50p cheaper than the Daily Mail and 50 times more fun
How The Media Turned Shannon Matthews Into A Madeleine McCann
"We want everyone to remember Shannon, like they do Madeleine McCann"
Nationwide Terror Probe Nets Hundreds Of PM Irritants
Cops round up Britons "irritating" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
US Today’s Citizen Journalists Write Entire Paper
CITIZEN journalism means big media corporations can lay off hacks and get you do do their job for free. It’s great…
Read all about it…
Citizen Journalism Is, Says Jay Rosen
Betsy Morgan On How The Huffington Post And New Journalism Screw Writers
How To Short Sell iPods And Steve Jobs
Posted: 7th, October 2008 | In: Anorak In New York, Photojournalism | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Comments
October 7th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Au contraire; I see this as a poignant evocation of President Bush’s rallying cry to the bits of Congress which would fit into his living room:
‘this sucker is going down’
He was right, too…
October 7th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Hooray! We is all jernelistts now!
[Serious face. Not mock serious. Real serious]
I know very little about journalism. Other than it is a hard job to do right, and it is hard not to want to do it right.
I worked for a local paper for three months in the late 80’s. Just a copy reader - fixing typos of those who were far too busy getting across the information, the body of the event to worry about being touch-typists. Even on a local paper, I saw weary reporters coming in from a hard day’s (or night’s) work of reporting the facts - in as few words as possible, in the most informative way possible.
Citizens (plebs like myself, who appreciate the fact that the professionals here are professional enough to tolerate me) are handy when they are on the spot with a cameraphone. We cannot be relied upon for real journalism. We plebs (I include myself here only, so as not to upset anyone else - all 3 secondary school exam results of me, all in woodwork; history of, high and applied marquetry - not quite true but close enough) will report on our loves and hates alone. We like the sound of certain words in our ears, the taste of certain words on our tongues.
The professionals can be told by their editors to go out and bring back a 500-word piece (or 5 minute film) on dog-sh*t on a Scarborough beach, or a flower shaped like Ben Affleck or a radical knitting circle - and make it interesting and informative. They will not like it, but the best of them can do it. It WILL be interesting and informative too, or at least not make us want to ball up the newspaper and throw it away; or hurl family pets at the TV screen in disgust, swearing to ourselves thet we’ll never watch this channel’s news again. We, the people, cannot do this. We are not trained for it, would not put our backs out for a story we feel does not challenge us or appeal to us the way the professionals can. How many Woodwards and Bernsteins could be drawn from the ranks of Joe Public?
Sometimes the public can string enough words together, eloquently enough to just manage, or fill a hole on a slow news day. We (me) the public should not be able to rise higher than that, lest opinion become our news.
Thank you for listening.
[3/10 magnetite - you could have done better...see what I mean? I couldn't do this for a living!]
October 7th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Didn’t we have a perfect example of this calibre of journalism only a couple days ago with someone reporting that Steve Job’s had been admitted to hospital, having suffered a heart attack.
“Apple has categorically denied a citizen report published to the CNN iReport website early Friday claiming that chief executive Steve Jobs had been rushed to a local ER following a major heart attack.
“It is not true,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told Reuters.
CNN describes its iReport site as a venue where ordinary citizen journalists can share their “passion about the news.”
“At CNN we live for news. We love talking about it. And we know that there’s a whole lot more to it than what you see on TV or read on your favorite Web site,” the news agency says. “So we’ve launched an independent world where you, the iReport.com community, tell the stories we’re not used to seeing. And the most compelling, important, and urgent ones may get seen on CNN.”"
October 7th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Poor old Steve - his obituary had already been published this year, then this “heart attack.” Eaten by alligators could be next.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Still, it’s good to know that the Anroka comments feature is going into meltdown in conjunction with the financial markets.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
are they really going to get rid of the comments feature ?
October 7th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Thank you for that cheerful comment; my theory is that the site’s sudden decision that 2 comments constitute a page is a result of the ‘all must have prizes’ syndrome.
Lots of people would like to be able to claim that they wrote an entire page, so now they can.
I should never have mentioned Anorka’s plans to reach out to the community with MP3 files for the hard of reading…
October 7th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
sam
As far as I know comments will continue, but the software develops weird and definitely not wonderful kinks. This is one of them…
October 7th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
it’s them constant upgrades chenier, they tend to screw a lot of things up.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
You’ve noticed it too!
