journalist

Let me explain why it really is a bad idea to have Twitter if you are an MP.  The media love Twitter and have embraced it fully in reporting of politics and here is why. They are the prime beneficiaries of MP’s tweeting.

Despite consistently advising MP’s not to get on Twitter they are ignoring such sage counsel and are continuing to do so.  So once again I will  share my experience in social media over the years and analyse  how and why MP’s should not use Twitter unless it enhances their reputation among media and with it a very small section of the voting public who follow Twitter.  Twitter use is making MP’s look even more clueless about the problems and needs of their actual target voters than most already are and in Asenati Lole-Taylor’s case, that was what I previously thought an impossible achievement.

I do not spend much time on Twitter and only have links to new posts on the blog.  I will jump on to sledge people who need and deserve it, like David Fisher and formerly Trevor Mallard but it is a distraction to my day I can do without. If for any reason I do go on, it is as a free social media lesson in how people with anything to lose in life such as their job as an MP and perks that go with it, need to be very careful about using it. Regular users of Twitter are just hopelessly addicted to it, bored with their job or life in some way and need to stop.

Then there are political journalists who show their bias and inner circles by endlessly communicating with MP’s they are meant to be reporting neutrally on.  The smarter political journalists though use twitter to bait MP’s into making fools of themselves by obtaining stories written from tips and gossip off it and present that to their editor now as news reporting.  None of these stories are ones enhancing the public perception of an MP. The vast majority of the public do not follow Twitter at all and only see something on it in the paper or online when an MP has made a dick of themselves.  Read more »

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Last one for the day…promise…it is almost like they are playing all their bombs this week so they don’t screw up the launch of their new masthead next week.

Last night the Breakers won. For a proper and correct match review head over to Truth where our resident Basketball fan and journalist Dave McPherson has a match report that is accurate…Breakers 96 (Jackson 24, Pledger 18, Corletto 12, Vukona 11) Kings 94

This was the Herald’s effort today, where Kris Shannon, clearly someone who Bryce Johns would describe as a “decent journalist, trained and skilled” has made sure The Breakers lost…  Read more »

Yesterday I blogged about Teri Buhl and her ‘Buhlshit’ attempt to sue people for publishing tweets. I scoffed yesterday that her behaviour was just like that of Bryce Johns and David Fisher…turns out I was right.

Here is her email to me, unedited (screenshot so you can see I haven’t changed anything):

Hi – there are so many version of what happen going around yet only one journalist from Poytner actually called to interview me to understand what really happen. Why do you think that is?

I have asked publications that took my whole twitter profile image (that I copyrighted and created) as a screen shot grab and posted it to take it down. It included two photos and are part of the marketing of my byline. If they don’t take it down I’ll likely send them a bill for a license fee and then if they don’t pay I’d try to sue them…

I have already apologized to the unnamed twitter person who asked about my ‘no tweets are publishable line’ in my twitter profile.It was knee jerk reaction which I said in Jim Romensko’s story on me. The idea is to sue over the copyrighted profile background image that is not under twiter’s TOS (as I understand it) and is owned by me. Not over the tweets. That’s why three non profit jurno organizations took it down already or re imaged it with my permission – knight, pointer, usc online jurno review.

I talked to a copyright lawyer he gave me advice on why fair use does not apply here and why I’d have a case (an expensive one) to sue for copyright infringement. Or if they are going to keep using the image to bill them.

Additionally – I was called a ‘smouthmash journalist’ by Josh Brown when he write a story for huffpo about the world’s most dangerous jurnos because they are going up against the establishment and are doing great reporting.

I did not come up with the term on my own but I do like it and want to trademark it.
cheers,

Teri Buhl

Couple of things Teri darling, Josh Brown called you a “smashmouth journalist” not a smouthmash. Apparently you are ”so fierce she even scares other financial journalists”…if your email is an indicator of your fierceness…then I’m sorry but I feel like I was just gummed by a nana.

Oh and explaining is losing.

Watch this TedTalk by journalist Heather Brooke:

Our leaders need to be held accountable, says journalist Heather Brooke. And she should know: Brooke uncovered the British Parliamentary financial expenses that led to a major political scandal in 2009. She urges us to ask our leaders questions through platforms like Freedom of Information requests — and to finally get some answers.

James Falk discusses media bias and finds that it is the undeclared bias of many journalists and reporters that is the problem rather than the declared bias of commentators:

[T]here is nothing wrong with media outlets having a strong policy view and publishing biased material – if it is identified as opinion. Media consumers clearly like the biases of opinionated commentators. The Press Council (http://www.presscouncil.org.au/statements-of-principles/) recognises that and sets a framework for it:

Publications are free to advocate their own views and publish the bylined opinions of others, as long as readers can recognise what is fact and what is opinion.

Where bias becomes an issue is in material delivered by people designated as reporters, journalists, correspondents and editors. Those job titles have traditionally implied a rigorous attempt to set aside personal biases and to report as neutrally as possible.

While they may quibble over the size and direction of bias, people of all political persuasions would agree that reporters in our media do not live up to that standard.

One of the problems is that too many opinion writers describe themselves as journalists or carry the bland title of editor or correspondent when a more accurate job description might be that of pundit or advocate. The other key problem is conflict of interest.  Journalists are the gatekeepers of debate and shapers of perception, and infinitely more powerful than the average elected backbencher. It’s more than overt support or opposition for a policy view.  How journalists choose words, shape questions, select quotes, edit stories, co-locate images, or even respond through body language can all shape voters’ perceptions of politicians and their policies.

