The Wardman Wire

I’m coming to the conclusion that one of the biggest threats to the accuracy and reputation of news-based blogs is when bloggers quote “mainstream” newspapers and websites verbatim without doing the necessary fact checking to make sure the newspaper reports are accurate.

The problems are precisely those of which bloggers are accused (sometimes with justification) - getting the facts wrong, not distinguishing news from comment and “shooting from the hip” when expressing opinions.

Columnists seem to be especially good at picking a couple of unrepresentative facts, and then drifting off into the clouds. Sometimes they shoot themselves in the foot the process.

I wonder whether - unless newspaper columnists raise their game - they may be left behind in the reliability and reputation stakes by some bloggers.

We had a good example yesterday. Janet Street-Porter, Editor at Large of the Independent, fired a broadside at bloggers. I thought I would count her hits and misses.

A careful, logical, argument. Or not.

Let’s first have a look at the JSP’s column.

Just blog off. And take your self-promotion and cat flap with you

You read it in black and white. Janet Street-Porter criticizing other people for self-promotion. As it happens, here is a photo of JSP not promoting herself on (I think) “I’m a Celebrity”, and another one of her not promoting herself on a sofa watching “telly” somewhere in London. There are lots more shots of JSP not promoting herself on her website.

Cat-flap?

I confess I am baffled, unless JSP has finally given up on husbands and has become a “divorcee with cats”.

Blogs are surely the musings of the socially inept, those people you sidle away from at parties after a couple of stabs at conversation.

Poor Adam Boulton. Alas for Nick Robinson. Woe unto you Bryan Appleyard. Helpless, hopeless, thoughtless, heartless, ruthless Professor Norm. You idiot, Westminster Wisdom. Noodle Pie, you ill-informed fool. Oh Egregious Greenslade. You stupid, stupid people who write for the stupid Open House blog. What a bunch of losers you all are.

I think not.

Thousands of hackneyed opinions about books on Amazon written by people who can’t use a three syllable word. Endless reviews of films tapped out by couch potatoes who’ve never experienced any culture other than the one within their suburban front room.

You probably need to get out more into the blogosphere. When you look for books to read, do you stop with “The Big Red Book of Ukrainian Tractors, 1937 edition”? Why not visit the rest of the library?

When blogs come from war zones or societies where freedom of speech is at a premium, I accept they have a real news value.

Leaving aside the small matter that reporting on Western blogs is a (perhaps the most) powerful way of bringing pressure to bear for freedom of speech or in war zones, are you really suggesting that our freedoms are not under any threat whatsoever in the UK in 2007?

Or let me ask the queston that dare not speak it’s name - where would your newspaper get it’s stories from if blogs didn’t exist? (Hint: the “Foreign Office Press Department” is not an acceptable answer).

But 99 per cent of blogs just soak up your valuable time without giving anything meaningful back in return.

So read the other 1%. It’s not difficult, and it’s called a free market in ideas.

They are about as interesting as watching cheese develop mould or Gordon Brown crack a joke. The whole medium is being undervalued further as businessmen and politicians discover blogs as a means of self-promotion and a chance to reach a younger, hipper generation.

I’d suggest that you need to look a bit harder.

Be honest, are David Miliband or David Cameron ever really going to reveal anything worthwhile about their political philosophies in their feeble blogs?

Maybe.

And now on Waitrose.com, managing director Mark Price, has decided we are waiting with bated breath for the first instalments of his efforts to lose weight, entitled notsochubby. Mr Price is 1.5 stone overweight, smokes cigars and doesn’t like exercise. He plans to write a daily diary of his eating habits, as well as revealing interesting details of his dining companions.

8<snip>

Since it kicked off on 2 January, it has received 17 comments on day one, 11 on day two and a measly one by 5.30pm on day three – hardly an overwhelming show of support from the shop’s millions of customers.

Go on Janet, convince me that three days on a brand new blog just after Christmas in a Bank Holiday Week is a sufficient sample to justify you trashing the whole project. Most people do a weekly shop, and - this being Waitrose - many of them are probably still on holiday somewhere.

