It's interesting and in no small way reassuring to see that the US is going to have a stab at regulating bloggers - specifically they'll have to disclose payments, says an article in the Press Gazette. I suppose I should declare my own interest; I don't get paid to write this blog at all but I'm hoping it will encourage people to buy my book, preferably through a link I put up so I get not only royalties but a kickback from being an Amazon Associate. Most authors with a blog do the same.

I'm a little concerned about two things, though. First, how are they going to police this? Everybody knows you can start a blog really easily (it must be true, I say it in my book) so how do we police every little thing that might crop up? Many blogs including this one originate outside the US, and it's difficult to imagine even President Obama himself being able to regulate them.

Second, lots of stuff isn't directly paid for as such but it's subsidised by freebies. Loads of bloggers - I'm afraid I'm talking about the amateur variety more than people like me who're used to getting paid for their words - are happy to review (say) computer games because the companies that send them will allow the blogger to keep the game. The blogger therefore hasn't paid for the game, and is therefore getting some sort of benefit (anyone wanting a Rolex watch reviewed on the same basis, just let me know).

Many journalists don't even notice these little benefits are happening. In my book I talk about Christopher Ward Watches, for example, as an example of an organisation that's used forums to engage with customers very effectively indeed. I stand by that, and would add that they've never pitched to go into any book on which I've been working; however, when I first met the team they were launching their then new range, and every journalist who turned up went away with a complimentary watch. This is just good PR of course - but is it a payment of sorts?

To my mind, the new American rules have opened a proverbial can of worms that certainly needs inspection; I suspect that insisting everyone declares any direct payments is only a start.

Tags: blog, blogging

I’ll tell you what gets to me about stories like the one that says the Observer may close (note to overseas readers, the Observer is the oldest established Sunday newspaper in the world; if you’re reading in America then it’s almost as old as your country’s independence). Actually two things. First, as a jobbing journalist I have clear vested interests in not seeing my market shrink.

The second thing, though, is how many people are hijacking the story with their own agendas. The comments to the story I’ve quoted above are a good example. I’ll disregard the one that complains that the Observer has a ludicrously gay agenda, I’m a straight man and hadn’t noticed so it couldn’t be that pronounced, and even if it were it would probably do OK financially if every gay man and woman bought it and responded to the ads. It’s the other stuff - the ‘why don’t they just shut all the newspapers down and admit they’ve lost’ stuff - that gets to me. I said yesterday that this wasn’t some sort of arch-rivalry competition and I still think it.

Let’s look at a few facts. According to the Sunday Times, the Observer first started to go into loss in 1792 - no, really, the story is here. Clearly I wasn’t there at the time but I think we can be pretty certain this had nothing to do with social networking. It has been sold numerous times, the most recent proprietor being the Guardian Media Group, which bought it in the early 1990s - but it wasn’t doing well at the time.

Of course the current losses won’t have been helped by the profligacy of social media, and the fact that anyone can log on to the web and read the whole paper without paying is hitting a lot of newspapers very hard as they’re tied to the existing publishing model. But the idea that the most sold-off, most cast-off newspaper in what oldies like me still refer to as Fleet Street should be taken as some sort of barometer of the effects social media is having on newspapers is absurd. The Observer, unfortunately (I speak as a contributor who’s rather fond of the paper), is a bit of a case in its own right.

If social media is going to hang around - and I hope it does - then it’s got to consist of more than people piggybacking every story they can find in order to push their own narrow agenda, whether it fits or not. Otherwise I have a feeling people will be logging off in droves.

Tags: observer, sunday times, blog, online publishing

There’s an excellent piece on the relationship between traditional news reporting and blogging on Mashable today. It makes a great job of looking at the argument from many sides.

Quite honestly, to read journalists talking about blogging you’d think it was a short-lived, evil thing that’s not going to last at all. Here’s Wired from a while ago, and there are many others. Mashable makes the excellent point that the newspapers have a vested interest in doing blogs down - established journalists (that would include me, then) are terrified for their jobs.

Well, yes and no, and up to a point. What’s frightening people a bit is change.

I’d like to take you back a few years to the early 1980s. I was at school, my father - still alive - was a proofreader on the Guardian newspaper. We lived in Tooting. It was a good life I thought at the time - still do. Dad, however, was concerned. He was having to learn about something called a word processor and it was causing him problems. He didn’t think he’d survive the technological change at the Guardian.

In fact he was really unlucky and thanks to a heart attack he literally didn’t survive. I’m confident he’d have made the adjustment and continued had things been different - but it was the change that was causing the issue, not the technology. He could see the change would come and couldn’t be - shouldn’t be - stopped.

