Author: David Landon Cole

London papers

Posted on by David Landon Cole

London needs greater media diversity.

I’m going to explain the situation, why it’s bad and then propose a solution.

The Evening Standard has something close to a monopolistic position on London news. It is, as we know, the only paid-for London newspaper. Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper are meant to be read on the way to or from work and are entertainment – hence the huge amount of celebrity gossip – rather than news. Some local papers – the Camden New Journal, for instance – are pretty good, but some areas don’t have any decent, local paper.

I would also say that the Evening Standard focuses (if I may pinch Ken Livingstone’s phrase) on the area around the wine bars and brothels of Westminster and, now, City Hall; it deals with trivia and minutiae. My objections to the Evening Standard‘s position are not because it is right-wing, obsessed with Ken or a bit tabloid. Rather, it is that they are unchallenged in their position. My objection to the newspaper market in London is that it leaves great swathes of GLA and borough politics untouched.

If we move away from the print media, the situation is not good. ITV London News has nothing of the politics of the capital, but only stories of interest. BBC News is, I feel, slightly better but still pretty woeful. Channel Four News and Sky News don’t cover the capital other than in passing. Moving to the online world, I want to weep. The ES‘s main website is thisislondon.co.uk, an entertainment guide, where showbiz comes above news. Its news site, standard.co.uk or thisislondon.co.uk/standard, is very much a second-string site; do a search for Evening Standard and you’ll see that only thisislondon.co.uk is anywhere to be seen. BBC London News just doesn’t have many stories.
In particular, I wonder how many people could name, say, three members of the Assembly. I wonder how many people know what the GLA does and doesn’t do.

I do want to flag three blogs in particular – Dave Hill’s London: Mayor and More; the Tory Troll; and Boris Watch – for their good coverage. While much of their content is great, it is not enough; I hope my reasons why will become clear later on.

All this together effectively gives the Evening Standard a bully-pulpit. While Teddy Roosevelt meant ‘bully’ in the positive, now-arcane sense, I fear that the Evening Standard does not quite match the idea of “a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda”. (C-Span Congressional Glossary).

There has been at least one attempt at direct competition with the ES in the past; Bob Maxwell’s London Daily News. Suffice to say, it failed. By resurrecting the Evening News and slashing prices to 5p, Associated were able to stop the London Daily News. The situation now is different; for one, the freesheet model has matured. I’d add that with the initials ‘LDN’, a London Daily News might fare better after Lily Allen’s song.

Equally, I don’t think everyone wants all celebrity news, all the time; I do not want a ‘Lite’ newspaper. The World, Stephen Glover’s proposed, new compact picks up on that idea; see the Wikipedia article for more information.

There is room and need for competition for the broader (rather than just middle market tabloid) London news market. Despite its attempts to move upmarket, ES’s news coverage is pretty poor. It doesn’t cover borough politics and only lightly covers the Mayor and GLA.

However, the ES retains several advantages. One is brand recognition; another is its distribution network. As an aside, I wonder what effect all those anti-Ken placards had in the run-up to the election; at any rate, those placards and the orange vans are a lot of advertising around the city. I don’t think it’s too much to say that the ES and its sellers are part of the street-scape of London; I would say, though, that the distinctive yellows and purples of London Lite and thelondonpaper, together with the muted annoyance at being attacked with freesheets at every station in zone one, have become part of the street-scape, too.

This leads me onto an area where I think the ES has singularly failed to capitalise; the online realm.
If I can take the issue of brand recognition first, ES, largely because of its decision to run as thisislondon.co.uk online, doesn’t have the on- or off- line, perceived web presence of some other outlets. Much as I like it, neither does Londonist – which isn’t really a news site – or thelondondailynews.com (no relation, I believe, to Cap’n Bob’s paper of the same name).

The other devolved administrations – Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, with respectively three, one-and-three-quarter and five million inhabitants – have their own competitive newspaper markets and, I am given to understand, the national papers have regional editions for the nations. London (eight million), effectively the fifth home nation and the economic, cultural and political centre of our country, does not have that and suffers as a result.

I believe that better news coverage and debate about London – effectively the fifth home nation – would be a good thing. The question is how.

In keeping with Guardian America and Guardian Weekly as successful sub-sets of the Guardian brand, I’d like to propose Guardian London.

