Where would blogging be without You Tube?

In big trouble, that’s where…

For instance, I wouldn’t be able to do this:

and then, we couldn’t do this:

and the world would be a poorer place.

Although, I remember this one being far more scary than it is:

But that might just be me. Weird.

OMG

Can’t write more… jaw on keyboard.

will blog later.

Ten views in 30 minutes

If I get another ten views today (which of course ends at lunchtime… darn you terminator, darn your very eyes) it’ll be a 200 viewer day! That’s four times over my usual traffic and I’m already at my all-time high of 190 viewers (previous best score, about 145).

Can we do it? Probably not, but it’s nice to have visitors. Feel free to click around a bit.

The old stand-by of searches for “lolcatz” and “funny otters” still hits the top of the search list every day. What a wacky crazy lot we are.

For Porter Novelli

Hi guys, great session yesterday… here are a couple of clips for your reading/viewing pleasure.

The first is the video clip I completely failed to play. As you can see the number of views of the site is now 1.5 million and no, they’re no longer hiring.

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

Hmm. Doesn’t want to embed for some reason. Click through anyway. Is fun.

and then there’s this one – a marketing campaign by Dove that ran in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago. Did OK, but no real traction. So they sent it out as an email viral campaign and everyone in the known universe watched it.

There’s another Dove ad that didn’t do so well but is still worth a look if only to terrify fathers of daughters. Just frightening. It’s called Dove Onslaught for a very good reason.

Enjoy.

The promotion of ignorance

It’s always a tricky business, achieving balance in news reporting.

Sure, some stories are easy – it’s a fire, at a warehouse, so you write about that. Not much balance needed really, just some good pictures and a quote or two.

Most news, however, needs balance. Each reporter brings his or her own bias, each editor has a point of view. For many years I wrote – and indeed crusaded – on the topic of broadband. I decided early on that not only was the topic important to my readers but that I needed to take an editorial stance in favour of one side of the many broadband debates. That is, I sided with unbundling instead of against it. That was an editorial decision and I stuck to it but constantly reviewed the value of that decision. Eventually the mainstream reporting came round to my point of view (even my editor, who once famously asked me “what’s the point of broadband?” and was unconvinced by my argument and who has since gone on to win awards writing about the urgent need for … broadband. But I digress. And gloat) and now everyone writes about broadband without a second thought.

If there’s one journalist I’ve always envied it’s Kim Griggs. She writes about science. She writes about New Zealand. She writes about science in New Zealand and she does it for Wired magazine and the BBC and The Guardian and any number of proper publications. I’d hate her but she writes so very well. I’d hate her for that as well, but what can you do…?

She is pro science. It’s hard not to be, and of course it’s her round so you’d expect her to have a bias towards science.

She also used to write for The Listener and, following the debacle over The Listener’s censorship of another journalist’s blog on the matter (go on, send me a letter as well, I dare you) Kim posted about it to Russell Brown’s Hard News on the matter. I’ll recreate it here – Russell, Kim, let me know if that’s not OK with you and I’ll paraphrase instead.

I was part of a group of four writers who wrote a science column for The Listener for a couple of years. Our idea, promoted to Pamela in the first instance by Marilyn Head, was to provide stories about the abundance of interesting science that is being done in New Zealand. Our hope was that the stories would show the array of different aspects of New Zealand’s science community – there are some great stories out there – but also build up an appreciation of science so that there is an understanding, and critical thought about what science can and can’t do. So that when we debate climate change or nanotechnology or GE or xenotransplantation or the Large Hadron Collider, there can be more light and less heat in our discussions.

We eventually quit – spat the dummy truth to be told – when we were told our stories had an endorsing (of science) tone. This, from a magazine that had run a story about laughter yoga (well written though it was) under the science and health banner.

Seriously – their stories had a tone that implied they were endorsing science.

I really don’t know what to say to that. I’d encourage Pamela the editor to post about it here if it’s not accurate, but my fear is that this is exactly the kind of thing Pamela and the editorial masters at The Listener would say.

It goes beyond dumbing down and becomes something much worse – the promoting of ignorance. Can we really stand by and watch that happen?

What he said

Keith Ng has launched in on the debacle that is The Listener’s approach to handling the media and done so with far more aplomb than I’ve managed so I’ll link to it here.

Favourite quote:

“Clearly, there’s some very sophisticated irony at work here. A climate change publication is accusing a media organisation of shutting down a voice on climate change. The media organisation then gently convinces said climate change publication to STFU, and to announce (in the manner of those convicted by Soviet show-trials) that the media organisation is in no way shutting down voices on climate change.“

Brilliantly put, Keith.

And Stephen Price (journalist-lawyer, a new hybrid I was previously unaware of who presumably can say mean things in print and then defend himself in court, thus earning more than the 40c/word freelance rate, OH the irony! ) points to the legal side of things and the D Word: defamation.

“The correction and apology looks ham-fisted to me. It even includes a retraction of things that weren’t even in the post.”