Yep, it’s the price of progress; we increasingly lose more and more function as they add more and more features that nobody knows how to make work.
I recall a few weeks ago you mentioning the killfile option on usenet; the happy days when you could dispatch some twit to the cybervoid in perpetuity…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
chenier, husband is a programmer, have suffered it for years :), yes usenet had it’s advantages certainly.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
The comments will continue, but Anroak’s link with the outside world will be severed, leaving us to write the entire thing from our own imaginations. We will be stuck forever in the server system with no chance of escape…in other words, nothing will change.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
What I like best about the comments is that we appear to be posting from the future….I sense an opportunity for some stock-market manipulation.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
sam
My computer expertise consists of knowing where the on/off switch is; I was completely freaked to be informed that I had to download a Vista update, with the throwaway line of ‘Oh, and you need at least 4.5 gigs free for it’. So that’s the laptop grinding away.
My old pedal driven pc doesn’t even have 4 gigs…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
jack, a fate worse than death having to write things purely from the imagination, i’d be stuck forever. well, perhaps not quite but close.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
“Hell is being stuck forever with fellow Anroka posters.” — some bloke.
Of course, the real quote was just simply: “Hell is other Anorakians.”
October 7th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
“How many Woodwards and Bernsteins could be drawn from the ranks of Joe Public?”
Err… both of them originally.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
i can do some things on the computer chenier but it’s more application specific than being computer savvy. i simply hate it when husband upgrades stuff as it invariably breaks something which then takes ages to fix. oh well, such is progress. oh, i have just discovered how to spellcheck on this thing. wonderful. my, i look much cleverer now.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Jack
Someday a physicist will explain Anorak time, and get a Nobel Prize for it, but I fear that the only killings to be made in the markets took place rather a long time ago.
Now it’s straightforward slaughter, with the nation’s Darling all set to unfold a daring rescue bail out all of our very own, with the certain knowledge that Hank ‘I’m begging you’ Paulson’s $700 billion has done f*ck all to improve matters in the US.
Neither has the voodoo accounting rules change, nor the voodoo tax breaks, nor the Black Magic tax ploy which the Internal Revenue quietly slid in while the OECD was not looking.
The geopolitics are interesting; Iceland has gone to Russia, not the IMF, and Russia has the cash.
It looks as if the Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction may have worked rather well…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Voodoo accounting…black magic…smoke and mirrors…moose in VP’s clothing…
What we have are all the right ingredients for a blockbuster thriller film. Hollywood must be licking its fangs at the chaos - provided people have any money to spend on watching films after this is over….
October 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
ZIRP, maybe it is coming?
October 7th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
interesting to note blair went to work for a bank not affected i thought.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Zero Interest Rate Policy should make somebody happy, if only the economists who have checked themselves into secure mental institutions and are pretending to be Napoleon to avoid being lynched, but much as I would like to see my mortgage payments drastically reduced, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Back in the 70’s Switzerland used to charge foreigners interest on money the foreigners deposited in Swiss Banks, which is one way of dealing with the problem of too much money…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
[Wakes up, stretches, clambers off pile of bones]
Hey! I wasn’t having a dig at anyone on Anorak, here folks - or playing down the abilities of the gifted amateur reporting on subjects in which they are knowlegable. Just the worrying mid-to long-term future of YouTube journalism. Remember that all my fears are long term. Such as whether my grandchildren will have to dig items from our landfills to survive in a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic future. With crumpet, obviously. This IS Britain.
Hey, you’re right Saul…both of them had little experience. Perhaps I sould have chosen a better example. Who broke the Profumo story, perhaps?
[Now I'm awake. I'll look around a bit]
October 7th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
sam,
Teflon Tony has a great deal to answer for, and in a just world he would be pretending to be Napoleon as well…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Easy Peasy, Japaneasy.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I told ya’ll ’bout Switzerstan! Theys is crazy. The B-52s are on their way….
October 7th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Anyone with a “Deep Throat” can break a story, finding the story is the hard part.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Well, judging from the number of choppers flying over the City at the moment something odd is happening…
October 7th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Convinci9ng a potential whistleblower to turn on their employers (and unfortunately their colleagues) is something not many of us would have the plums for though, Saul.