Its primary issues could be City Hall, including the Mayor, Assembly and executive arms; London beyond zones one and two; transport; the boroughs; the City; and informing people about the reality of London today. Over an eight-week cycle, there could be information on the council politics of the different boroughs, grouped as four at a time. To begin with, there could be a guide – one a week – to each of the boroughs. It should also look at what might be called the civil society of each borough.

The arrival of Crossrail is one particular issue that deserves attention that the existing media offer singularly fails to address. To take just one station as an example: Tottenham Court Road. Crossrail allows for the development of a better, larger, more accessible station but the Astoria and Sin will go and the Paolozzi murals on the platforms need to be maintained. I’m sure there are similar issues at just about every station on the Crossrail line and will be in future on the Crossrail 2/Chelney line. All we will get will be a glitzy, CGI, double-page spread when it’s far too late to do anything about the changes as the station is about to open. Instead of the newspapers giving us news and comment to allow us to form opinions, they’re giving us re-cycled press releases.

It would do well to do profiles of the main people in London politics; the Mayor, various deputy Mayors, GLA members, people who run and are on the boards of the MPA, TfL, LDA, LFEPA and any future authorities for waste, recycling, education, skills, the environment and planning.
Initially, it could operate a purely online outfit. Journalists need not be retained but could be remunerated on the same basis as CiF. If successful, it could perhaps grow to a weekly supplement to the print edition in London, and perhaps the south-east, on Saturdays.

If we look at the blogosphere and social media, the combination of individual blogs, group blogs, media blogs like Comment is Free and Coffee House, Facebook and so on, we see a potentially powerful combination for attracting people’s attention and engaging them in the London polis.

The trick would be to attract people to local goings-on – whether campaigns over a particular issue, calls for involvement, bouncing around ideas or just keeping people in the loop – by cross-pollinating from the main Guardian. There are all manner of local campaigns, organised on the internet, that act on different facets of the same issue that should be given greater, public exposure. An example might be the Better 172 Now campaign to improve the 172 bus route; I’m sure there are similar issues that ‘citizen journalists’ could report that would be of interest to people who don’t live on the Brockley-St Paul’s route. At the moment, they are too fragmented.

Local papers often suffer from a lack of critical mass; the use of the Guardian’s existing online community and brand could help increase the traffic, as (dare I say it) could its more user-friendly website.

Because people move from one part of the city to another on a regular basis, they are going to be interested in what’s going on away from where they live, whether it’s because they go there for work, socialising or recreation. Equally, many ‘local’ issues become London-wide, in no small part because of the re-institution of strategic, City-wide governance. There is the need and the potential for a new entrant to London news.

xD.

UPDATE: An edited version of this post appeared on Liberal Conspiracy.

Secret inquests, revisited

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I wrote on the first of April of this year about provisions in the Counter-Terrorism Bill for restricting the openness of inquests. It seems that it wasn’t just me who was concerned about some of the proposals; the Guardian reports that section 64 is under fire1:

A cross-party committee of peers, including a former lord chief justice and two former attorney-generals, has told the government that any decision to hold an inquest without a jury must be taken by a judge and not a minister.

I cannot help but think that this would be a good thing. The bill is not necessary – as I said on the original post, things can be heard in camera if necessary – and, while I don’t think the Government would abuse the powers, this is handing a power to obfuscate government actions resulting in deaths to every future government. I don’t trust future governments, their members as yet unborn, sight unseen.

xD.

1 – the article says 63, but I think they mean 64.

We are ZCTU

Posted on by David Landon Cole

A little while ago, I wrote a post here and on the Wardman Wire called ‘Help Zimbabwe from your chair’.

We Are ZCTU: Defend unionists on trial in ZimbabweLovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively the President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU), were being charged with ’spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state’. Those falsehoods are, in fact, criticisms they made on May Day of Mugabe’s government and telling the truth about the violence today in Zimbabwe.

The TUC, the UK equivalent of ZCTU, and ITUC, the international version, organised a mosaic depicting Lovemore and Wellington made up of faces of trades unionists from around the world. You can see it at WeAreZCTU.org. There are also tools to spread the word, add your support and to lobby for justice. There are model letters to send there as well.

xD.

Show us a better way

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Via Tom Watson, I’ve found out about the Show Us a Better Way project. The idea is very simple; I quote from their website:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated

I have three entries.

Entry the first: Free our bills! The wonderful MySociety.org people who brought us TheyWorkForYou.com are spearheading this campaign; I encourage you to read the why and wherefore at theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills. More generally, better use of RSS across government is needed. For instance, I’ve been tracking the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill. It would be really nice to be have an easier way of tracking all the documents, like amendments, as they come through. The same could apply to the GLA, Senedd, Holyrood, Stormont and local councils. A central website to keep track of them all would be nice as well.