The Listener – a new all-time low

Rather than debate the merits of the case or argue with the bloggers about what was said and why and by whom and when, The Listener has gone medieval and called in the lawyers.

The good news is I would hope this is the lowest point The Listener can reach, so it’s all better from here. The bad news is, I fear the depths of nonsense to which this editor and her publishers may stoop.

Why is it so bad? Because newspapers and magazines live in fear of the lawyer’s letter. Every reporter I know worth their salt has been threatened by some lawyer or other. I’ve had a couple in my time (the last one, laughably, ended up with us all going out to dinner to discuss our differences, because they couldn’t afford lawyers. Not sure which is worse really).

Typically the lawyers are called out in a cowardly attempt to get a reporter to back down. A good editor and a decent publisher will bear the brunt of it, and I’m delighted to say in my last journalistic role I was blessed with editors and publishers alike who would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a reporter when such a need arose.

For a reporter it’s a terrible situation to be caught in. Meetings are held, often without your input. Older staff mutter about getting your own lawyer (all this for a story that you may have received as much 40 cents per word if you’re a freelancer) and the knot in your stomach grows and grows.

For a media house to use that kind of stand-over tactic against another publication is just unacceptable. We don’t need to stoop to the level of the lawyer to settle our differences… That’s what editorials are for. Use the tools of the trade to defend your position, to explain, to communicate. If you can’t do that, you’re not an editor I would bother reading, let alone writing for.

The Listener: RIP

I’ve written about the decline in standards at The Listener, New Zealand’s only weekly news and current affairs magazine, on other occassions.

I’ve always enjoyed reading The Listener. It was a calm voice of reason in an increasingly nutso world of extreme views. Whenever a topic was handled, it seemed to be treated with a great deal of thought and reasoning and a lot of analysis over commentary pieces.

For those of you who aren’t journalists, let me explain the difference. It’s subtle, so feel free to read it slowly.

Analysis consists of gathering the facts, typically over a long period of time, and sticking strictly to what is proven and what is provable. Good examples of this are the Metro stories on The Unfortunate Experiment and the like. They take the heat out of the story which in turn makes it a much better read.

Comment pieces (and I say this as a former columnist) are written by chimps who are forced to have a view on things they neither know nor care about. It’s the 60 Minutes/20:20 of the print world. Typically it’s all emotion, heat and noise and ultimately empty.

As an aside, I’ve just read my first Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American, which was really very nicely done and astonishing when you realise he’s writing about the lead up to the Viet Nam war in real time.

His description of opinion writers as being hollow is bang on. I’ll add it to this post later when I find it.

The Listener has, I’m afraid, dumped analysis in favour of opinion and the steady decline in standards has just got straight off the cliff edge.

John Drinnan has a nice round up of the issue here in stablemate The NZ Herald:

The Listener has dumped its “Ecologic” columnist as the magazine acts on a complaint by Bryan Leyland – a prominent sceptic of the human impact of global warming.

Global warming activists and left-wing bloggers have leapt on the magazine which has actively covered the debate, suggesting that it is bowing to pressure.

But Listener editor Pamela Stirling is insisting that the two events are unconnected and that she is losing a staffer because of budget cuts.

Russell Brown (presumably one of those “left-wing bloggers” and not coincidentally a columnist at The Listener (but of the good sort, right Russell?) has a fairly alarmed and damning post in his blog, Hard News, but the real meat of it can be found here on Hot Topic.

I had hoped that the arrival of David Fisher as chief news hound and Proper Reporter would help, but I fear David is a single voice fighting the good fight. I wonder how long it will be before Russell packs his bags and flees and whether the best TV reviewer in the land, Diana Wichtel, will stay.

I, however, will not.

An editor’s job is simple: to deliver the best in journalism. That’s it, really. The how of the matter is tricky (subbing, photos, layout, staff levels, remuneration, profit taking, balance) but at the end of the day newspapers and magazines are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers and you attract eyeballs with a juicy, tasty publication full of whatever it is the eyeballs are after. Mine have better things to do with their time.

Where’s my rocket backpack II: Redux (the editor’s version)

Some time ago I complained about not having a rocket backpack. Well, I sort of complained. I pointed out that a lot of things we’d been promised hadn’t been delivered.

Well, cross off rockets because the Rocket Racing League is ready to start their motors!

That’s right, it deserves an exclamation mark. Only one though.

From the site:

The RRL was established by X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and two-time Indianapolis 500 champion team partner Granger Whitelaw to advance the technology and increase public awareness of space travel.

You just know the Millennium Falcon can make that run in less than 12 parsecs…

The future is here and it is us (or are we it? I forget)

This is why The Register is king…

well, king of the tech journos, at any rate.

Not only do they write great headlines and even better sub-heads, but they let a story take its natural tone rather than trying to enforce some blanket model on it.

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.

The whole story is nicely written but this is my favourite paragraph:

Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began. Fahey didn’t say just how, but conceivably the rogue robots may have been suppressed with help from more trustworthy airborne kill machines, or perhaps prototype electropulse zap bombs.

Ahhhh.