I was at a roundtable debate this morning about Citizen Journalism (update: rather ungenerous of me not to mention this was hosted by the excellent people from iStockPhoto). Everyone saying they want to embrace CJ as part of their forward strategy. I suggest that mainstream media is attempting to contain rather than embrace conversations.
Me (to attendees from the Times and the BBC): You don’t link out to other people’s sites.
Times chap: Yes, we do, all the time.
BBC women: Yes, we do, all the time.
Me: Oh, okay…
Me (8 hours later at home): how do you explain this and this, then? (These are the top stories on the technology sections of their sites right now. Between the two of them, they manage to link to two sites. Both of them corporate websites. I don’t find any links to any blogs or CJ sites on any tech news stories right now).
Meh.
I’ve also learned the marvellous expression ‘Hammersmithing’. Say you’ve got two photos of the same two people, taken moments after each other. In the first, the first guy has his eyes closed. In the second, the other guy is blinking. What do you do? Neither picture is usable as it is. The editor might ask you to ‘Hammersmith’ the two shots — which means take the open-eyed head from one photo and stick it on the neck of the closed-eye portrait in the other shot. End result — usable photo with everyone’s eyes open.
Why’s it called ‘Hammersmithing’? Because the first organ transplant operations were conducted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I didn’t know and I thought it was really cute.
‘Hammersmithing’ was robustly defended as basically the same as editing. It’s one of the things news media do to help create stories that are worth something. No-one wants pictures of people with their eyes closed, neither reader nor publisher. The time and energy that goes into retouching photos is one of the things we pay for when we stump up the cash for a quality paper or broadcaster.
The very existence of the term and admission that it’s common practice resulted in gasps of shock in some quarters. But not here.
The ongoing ‘regaining trust in media’ agenda, as various mainstream channels are found to have falsified all sorts of things, goes too far a lot of the time. We need our stories crafted into edible chunks. That’s called editing. Imagine the cookery show where you have to wait 90 minutes before Nigella can pull out her perfect roast and serve it to her perfect friends. The showdancing competition where you wait 20 minutes for set changes between the acts. The press news story that interviews every possible person with any interest in the story whatsoever. A little leger de main is part of what we pay newspaper and broadcast people to do. It makes their stuff more entertaining and consumable. They filter the news so we don’t have to, because filtering is a full-time job and more. It’s only when stories are falsified or deliberately slanted, or when people are conned out of their voting cash, that anyone should become concerned.
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Hi Boss. I think you were there when Ashley Norris took the Jem Stone from the BBC to task for failing to link out to sites? After that, Jem was very gracious and insisted we email him if we ever spotted linking failures in the future.
I took him up on his offer, and sent him some stories that seemed just too similar to ones we’d done not to have been sourced from one of our sites. He forwarded them to the relevant department and we received a really condescending reply from the head of dept. that made it clear that his site was run by “experts” — unlike ours (although this particular site is peopled almost entirely by journalists who write for the broadsheets).
Anyway, the whole thing was depressingly arch and pompous, and he finished by saying “On a wider point, it is our policy is to link to sites beyond bbc.co.uk and to recognise the best content the wider web has to offer.” So there you go — obviously we’re all just imagining it.
On a similar note, we can’t get hold of review copies of TV shows for TV Scoop (which currently gets just under 10,000 uniques a day and growing steadily) because the BBC refuses to acknowledge blogs as credible websites. Again, our editor is a well-known journalist.
/whinge
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