Entry the second: Following on from that, it would be good to be able to find out what’s going on in your area or that would be of general interest. To that end, anything be done by any arm of government could be tagged with an area of interest and the postcodes it would affect. You might only be interested in recycling in your immediate area, and so might ask for anything that matched ‘recycling’ and ‘SW1A 0AA’ to be emailed to you while for transport, you might want to look a bit further afield and would have ‘transport’ and ‘SW1, EC1, EC2’ or somesuch.

Entry the third: The Consolidated Fund is the Government’s bank account. It’d be nice to have a website that shows the state of the Consolidated Fund and where money comes from and goes to; simple pie charts, updated relatively often, would do the trick. The same thing – again – could be done for different levels of government, ideally down to the ward level.

I think entry the second is the best of my ideas. I might work it into a proper proposal.

xD.

Unintended consequences

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Nadine Dorries MP (Conservative, Mid Beds) complains about the ‘deluge of liberalising amendments’ proposed by various MPs.

Unfortunately, Ms Dorries is continuing in her wilful ignorance of, er, reality.

Let’s clear up a minor point. Dorries says

against the backdrop of statistics which show that we now have children aborting

That is a misleading sentence. The key word is ‘now’; this is nothing new. I showed (using clever sums and everything!) that there is no statistically significant rise in the number of abortions by people under sixteen. To say that ‘we now have children aborting’ suggests a recent change or, at any rate, a change. There is no evidence for that.

Moving on, the deluge is somewhat misleading. Below the fold you can find, by MP and date, all the amendments proposed by Evan Harris, John Bercow and Nadine Dorries to the HF&E Bill. Of the three MPs, Evan Harris has submitted the great bulk of the amendments. Very many of them deal with relatively technical details and the like; almost all deal with developments in fertilisation and embryology. No great surprise, there, as we are talking about the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill.

Ms Dorries has no comeback when people wish to amend the Bill to liberalise abortion; it was she who took the Bill beyond its original purposes with her amendments to restrict abortion.

I think the amendments tabled by both men amount to a form of legislative abuse of women. They display no care or attention to the effects of abortion on women and a complete disregard towards any moral direction of our young people.

I could, of course, say that the amendments tabled by Ms Dorries (her sex being largely irrelevant) amount to a form of legislative abuse of women by stripping them of rights over their own bodies. When Dorries talks about a lack of care and attention, I presume she is moving forward to this passage in her post:

His [Bercow’s] amendment seeks to criminalise any doctor of conscience who provides counselling or guidance to any woman seeking an abortion, with two years imprisonment.

Fortunately, it is such an outrageous amendment which would almost certainly result in the imprisonment of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu GPs everywhere, that the Speaker is very unlikely to accept it.

I read it differently. I think it says that doctors should be doctors, not proselytisers. If (say) a Jehovah’s Witness were to become a surgeon, would we allow them to refuse to administer blood transfusions? If a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were to become a psychiatrist, would we allow them to Talk Like a Pirate on September 19th? As I and Unity have said before, Dorries’ arguments about absolute religious objections to abortion are weak.

If we are allowed a debate on restricting abortion, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have one on liberalising abortion. I’d add that liberalising abortion doesn’t necessarily mean raising the twenty-four week limit; it can mean making it easier to have an abortion up to (say) fourteen weeks.

xD.
Continue reading “Unintended consequences” →

Blog Nation part 2: qu’est-que c’est le blog?

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Last night’s Blog Nation gathering at the Guardian’s offices was interesting. Two main things came out of it for me.

1. There’s no such thing as blogging

Or rather, there’s no one thing called blogging. It’s a clever piece of software, coupled with the internet, that allows people to do different things. Just ‘political blogs’ covers sites that explicitly politically campaign and organise, discussion areas for groups and communities, sites for self-promotion, personal musings, ranting, communication with interest groups of all shapes and sizes and more besides. This is exacerbated by Labour being in government, meaning that there is no common enemy on which to focus. Even if, though, the Tories were in power, they would not be the focus of even the majority of blogs.

