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In the Press: Guardian Quotes the Social Media Mafia on Social Media Skills

Twelve months ago, in October 2008, The Guardian interviewed Chris Hambly and I on social media skills and 'unconferences'.  We tried to get over the huge generational gap in skills and the threat to large organizations who aren't keeping up.

Since this article was first published, we've seen a Twitter's challenge to the hiding of Parliamentary expenses, the realtime reporting of a plane crash in the Hudson, the earthquake in China and a terrorist attack in Mumbai, and the Guardian's use of an open data base to analyse the expenses data.

The Guardian republished its original article in June 2009. My name is still spelt wrong.  But I was pleased.  The original was published17 months after I arrived in UK thanks in most part to my membership of the Social Media Mafia.

Jo Jordan quoted by The Guardian about social media skills, unconferences and the impact of social media skills on the competitiveness of organizations.

Krafttraining: Kreuzheben, Frontdrücken, Schrägbankdrücken

Aufwärmen:

• 2000m Rudern (C2) in 7'53" (1'58"/500m).

Workout:

• Frontdrücken @ 40kg: 10-10-10-10-10 (30-45" Pause).
• je 10× Kreuzheben @ 40-60-80kg (ca. 1' Pause).
• 4× 15 Wdh. Kreuzheben @ 57% 1RM (2-3' Pause).
• 2× 30 Ausfallschritte (15 je Bein) mit 20kg-Hantelscheibe über dem Kopf.
• 2× 10 Man-maker mit zwei 15kg-Kurzhanteln.
• 45°-Schrägbankdrücken: diverse Sätze mit 1 bis 20 Wdh.; Griff von eng bis sehr weit, Gewicht zwischen 40 und 70kg.
• Pec-Deck: Leiter mit 4 Stufen à 5 Wdh., zum Ende 12× @ 68kg.

The PCC Want To Regulate Bloggers

As others have pointed out, it would be nice if they could, y'know, actually regulate the press effectively before looking at broadening their horizons. Unity has a post here: Liberal Conspiracy, with a letter to the head of the PCC that includes this:

we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practiced by the vast majority of established British bloggers.

This is something I agree with, perhaps because the blogs I read tend to aim for accuracy, accountability, attribution, and minimisation of harm. Maybe there are hordes of bloggers out there that do not share these ethics that have not come to my attention. What has become apparent to me from reading and responding to various articles in the mainstream media (I'm thinking of papers such as the Mail and the Express here) is that newspapers too often print inaccurate articles and fail to make prompt and prominent corrections (thus failing on the counts of accuracy and accountability). As for attribution, I know of a few bloggers who have effectively had posts plagiarised by journalists without any acknowledgement. When it comes to minimisation of harm, I doubt there is anyone reading this who cannot think of an example of the mainstream media failing to minimise harm to subjects of articles in the press.

Unity also points to the failings of the PCC and give an example of an occasion where:

the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World’s efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the Internet; i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made.

I have had some experience of the PCC myself - it took me from the middle of March to the end of June just to get a headline changed to something less misleading than the original: Stuff And Nonsense.

It will be interesting to see the PCC response to Unity's letter.

Can We Trust The Press?

Probably not. For various reasons, what we read in the mainstream press is unreliable.

Stories are sensationalised by reporters and editors with the effect of distorting information, misleading readers, and rendering the articles in question inaccurate. While the PCC code begins by stating that: "The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures"; it is in practice difficult to obtain prompt and prominent corrections from those publishing inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.

Specialist reporters are quite capable of commenting on health and science stories responsibly and accurately. However, they are all too often sidelined by editors when a big health story breaks - and lifestyle reporters are given the task of writing articles about, for example, whether the MMR vaccine causes autism (or whether HPV vaccination has been responsible for the death of a young girl with a tumour). (See here: Bad Science and here: Stuff And Nonsense for more.) These lifestyle reporters often fail miserably, but it seems to me that the responsibility for their shoddy work lies ultimately with the editor who has sidelined a specialist reporter, presumably in order to get a more sensational piece.

The time pressures that journalists face are also a factor in the trustworthiness of the press - according to Nick Davies in Flat Earth News, only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. It seems that fact-checking may be one of the first casualties of a busy news room. There are many examples of journalists being caught out by a failure to factcheck. Here: Lay Science is an example of the media being taken in by a hoax (that "women with big breasts are smarter"), while sports journalists have reported on several unfacts that have appeared on the internet - notably a Wikipedia hoax that claimed of AC Omonia fans that "A small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called "The Zany Ones" - they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes and have a song about a little potato." (See here for more: b3ta.) There's also the footballer who made a "50 Best Young Footballers" list. The player did not, in fact, exist. Moving away from sport, there is a fine example here: How a student fooled the world's media

On the 28th March, Shane Fitzgerald who studies at the University of Dublin, began an experiment which could put journalism into disrepute, by faking a quote on Wikipedia and measuring the spread across the world’s media outlets.

It is worth noting that of all those who fell for Fitzgerald's hoax, apparently only one outlet saw fit to issue a retraction afterwards.

Given the number of sensationalised, inaccurate, misleading, and distorted stories that have appeared in the press - and their failure to fact-check - it seems obvious that we cannot trust what we read in the mainstream media. To quote Mark Twain:

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

 

Notes

I have not properly fact-checked this post. You would be wise to be sceptical as to the veracity of the assertions I have made. This disclaimer would be appropriate for many news articles in the mainstream media.

Rabid Gravy's music on MEmusic

NY Times: свиной грипп в(на) украине

Max Cooper's Symphonica EP - "Totally wonderful"

Dissecting the Dollar ReDe$ign Project : MintLife Blog

New blog post by Joshua Ritchie on Mint.com slices and dices the Dollar ReDe$ign Project. 'With faith in the US dollar hitting new lows, some believe the solution lies not in politics, but in design. Meet Richard Smith, architect of the ambitious and infectiously popular “dollar rede$ign project.” Smith is a creative strategy consultant who feels, “…our great rival, the Euro, looks so spanky in comparison,” to US currency that, “…it seems the only clear way to revive this global recession is to re-brand and re-design.” But rather than merely arguing for a new-look dollar, Smith drummed up an impressive wave of support for a redesign by allowing people to submit their own ideas to a web-based contest.'

Our home in Your Home

We've just been featured in the December issue of 'Your Home'. Initially, the magazine asked us for one or two product shots of items from the H is for Home website. This escalated to a full house feature.

A couple of months ago, a photographer and his assistant spent a whole day taking shots around our house. We're very happy with the results, they've used a lot of the photos and the article is spread over six whole pages!

If you'd like to be able to read the feature properly we've scanned larger versions of each of the pages:

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6

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Original Article