Voters never get the chance to hold journalists accountable for how they exercise this power. Journalists never face election. Voters can only choose to consume media output or not. That consumer choice should be as informed as possible about journalists’ conflicts of interest.

Perhaps it is time that like the US, we have journalists and reporters register their political allegiance.

In any other industry that last statement would be unremarkable. Yet in journalism it has never been taken seriously.

For example, there has been no formal disclosure of political journalists – not commentators – who may be former staffers for Ministers, married to the party funtionaries, or living with a Minister whose portfolio they write about. There is no formal disclosure that a journalist mediating debate is a paid campaigner for a signature political issue. There is no disclosure that an environmental editor used to work for an advocacy group promoting one side of an environmental debate. There was no disclosure that a journalist drove a damaging story about a political enemy of a former girlfriend.

Only insiders know this type of information. Ordinary media consumers find out by accident.

It is obvious where my bias lies. Some people however do not like that I wear my bias on my sleeve, but then no reader of mine will ever die wondering where my loyalties lie.

ᔥ Andrew Bolt

Interesting description from Tom Switzer at The Spectator about life in the Fairfax news rooms. I dare say the comparison with the Herald and Radio New Zealand here is very close:

I’ll never forget my first week of work in Australian journalism nearly a decade ago. I started work at the Australian Financial Review at the height of the waterfront dispute in March-April 1998. My editor called me into his office … and instructed me what our editorial line would be, which was along the following lines: “This is a great day for Australian capitalism; at long last, Australia is reaching a big bang end-game in its decades-long quest to remove the shame on its waterfront.”

After writing my first draft of the next day’s editorial for the editor, I then walked around the floor to meet my new colleagues. They were clearly concerned about the docks dispute unfolding outside our Darling Park office windows. One disturbed journalist asked me: “Comrade, how do you think we are going in the war out there on the waterfront?”

Now, the “comrade” talk naturally astonished me… Leaving that aside, I still assumed that my new work friends meant we in the sense that we were on message with the company line. So keen to assimilate into my new workplace, I thus plagiarised the editor’s refrain: “This is a great day for Australian capitalism!”…

Imagine my surprise when one senior journalist called me aside and warned me that airing such provocative opinions around the office could amount to a workplace dispute–even though I was merely parroting the paper’s editorial line! My colleagues, you see, belonged to the journalists’ union and so had pledged solidarity with the battling wharfies. Never mind that these battling wharfies had held the country to ransom for decades…. I stood out like a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.

The episode, though, made me think: if the sober and august journalists at the nation’s leading financial daily had such views about the modern workplace, I wondered how much more entrenched the same attitudes might be among the journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, as well as at the public broadcaster.

ᔥ Herald on Sunday

In stark contrast to the efforts of Stuff.co.nz to steal my work the Herald on Sunday showed how it should be done.

Firstly the journalist rang and asked for permission to use my photo and asked for some additional detail for the story. Fairfax didn’t even bother to ring me, they just nicked the story and the image.

Then in the HoS story they actually credit me and on the image attribute it to me as well.

About the only thing I could fault them for is failing to provide a link, but hey pixie steps.

Well done Herald on Sunday, still sucks boo to Fairfax who will be getting an invoice.

ᔥ WarrenEllis.Com

Image via Boing Boing

Journalist Laurie Penny  writes about the changes in journalism within the Mainstream media. For once we can see that some journalists actually get where things are heading.

I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account. Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.

Journalists are losing any case we ever had for special pleading. For the younger generation of digital natives, there is no particular reason to be deferential towards anyone who happens to be at a protest with a phone that can get the internet and an audience of thousands: it’ll be you and a hundred others, and unless the police have given you special privileges to write precisely what they want and nothing else, your press pass is less and less likely to keep you safe from arrest. As more and more ordinary men, women and children without degrees in journalism acquire the skills and technology to broadcast text and video, the media has become another cultural territory which is gradually being re-occupied. Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry.

What makes sources leak to me or to anyone else in the media?

A new book by veteran journalist Max Holland called Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (University Press of Kansas) looks into the Watergate scandal from a different perspective.

Leak overturns once and for all the romantic, popular interpretation of the Watergate saga of one inside source risking it all to save democracy. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” Holland writes. Although Holland never disparages the enterprise of Woodward and Bernstein, acknowledging the impact their reports had on Judge John J. Sirica and the senators who formed an investigative committee, neither does he bow to them. “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.”

So Woodward and Bernstein were in fact fast followers of the investigation, but with a heads up from the leaker:

Leak, to be published Mar. 6, vindicates journalist Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of Woodsteinmania. In a Commentary piece published in July 1974, about a month after the Woodstein book came out, Epstein eviscerates what he calls the “sustaining myth of journalism.” Naïve readers believe that intrepid reporters expose government scandals by doggedly working their confidential sources. Of course such scoops do occur, but the more conventional route to a prize-winning series is well-placed leaks from well-oiled government investigations, which Holland maintains was the case with Watergate.

I like the description “sustaining the myth of journalism”. But what of the leaker? What motivates them?

 Every source leaks for a reason, and it’s usually not about preserving the Constitution and the American way. As Stephen Hess writes, sources have many reasons to leak. They leak to boost their own egos. They leak to make a goodwill deposit with a reporter that they hope to withdraw in the future. They leak to advance their policy initiative. They leak to launch trial balloons and sometimes even to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. But until contesting evidence arrives, it’s usually a safe bet that a leak is what Hess calls an “Animus Leak,” designed to inflict damage on another party.

Heh “Animus Leak”…yep I like that description.