Until people move away from the idea that there is only one effective model of blogging – the trivia of day-to-day politics – the medium will not achieve its full potential. That conflict was highlighted in a panel discussion with Sadie Smith, Kate Belgrave, Zohra Moosa and Cath Elliott when various people raised the disconnect between feminist political blogs and other political blogs. While I don’t doubt that there is a disconnect, I don’t think it’s unique to feminist blogs; as I pointed out, there are lots of blog communities that focus on an abstract issue that have varying amounts of engagement with the generalist blogs.

In terms of making a political difference, a blog that only reaches twenty people may have as much impact as a blog a thousand times as large if those twenty people happen to be party activists who feel it gives them a connection to their local councillor (or whatever) as it can help to improve responsive campaigning and keeps those twenty motivated to knock on doors and hand out leaflets.

A point made by Mark Hanson of Labour Home was that all this new, social media may herald a return of sorts to the halcyon days of town hall meetings; unlike the television, it allows for responses. I do hope so; it strikes me that we’re not there yet.

All the above feeds into commenting. As we all know, there are a lot of unpleasant and fatuous comments out there. This feeds off and gives rise to the somewhat combative, adversarial feel of contemporary UK blogging. For my part, I feel this to be negative as, although there is a place for strong words, it seems to be drowning out engagement on a lot of blogs. This comes from the preponderance of the aforementioned style of blogging.

The indomitable Dan Hardie made a point that was picked up on by Mr Phil ‘No2ID‘ and others; if online campaigning is the visible tip of the iceberg, the greater part – offline campaigning – is there under the waterline. I agree with them; emails, websites, blogs, YouTube and the rest are the tools, not the objective.

My blog is a generalist blog. I hope that I have not given the impression that there is something inherently wrong with that style of blogging; that is neither my intention nor my belief. However, there is nothing inherently right either.

2. There’s no such thing as the left

There’s no such thing as the right, either. I dislike the use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ as they are, at best, of low descriptive and predictive value. I would go as far to say that thinking in terms of a single axis is damaging for debate in the country, but that is a theme for another day. What was clear was that at this gathering of the liberal/left/progressive/’various people against nasty things’ caucus, there was not a single, unifying leitmotif. You might have been able to find twenty issues that four-fifths of people would have agreed on fourt-fifths of the time, and you would certainly have found groups with greater correlations than that. There will be particular issues and particular campaigns that bring people together from time to time, but to say that there was harmony and concord would simply be inaccurate. If the progressive (I can’t think of a better word) section of the British polity is going to effectively use the online domain, it must remain diverse and, crucially, campaign effectively offline as well.

I would tend to say that the same is true of bloggers who wouldn’t have fitted in at last night’s gathering. There was talk of the ‘right’ being a monolithic entity on the blogosphere (I think the description of choice was ‘pyramid’). Given the range between UKIP, libertarians, wets, dries, Tories, Young Turks, Englishers and so on, I don’t think that the description will hold (if it even does now) once their common enemy – Labour – is out of government.

My thanks to Liberal Conspiracy and the Guardian for organising it and to everyone there for the pleasant evening I had. There are some write-ups and so on over at LC, and I hope more will be appearing soon.

xD.

Blog Nation part 1: thanks, Cath

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I attended last night’s Blog Nation event hosted by Liberal Conspiracy and the Guardian. I’ll write it up later, once I have my thoughts in order, but I wanted to quickly thank Cath Elliott, who writes for Comment is Free, for linking to my post on Nadine Dorries’ use of statistics1 from this post of hers on CiF, entitled ‘It takes two to make a teenage pregnancy‘. Thankyou to everyone else who links to me from time to time… it’s just nice to be picked up by the Guardian.

xD.

1 – ‘like a drunk using a lampost, more for support than illumination’

Too little, too late

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The news that the UN Security Council has issued a statement condemning Robert Mugabe with the support of Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa is good news. After condemnation from Rwanda’s premier, Paul Kigame, and others, it seems that no-one in Africa, at least of any political substance, supports the Mugabe regime.

I think statements like this can make a difference. True, the protestations of the UK are batted away by Mugabe as propaganda from a would-be irredentist colonial power. It is much harder to dismiss that message if it comes from an African leader; the means by which some criticisms are deflected become useless. For such things to work, however, the criticisms need to reach the mass of the people. With no free press, poor electricity, hunger and flight across the country, it is of little surprise that the messages coming from Tshwane, Luanda and New York will not reach the people who need to hear them most.

