, the good news. There are genuine, grassroots alternatives sprouting up around the world that could address both of these problems. There are some Creative Commons materials on my website you can take for free, if you want. I haven’t posted the address for fear of comment removal but I’m sure you can work out how to find it.

What would be interesting is to think about how to seed the ideas of Demand the Impossible to make it deliverable all over the place, not just in the UK.

Creative Commons How to manuals and accompanying video journalism reports made by participants and uploaded online would be good places to start.

Stand aside George

People’s budgets

The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames.

News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with more accountability to the public.

Just what might UK finances look like if ordinary people had greater say over how much money gets raised in taxes and where to spend it?

Read on here….

William Cobbett – dead radical, dead relevant

People’s budgets – our cash, why not our call?

People’s budgets or the same-old unaccountable ones?

 

 

 

The basic message of Fraudcast News is pretty simple, you sort of can’t miss it in the subtitle – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.

Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – which the Ancient Greeks defined as government by the people.

The UK  budget process is a case in point, consisting of rounds of closed-door horse trading between government departments and ministers. The latest City-loving Chancellor then waves about a battered red briefcase for the media before delivering some crowd-pleasing stunts at the Dispatch Box to hide the fact that most ordinary people are getting stiffed while status quo money holders carry on swimmingly. Gross over-simplification, of course, but it covers the last 30 years of British government relatively well, save for pre-election sweetener budgets and some of Gordon Brown’s giveaways.

The problem is, ordinary people get not a look in on what is the most important function of elected governments. The same problem occurs at lower tiers of government and let’s not even talk about the European Union.

It doesn’t have to be this way, which is why I’m excited to be going along to report on a People’s Budget event in Kingston-upon-Thames on October 8.

This clip explains why such an approach can transform local governance, improving its accountability, transparency and the fairness of its revenue raising and spending.

So rather than “bogus” democracy – we get something more like real democracy.

And bad journalism? It’s all journalism that ignores the bogusness of our current governance systems, at every level, which is pretty much all mainstream journalism.

After that build up, I hope it’s a good night.