Tom Streithorst
With YouTube, everyone can be a director now
“It’s 2010—time to get off of the Titanic and get onto the lifeboats,” Kevin Anderson, the Guardian’s digital research editor, told me. I wasn’t pleased. I thought: ”But the Titanic has an orchestra, a well-stocked bar, fine Egyptian cotton sheets. The lifeboats have nothing but freezing cold water.” I was at an event at the Frontline Club which sought to ask how the news industry will survive the next decade. Will the internet save it, or kill it? I came out convinced the internet will be good for journalism, but probably be bad for me, a journalist.
For news consumers, the internet rocks. Wikipedia allows us to find out everything about just about anything—no need to take the bus to the British Library. The best writing about the financial crisis hasn’t been from traditional journalists but rather in blogs from academics like Simon Johnson or traders like Barry Ritholtz. Riverbendblog may have been opinionated and occasionally inaccurate, but it gave a better picture of life in Baghdad in the dark days of 2005-06 than any western journalist could. Ten years ago we would not have heard these voices. Now they are omnipresent.
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Jonathan Power
Obama: a new serious tone to worldwide peacemaking
It seems fashionable to argue that the wheels are coming off Barack Obama’s foreign policy. It’s a position which the distinguished American scholar Philip Bobbitt stakes out in the most recent edition of Prospect. But, in truth, nothing much is happening in foreign affairs—and even if he himself had not earned his peace price, President Obama reflects the new era of tranquility over which he presides.
Let’s look at the ledger. Iraq has all but disappeared from the front page. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain, but even here investors are still steadily upping their investments in Pakistan, presumably judging that the conflict is being over-hyped. The argument with Iran over whether it is building nuclear weapons drags on, despite the forgotten report of the CIA two years ago, which found that Iran was probably not. Iran now says it might ship some of its used uranium to Russia to be converted into fuel (to provide medical isotopes) or else import from Europe, instead of manufacturing its own. The argument should now be relatively easy to wrap up.
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Felix Salmon
Have financial journalists had a good crisis? Some certainly made their names, like BBC business editor Robert Peston, an old-fashioned scoop-getter with good sources. In September 2007 he not only broke one of the biggest stories of the crunch—the Bank of England’s emergency support for Northern Rock—but arguably triggered Britain’s first bank run since 1866.
Others emerged as powerful commentators on financiers’ failings. In the US, a Rolling Stone article in July 2009 by political writer Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs started with a bang, likening the firm to a “giant vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It was soon the most discussed article of the crisis in the US.
But these are only a few chinks of light: although journalists aren’t down in the basement with the bankers, they have hardly had a good crunch. It’s now commonly noted that the financial media in Britain and America didn’t see the crisis coming, while its journalists egged on the derivative pedlars and leveraged-loan wallahs. Many media organisations acted as relentless cheerleaders for the boom. Take US financial cable channel CNBC, known for its focus on daily stock price moves, cacophonous studio debates, and the slogan of its most famous presenter Jim Cramer: “there’s always a bull market somewhere.” Such boosterism came unstuck when Cramer was interviewed by television presenter and comedian Jon Stewart in March 2009. The CNBC host just let the blows fall, unable or unwilling to defend himself or his employers.
Other forces militated against a bearish media culture. Journalists had been encouraged to build relationships with bankers, creating a dependency for their diet of mergers, price moves and management rows. The noise suited the bankers, helping to tee up deals or move stock prices, but it institutionalised a culture in which editors ignored the big picture. Financial coverage is usually ghettoised in business sections and on news wires unseen by the public. Even if journalists had clear-eyed explanations of systemic problems, no one outside the financial world was reading them.
But to a great extent there weren’t any explanations, at least in the non-specialist press. Such mainstream news as did creep out over-emphasised daily market price moves with few attempts to push big stories onto the front pages. The public followed all this with barely half an eye, and emerged without any hint of what the financiers were up to.
But while the crisis exposed the average financial hack, it has allowed more in-depth writing to shine. Michael Lewis’s December 2008 cover story,“The End,” for Condé Nast Portfolio, racked up over 5m page views. Similarly former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson’s attack on financial oligopoly in May 2009 in the Atlantic, “The Quiet Coup,” changed the tone of debate about the future of regulation.
Britain had its bright spots, with the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf highly influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and markets editor Gillian Tett (see main article) consistently insightful in her coverage of derivatives. In April she published one of the most successful of the crisis books—Fool’s Gold. The Times, edited, like the Daily Telegraph, by a former FT staffer, produced some striking coverage which helped it to win the Newspaper of the Year 2009 award.
But perhaps the best performer has been the blogosphere, which has arguably had a bigger impact on policy making than the mainstream media combined. While the FT’s Alphahville is the best of the few British blogs, it’s high-profile US economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini who drive debate, while others, like Mark Thoma, have created influential clearing houses where the thoughts of hundreds of other top-flight economists are aggregated and debated. Current and former financial professionals, such as the anonymous Epicurean Dealmaker or the semi-anonymous Calculated Risk, have also provided analysis a cut above the newspaper business desks. Recently, an angrier streak has been seen, exemplified by the take-no-prisoners Zero Hedge, a blog written under the pseudonym “Tyler Durden”—the nihilistic character from the film Fight Club. Zero Hedge was instrumental in pushing problems with automated “high-frequency trading” onto the wider agenda, after which a variant known as “flash trading” is almost certain to be banned.