It’s the same now, I suggest. The journalists and indeed bloggers who are going to best will be the ones who don’t buy into all this nonsense about the new or old technology somehow being the enemy. When TV started it was going to kill radio. It didn’t. When radio started it was going to kill the theatre. It didn’t. Now we have the Internet - blogging, Tweeting, whatever you want, and panic that it’s going to wipe out newspapers and magazines, and some newspapers and magazines hitting back by saying blogging’s not going to work. My bet is they both will, there will be some realignment of niches by all means but ten years from now both media will still be around.

You never know - the more open-minded practitioners might actually find they learn something from each other.

Tags: media, blog

A great blog post here from Penelope Trunk and her Brazen Careerist venture. I say great blog post because it’s well-written and well-argued. I also believe it’s completely wrong-headed. It’s important though; if we’re really serious about Digital Britain and the consequent social networking and blogging that appears as a result, we need to consider these issues.

Essentially, Trunk is arguing that newspapers disclosing an interest in something are protecting themselves rather than informing the reader. So when I report something for the Guardian and am flown out somewhere by corporate hospitality to find out about it, I declare ‘Guy Clapperton had his accommodation and flights paid for by XX in connection with this piece’. We all know where we stand, the reader accepts that I’ll have been shown what the company in question wanted to show me. This is more important in, say, travel journalism than in my field - if you know a travel journalist went to Cuba only because the Cuban tourist body paid for it, you understand there’s an element of promotion involved, unbiased though the actual article will be.

Trunk believes this is all baloney. She believes this because I wouldn’t be telling anyone anything about any of this stuff if I weren’t being paid anyway - so the reader really needs a disclaimer saying ‘Guy Clapperton wouldn’t tell you about any of this stuff if someone weren’t throwing money at him’ (true of most of what I write but not of this blog, by the way - I write this of my own volition). That is of course a fair comment too, and it’s something I raise when I’m doing my media training. Journalists, particularly business journalists and those who write about products, often get prissy about how independent they are while the PR community has vested interests. Well guys, so do we, just different ones.

But if there’s a reason I’m able to report on anything and it’s down to a company paying my way, I do believe in disclosing it. This is why I’m a little perturbed to read Trunk’s view that bloggers should be exempt from the rule. In my view it’s quite simple: they shouldn’t. You can be fed a lot of unscrupulously biased coverage by bad bloggers among the excellent stuff from the more professional variety. I’ve been to media training sessions at which the advice has been ‘give the journalist information and contacts, give the blogger a freebie and you’ll get coverage’. I have a problem with this. First it’s patronising to a large number of bloggers - gee, we gave Guy Kawasaki a burger, maybe he’ll talk us up? No he won’t. But the ‘we gave a small but influential blogger a Blu-Ray player, maybe he’ll write something positive’ view is becoming endemic.

It gets back to a favourite theme of mine; there is by definition no professional standard for a blogger. Anyone can do it. So the ‘you can keep the review kit’ theory can sometimes be used to influence coverage. Trunk’s view, that we’re all writing from some sort of starting point, that we all have a reason for writing, is valid to an extent - but I still think disclosure of a vested interest gives the reader a much clearer picture of where you’re coming from and therefore arms them better to make up their own mind. Personally I’d love to see some sort of voluntary code for bloggers - in which they could, among other things, sign up and agree to disclose vested interests where they’re involved and undertake to be independent within their blog’s parameters.

Anyone who’d like to help me set up and administrate such a voluntary code is welcome to get in touch...

Tags: blog, blogging, social media, social network, vested interest, broadband britain, digital Britain

Probably the most interesting thing about the case reported in the Guardian, in which a man in Korea has been acquitted of spreading falsehoods on the web, is the way it highlights the differences in culture and emphasises that the Web might make us look at the same thing but through many different sets of eyes. I sound like Marco Pierre White at his most cryptic, I know.

But it’s true. This Park guy sets himself up as an economic prophet. To a Western pair of eyes we see the word ‘prophet’ and already start to write him off as a chancer. He’s not serious, he’s calling himself a prophet, it’s a ludicrous title...but there it is. He’s one of these odd people you get from time to time who might, concievably, have something to say. Elsewhere it appears they take him seriously enough to take him to court when they find that some of his credentials are bogus.

There are areas in which it would be the same over here. Had he styled himself as an independent financial advisor in the UK without the right qualifications or offered actual financial advice without the right title there would have been regulatory questions to answer. But prophet? It sounds almost like guru. I hate to think of how many new media or social networking ‘gurus’ would be in serious trouble if they actually had to quantify their expertise.

Tags: blog, blogs, internet, web, on the web, twitter, facebook