Had Mbeki spoken out more forcefully while it could have made a difference, it might have encouraged Mugabe to leave. I may be being unfair; there was quiet diplomacy between Tshwane and Harare and it is impossible to know, until the history books are written, whether it was an idea that was never going to work or a gamble that didn’t pay off. It looks, though, like too little, too late.

xD.

Fourth Plinth: and the winner is…

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Model of Nelson's Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shobinare MBE, courtesy of london.gov.ukThe next two installations for the Fourth Plinth have been announced; they are Antony Gormley’s One and Other and Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. I’m delighted than Shonibare’s entry was chosen – I wrote about it here. As I said then, I think a model of HMS Victory would be particularly appropriate both because of the obvious links to Trafalgar and Nelson, but also because of London and Britain’s maritime heritage. The fabric used for the sails will be based on an African design, which seems to reflect the modernity of the city well, as does the irony of literally being ‘in a glass jar’ in an area used for demonstrations, festivals and, of course, statuary.

Model of One and Other by Antony Gormley, courtesy of london.gov.ukGormley’s entry, which consists of a series of members of the public standing on the plinth for an hour each, will only be installed (for want of a better word) for a hundred days, meaning 2,400 people will be able to take part. I’m tempted to have a go myself, mostly so I can take my camera and tripod and take some unique photos1. One of my projects at the moment (moment in the loosest sense of the word) is to try to photograph every statue in London and put them onto a searchable map; it would be fun to be part of the database.

I wonder how many people will use their hour to make a political or commercial point. ‘Vote for Me’ and ‘Eat at Joe’s’ on either side of a sandwich board seem like a good idea to me.

xD.

I’m thinking of getting a panoramic head anyway. Anyone have any experience with the Panosaurus?

Two cheers for Tom Watson

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, has released a code of conduct for blogging civil servants. It reads:

1. Be credible
Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.

2. Be consistent
Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.

3. Be responsive
When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.

4. Be integrated
Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.

5. Be a civil servant
Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

There are a couple of particular points that I want to flag – reasons why Tom deserves a cheer – and one big omission from the code.

First cheer

Tom attracted some controversy, and quite a lot of blog-inches were given over to the subject, when he talked about a Code of Conduct for civil servants who want to blog in March of this year. The early version read:

1. Write as yourself
2. Own your own content
3. Be nice
4. Keep secrets
5. No anonymous comments
6. Remember the civil service code
7. Got a problem? Talk to your boss
8. Stop it if we say so
9. Be the authority in your specialist field – provide worthwhile information
10. Think about consequences
11. Media interest? Tell your boss
12. Correct your own mistakes

That is the reason for the first cheer. While the thrust and many of the specific ideas remained, there are clear changes. He asked the experts (and I’m well aware of the irony of calling bloggers experts), listened to the debate and came up with a very sensible policy. I hope people take note – it is possible to have a pretty good debate on a policy in the online world. While I’m sure that the Civil Service had a great deal of input, as is only right and proper, I think we can see the effect of the informal, online consultation as well.

This isn’t just bloggers getting terribly excited at the merest sniff of actual politics (well, it is, but not only). The method of consultation seems to have worked rather well and is novel; rather than just a consultation where you submit responses and they’re collated, people were able to engage in a discussion about the policy.

Second cheer

Greville Janner’s Complete Speechmaker has a wealth of stories and anecdotes at the back. One of my favourite is on brevity:

“We have lost the ability to be brief. The Lord’s Prayer consists of seventy words; the Ten Commandments, three hundred and thirty five word. The EU Directive on the Importation of Caramel – 26,211”

If for no other reason that that the Civil Service Blogger Code is, in total, seventy-nine words, Tom Watson deserves recognition.

However, it is not just the appeal of the style that merits a cheer. As Matt Wardman points out, it encapsulates principles rather than individual rules. That will give it greater longevity and covers some of the problems with the original draft – client confidentiality, for instance, is covered under ‘5’. I know that the civil service code would still apply and that this acts as an addendum to it, but it’s easy to see how someone could, ahem, get confused.

But why no third cheer?

I commented on Tom’s original post to point out the big thing missing from his draft – protection for bloggers. Unfortunately, there are many instances of bloggers being fired from their employment for blogging. The creation of the Code of Conduct emphasises that the medium is new; people don’t know how it works and don’t know what their rights and responsibilities are. This Code of Conduct was an opportunity to establish, in principle, that ‘a right to blog’ is a subset of ‘the right to speak freely’. I’m afraid that, for missing that opportunity, Tom only gets two cheers.

(But they’re quite loud, Tom).

xD.