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.

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.

Collaborative news anyone?

I posted this in response to a LinkedIn question about reporter, collaboratively owned news operations.

I dream of these as alternatives to the status quo. I’m sure their time will come.

 

The best one I came across, before it expired, was this:
http://www.newstandardnews.net/

This is what it said about itself:
The NewStandard was a unique online newspaper founded on the belief that the dominant model and methods of profit-focused news journalism have failed the public interest.

This was a blog post I wrote about them when they expired:
http://patrickchalmers.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/new-standard-rip/

Why spend so much time talking about a defunct publication? Because I believe their model was correct but they worked themselves too hard, stretched themselves too thin, without having found a way to pay for what they were doing.

Yeah, right, that’s the whole problem, I know, but I think they carried several seeds of possibility without having got them to germinate, if you’ll allow me a little, extended gardening metaphor.

These included an editorial line anchored in the knowledge of how journalistic economic models determine/bias output. They also included a work sharing and work rewarding process that was designed with fairness and equity bolted in rather than tacking that on as a fluffy after thought. They also refused adverstising (so as not to compromise their output) and even foundation grant money. They did some great grunt work for us all and then made it available for others, here:
http://newstandardnews.net/about/index.cfm/page/faq_tns

and here:
http://roottruth.org/book/newstandard-contributors-handbook

(Some of the writers are friends of mine too, by the way, just so that you know).

The collaborative-owned model will have its day – this fellow Dave Boyle writes very engagingly about the possibilities here:
http://www.thenews.coop/author/dave-boyle

Alongside the possibilities of collaborative projects is the idea of making the dark arts of reporting far more transparent and more widely available to anyone who fancies trying their hands at citizen journalism.

The point of citizen journalism, for me, is to focus on governance and accountability questions as its whole reason for being.

I write about this at length as a former news insider in Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. It is a paperback, eBook or free PDF that you can get via this link http://fraudcastnews.wordpress.com/ or the book direct here (http://bit.ly/OQCkox)

What role for government in changing our behaviour?

Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31.

Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global.

There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging from the visionOntv smartphone interviews posted afterwards. You can view them all via this link.

My contribution was purely by pre-recorded video interview, having left England for my usual home in SW France the day before.

This GlobalNet21 blog post gives more details on the evening’s discussions.

Setting The People Free – a meeting with the author

I was delighted to spend a couple of hours today talking democracy with John Dunn, emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King’s College, Cambridge.

Professor Dunn wrote the excellent “Setting the People Free“, a book that helped me nail down my thinking on the evolution of “democracy” since the Ancient Greeks coined a term for government by the people. That learning process was an essential step for me to take in fleshing out the arguments and observations I make in Democracy Now?, the fifth and final chapter in Fraudcast News.

We talked about what he’s planning as a follow-up to the book – a text due out next year in which he intends to lay out the book’s political implications, not least for the United States.

The meeting was a great way to prepare for a Fraudcast News reading and Q+A I’m due to deliver later on Sunday in CB1 cafe in Cambridge.

For a potted take on Dunn’s thinking, this Russia Today interview from a couple years ago does a good job. That should only be as warm up to the full works presented in Setting the People Free, which I can’t recommend enough for anyone interested in the way their lives are governed.

News to make the rich richer

I wrote this comment in response to the following article by the World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers.

Thomson Reuters can hire all the new journalists it wants but won’t change anything fundamental about its daily news file. Sorry about that.

The agency deserves its reputation as providing a service that helps rich people get richer – that’s exactly what it does. Whatever its editorial cheerleaders might say about speed, accuracy and freedom from bias, they can’t escape the reality that the vast bulk of their clients, by value, work in finance.

The rarely spoken truth about journalism is that the news you get from any media outlet turns on a handful of factors.

They include income sources (banks/finance for Reuters), ownership (Reuters is controlled by a few very rich individuals), reporters’ choice of news sources (overwhelmingly traders, banks, economists, governments and other institutions), editorial ideology (profoundly one of dergulated banks, markets, trade, status-quo institutions and free-market capitalism) and, finally, the organisation’s response to real or feared “flak” or hostile elite criticism of its output (generally supine).

Despite serial financial crises around the world, various environmental ones looming, growing inequality across many countries and plummeting faith in conventional politics and politicians we get what from Reuters in response? Nothing sustained, nothing coherent and nothing journalistically credible – despite its mammoth editorial operation.

