SacredFacts

Media Cloud

I've been playing with MediaCloud - a new site and set of tools under development from the Berkman Center. 

The idea is:

 a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds anarchive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas.

Berkman's Ethan Zuckerman describes the project to Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab.

And here is a comparison of world coverage between the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera English. Not surprsiing I chose this one as it shows the BBC has broader and deeper coverage than either of it's main competitors, in spite of their marketing:

(the darker the colour, the more coverage of that region)

Who do you Trust?

I was going to write a rebuttal of Nick Cohen's article in the Observer lamabasting the BBC for a dereliction of its duty to protect serious journalism. But I can't be bothered. I like Nick and enjoy reading him even when we disagree. But this is such an uncharacteristically sloppy and soft-headed piece, riddled with unsubstantiated assertions, that Im not sure it's worth the effort.  I will simply point out :

1. The cuts Nick criticises the BBC for making were mainly in administration in order to put more money into content - the very thing he is arguing for.

2. There is no "class war" between managers and staff. Managers, who have nearly all come up through programme making, are motivated by the same aim as their staff - to get strong original programmes on air - and are struggling with the challenges of the recession and digital change in the same way as every other media organisation.

3. He seems to think if the BBC avoids difficult decisions about budgets and resources it will somehow be stronger. The opposite is the case. If we don't confront those difficult choices - including cutting some staff and budgets -  the BBC will become as weak and poor an animal as he fears. In the 1990s the things he celebrates, extensive newsgathering, strength in frontline journalistic staff, the move into the web and more, were achieved through facing the difficult decisions of the time, making changes and moving money into those strategic priorities. The same is true today.

He finishes by saying the BBC has a public duty to invest and broadcast the journalism others cannot afford. That would be why we maintain the biggest network of correspondents and bureaux of any broadcaster or newspaper and why today more money goes into journalism than at any time in the BBC's history. 

But to discover that, Nick might have had to do some research. 

Ghost Net

Good work from Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski:

Researchers at the Information Warfare Monitor uncovered a suspected 
cyber espionage network of over 1,295 infected hosts in 103 
countries.  This finding comes at the close of a 10-month 
investigation of alleged Chinese cyber spying against Tibetan 
institutions that consisted of fieldwork, technical scouting, and 
laboratory analysis.

Close to 30% of the infected hosts are considered high-value and 
include computers located at ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, 
international organizations, news media, and NGOs.  The investigation 
was able to conclude that  Tibetan computer systems were compromised 
by multiple infections that gave attackers unprecedented access to 
potentially sensitive information,  including  documents from the 
private office of the Dalai Lama.

Full report here:

New York Times article here

The Sixth Sense

The Today Programme?

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quantity v quality in the digital age

Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, recently attacked Google but made a really important point in doing so: “Google devalues everything it touches,” Thomson said. “Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content."

Recognition of quality of content rather than just availability or quantity of content is a key issue for sure.