I fully expect loyal employees will soon be ordered to log on to make the whole exercise seem more worthwhile and to bolster their boss’s ego.

And the evidence for that? By the way, comments on the last entry are back up today.

In the meantime, might I suggest that Mr Price includes fewer mentions of his own products and all the lavish accoutrements of the salaried classes.

It’s a blog on the home page of a posh supermarket, for God’s sake ! What’s he supposed to mention? Bog-snorkelling in the Channel Islands? Walking ley-lines? Newt breeding?

Perhaps you should have had as much of a go at the other silly people who talk about irrelevant things like food on Waitrose.com (for the last time, I hope, after this article).

Even more time-wasting than Mr Chubby Chops’s blog are networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook, in particular those entries where people boast of a huge number of friends

Ay Caramba! I agree with JSP. At least about Facebook timewasting.

You and I know that any cyber-pals you’ve acquired are not nearly as useful as the three-dimensional variety when your partner’s vanished or you’ve lost your job and need a shoulder to cry on.

Tell that to Graham Holliday (BBC, Guardian, Observer, Time etc as a result of his blog…), Michael Lehmann (job at Microsoft), Hugh McCleod (consulting and marketing business) or the thousands of others who have been able to build their personal brand and professional lives using their blogs - then think again.

Michael Nyman, the divorced composer, has just found out the real cost of social networking in the most embarrassing fashion. A woman who contacted him via his Facebook entry met up with the 63-year-old and a romantic fling ensued. The episode, complete with embarrassing details (including the information that he needs to deal with the hair in his ears) has appeared as a blog on the internet under the pseudonym of Lucia Keenan. She describes him as being “as short as Ronnie Corbett” and reveals details about their love-making which Mr Nyman would probably have preferred not to have been electronically disseminated among the e-community.

I’d suggest that this says very little about Facebook and Social Media, and far more about Michael Nyman (idiotic), and Jane Slavin (vindictive), who was the actress involved. You probably wouldn’t make the same mistake, or wouldn’t care if you did. By the way, why do you name him, but not her?

My motto for 2008 – blog off!

A new phrase. Innovation in journalism is truly a revelation to me this week.

And the other high quality journalism…

… in this column consists of a note on the “Jane Medley” (shoe stealing husband) story and an explanation as to why the Head of Railtrack is (and I quote) a “fuckwit”.

Or to put it another way, it all seems to be written in the style of a Gossip Blog.

Some Questions: Bloggers vs Columnists

Which is easier? To create a personal microbrand as a blogger - a reputation for decent research and considered writing (which will probably take 500 or 1000 articles to build), or persuading a newspaper or magazine to lend you their brand as a columnist? Which is more valuable to the writer?

Who is going to have a better knowledge of their subject area? A niche blogger, or a general columnist going on a Magical Mystery Tour of different subjects each week?

Which is subject to more democratic accountability? A blogger subject to public debate and comments (or ridiculed for not being willing to engage in a debate), or a columnist in a newspaper who does not participate in a conversation, or where debate is disallowed or private?

For Example

The most outstanding example I have seen recently of dodgy reporting was where a thoughtful interview with a Muslim Magazine by Archbishop Rowan Williams in November was reduced in the papers to pasting together a couple of phrases from different places in the interview. The majority of bloggers reported the newspaper report, not the original article.

Bloggers then repeated exactly the same mistake, by treating superficial newspaper reports as authoritative and trustworthy. More often than not this is not the case. When blogs repeat errors from newspapers, we undermine our own attempts to become credible sources of news and comment.

What to do?

I think it comes down to bloggers adopting the traditional habits of serious newspapers. Check facts, separate news from comment (or at least flag which is which) and shoot from the hip a bit less.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing for newspapers to do the same thing.

I don’t say it too often, but I think we have some things to learn from the staider end of the US Newspaper Industry in this respect.

Some journalists have been experimenting with blogs for some time as a way to provide extra source information and background comment to support published reports. That is one approach that may combine the strengths of blogs and papers.

What do you think?