The blogs, then, do a great job of feeding avid financial news junkies, and easily beat the mainstream press for their understanding of macroeconomics or banking regulation. But navigating the blogosphere still needs critical faculties beyond most news consumers: there are many more bad blogs than good. So most will continue to rely on the mainstream media, be it the BBC or Rolling Stone. If financial journalists don’t provide the type of context and clarity that the public needs, we’ll likely see more vampire squids before too long.
Felix Salmon blogs for Reuters in New York
Tim Footman
Steven Wells RIP
As you may or may not have noticed, a Famous Person Has Died. Which leads, of course, to any number of questions for media-type folks. What priority should we give to the news of the Famous Person’s death? How long should we carry on, before the bulletins become, in effect, Famous Person: Still Dead? At what point might it be OK to mention the, y’know, icky stuff about the Famous Person? At what point do we unleash Uri Geller? Oh yeah, and what do we do about the economy and Iran and all that boring stuff?
Moreover, if a Famous Person Has Died, should that mean that other, slightly less famous people who die around the same time should get the same treatment. I know, you’re thinking of Farrah Fawcett. But I’m thinking of Steven Wells.
Steven Wells, aka Swells, Susan Williams and a few things less pleasant, was probably only truly Famous (that’s Jackson Famous, Farrah Famous) to those of us born between about 1960 and 1975, with a fondness for noisy music in which attitude trumped ability every time. He was a poet, novelist, film-maker, sports writer and political activist, but his Famousness derives from his long association with the New Musical Express, in which he lauded Napalm Death and Kylie Minogue, while pouring scorn on Morrissey, Radiohead and Belle & Sebastian (you know, the kind of acts that NME readers really like). To read his views was like voluntarily submitting oneself for re-education.
But his true genius was expressed not in his reviews or interviews, glorious as they could be, but on those magnificent occasions (once every six weeks or so, I reckon, although my memory could be playing silly buggers) when he was allowed to edit the NME letters page, known since forever was a toddler as ANGST. That was when the caps lock was taped down; that was when the adjectives and expletives and exclamation marks exploded around the page; that was when perfectly sensible letters from people who bought the paper and were entitled to their views were eviscerated in public for liking, I dunno, Aztec Camera or something. It was childish, it was cruel, and for a few thousand of us, it was the funniest thing we’d read until the next time.
But not funny enough it seems. Steven Wells died last week, and as the news trickled in, occasionally poking its nose out from behind Farrah’s hair and Jackson’s… well, Jackson’s nose, I suppose, it turned out that he really wasn’t even famous enough for a Wikipedia page.
This has now been rectified; but the Wikiprefect (or whatever they dub themselves) had a point that the people howling against the decision couldn’t be arsed to find citations to support the inclusion. And this does raise an issue, specifically about journalists, but also about anyone who achieved notability in his or her field before about 2000. The pinnacle of Swells’s achievement lies in his belligerent marshalling of those letters pages. And that’s what they were; pages, which survive in attics and garages and people’s memories. They were physical, tactile things where layout and artwork and smudgy ink came together with the readers’ earnestness and Swells’s nihilism in a dialectic of verbal violence that made them bloody near essential. Because of the physical size of the old-style NME, scanning them and reproducing them on a computer screen would necessarily diminish their impact. Yes, you could cite the references from your old, mouldy copies, but the mice ate them some time in the last century. Doesn’t mean they weren’t great. Swells could twist the conventions of Web 2.0 to his own Satanic purposes with coruscating wit, but his glory days were analogue. As were many hacks who have been tagged for deletion on the basis of notability and lack of citations.
So here’s the question: in Wikiworld, and the culture that shares its values, is it notability that’s the issue, or Googlability?
Mary Fitzgerald
Shannon Matthews: a tent pole story
As advertising budgets are squeezed, the internet may be the only thing that saves the media, reports Andrew Currah in this month’s Prospect. Thanks to web analytics technology, publishers can offer advertisers much better targeted and more effective adverts; and publishers themselves can learn more about what people want to read. This all could potentially make the news becomes more accessible, engaging and relevant.
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anonymous
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The motorbikes weaved in and out of the traffic to surround the dark blue sedan making its fitful way through Colombo’s rush-hour traffic. One rider drew up alongside the right-hand side of the sedan, reached across and smashed the car’s window with the butt of his revolver, He then fired two rapid shots into the head and body of Lasantha Wickrematunge—who would die within hours at one of Colombo’s clean, well-equipped hospitals.
Summary executions, assassinations and torture are an increasing part of daily life in Sri Lanka. Lasantha knew that he was going to die. As the outspoken editor of one the country’s leading weekly broadsheets, The Sunday Leader, he was at the forefront of criticism of the government. A government that has supported and promoted a range of human rights abuses including torture, suppression of the media and the judiciary; random detention of citizens from the Tamil ethnic minority, and the recruitment of child soldiers to fight in Sri Lanka’s dismal, dirty little war. A government, led by a former human rights activist, that has done more in just four years to suppress opposition and unwind state protections than any other in the country’s short and tawdry post-colonial history.
Before Lasantha was assassinated on 8th January he drafted an editorial. It was published three days after his death. As a piece of journalism, it is an extraordinary, powerful and poignant piece of writing. It lays bare the pressure that people are under in Sri Lanka, especially the media; the way in which the powerful trample unfettered over the powerless, and the aching tragedy of this country. But above all, it is tremendously sad that another courageous man has been killed and, as he says, there will be one less voice to speak out when they come for me.
 Read it here.
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