The only comfort for Reuters is that it’s in good company with all the other major globe-spanning and national news organisations you might care to name. None serves ordinary people’s interests or highlights the farce that representative democracy has become in the face of modern markets, finance and corporations.

It took me 11 years as a Reuters reporter (1994-2005) to realise the lock down on editorial thinking created by these different factors combined together. I was lucky to be able to grab a voluntary redundancy cheque and get out in search of alternatives.

So what did I find? The good news is that there are alternatives, the bad that they take time to build. They include doing journalism focused on governance and accountability to citizens as its core role, illustrating the global and national from local perspectives. It means training others to do the same and to share the content for free to help improve our political and media literacy.

In essence, it’s the sort of thing I dreamed Reuters could do before I got tired of banging my head against the wall trying to persuade my editors that that was what “freedom from bias” really meant.

I get into the whys and hows in far greater detail in my book Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. It’s free to download as a PDF via the link or to buy as an eBook or paperback.

And no, I’m not expecting a Pulitzer.

The bloody realities of self publishing

Creative Commons

- not your standard

copyright

Self-publishing is a grind. Don’t kid yourself that you can just kiss off that bestseller, throw it up on line as an eBook or paperback then lay back and count the royalty cheques as they roll in, particularly if you forgot to put in the teen vampires chapter.

Here in the grunt room at Fraudcast News, I’ve got to the stage of promoting my book beyond the immediate circle of family and both of my friends. Time for a brief run through what got me here.

There’s quite a skillset to build up or borrow just to get this far, the first being to have the idea for a book.

The ones behind Fraudcast News  began germinating 15 years ago, when I first wondered about the realities of political power in the European Union. No really, it’s sad but true, that’s the sort of thing that bothers my head in idle moments, I can’t help it.

As a Reuters reporter in Brussels, I witnessed political decisions being taken over the heads of European environment ministers – by finance ministers, heads of governments and even European Commission civil servants. It made me think about where power truly lay, who had it and what I as a journalist should be doing to write about that. My immediate concern was why so little ever got done to resolve environmental issues such as climate change. As I now know, the problem goes far wider.

My questions about power and how journalism should cover it mushroomed out over the years, eventually forcing me out of Reuters. They spread down to national and local levels of government and up to the global level. It took ages for me to work them into the broader critique of representative democracy and journalism, and possible remedies, that is Fraudcast News. It’s complicated but not impossible stuff.

The work required me to write and re-write the text, getting various clever friends to read through each version for coherence, content and so on. With a complete first draft in hand by last May, I re-wrote it all again in the subsequent months on the back of people’s comments, positive and negative. Many times over the years, I considered jacking it all in as a bad job. The project survived, emerging complete at the start of 2012.

That took me to lulu.com, one of several self-publishing sites. My first goal was to publish an eBook, which took a few days to work through their system.

My Word document needed juggling about to strip out unnecessary formatting and to make its chapters suitable for the table of contents generator Lulu uses to turn a document into EPUB format. There were all the usual annoying glitches you get with any formatting process but I got there in the end, this being the result. I used one of their off-the-shelf covers to get me going. Once it was done, I read the ebook from start to finish, picking up quite a few grammar howlers, spelling mistakes or wooly sentences as I went. Strange how a changed format threw up errors I’d missed in the previous one.

Next was the paperback, which was more straightforward. I created a PDF from the Word document, played around with fonts, headers and footers and the extra pages at the front. I appealed to the world for help designing a cover before eventually doing one myself and market testing it with my Facebook friends. They were great – I got tonnes of helpful and useful advice.

The process was faster than it would have been with a conventional publisher, once I’d worked the text through to its first complete draft. I’d tried but failed to get a conventional publisher a few years back and decided this time around to do it myself.

Would I recommend that others do the same and bypass the old-style route?

It depends, though probably yes. I’ve learnt a lot having to do all this stuff myself, to say nothing of the experimenting I’ve been doing with Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

You certainly need friends who are willing and able to help and plenty of time that you don’t have to spend on other things, with or without full-time, paid work.

No conventional publisher would have accepted me doing a Creative Commons book or giving away free PDFs, so I was probably always destined to do it this way. Technology set me free then made me work my backside off.