This is an AHRC funded research seminar, held at Sheffield University.

Abstract

This paper explores the application of interactive web tool Wordle in the framing of content analysis, finding that it offers new possibilities for scholars. But it is only useful in the field of news archives where publishers make output available in data-portable formats.

Those traditional content analysis methods used to establish the frequency of terms in text can be constrained by human limitations – most notably the difficulties inherent to selecting terms to measure from a large collection of documents. Classification process requires agreed standards between researchers, in order to establish consistency (Weber, 1990), or intercoder reliability (Neuendorf, 2002). But the initial steps in framing research often rely upon assumptions which do not (and cannot) take into account the frequencies of all significant words across large-scale document collections.

This research proposes a means by which scholars might challenge their initial assumptions about texts, and use computational power to audit the full range selected. It is proposed that this may invigorate approaches to content and discourse analyses.

Wordle has been employed by newspapers in coverage of major news events, including analyses of major public speeches (Stodard, 2010; Rogers I and II, 2010), and political manifestos (Rogers III, 2010). In the literature, Wordle’s merits have been explored in terms of framing partisanship in political speech (Monroe et al, 2008). While this paper acknowledges the limitations of such software as a means to an end in content analysis (McNaught and Lam, 2010), the application of such technologies can nevertheless help inform the preliminary stages in content analysis.

Data scraping techniques both simple (and laborious) and complex (macros in Microsoft Word) are discussed. Large volumes of text (downloaded from Nexis) require parsing for metadata and stop-words, with the remaining text then usable in Wordle. This data is presented as a word cloud, with keywords ranging in scale as a function of frequency. This offers a more systematic means of auditing large data sets across a range of variables.

A plea for the application of data portability in the construction of online newspaper archives is put forth. Those archives which do not provide text-only download options (including Times Digital Archive, and Gale’s 19th Century British Library Newspapers in the UK, and New York Times Archive and Google News archive in the US) are explored in terms of their output formats. Optical Character Recognition software is acknowledged as a possible solution, but a hugely time-consuming one. This research demonstrates that without text-readable formats, content analysis of online news archives will remain limited in scope and potential.

References

McNaught, Carmel and Lam, Paul (2010) ‘Using Wordle as a Supplementary Research Tool’, The Qualitative Report Volume 15 Number 3 May 2010 630-643

Monroe, Burt, Colaresi, Michael, Quinn, Kevin, (2008) ‘Fightin’ Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict’, Political Analysis 16 (4): 372-403.

Neuendorf, Kimberly A (2002) The Content Analysis Guidebook, London, Sage.

Rogers, Simon I (2010) ‘The text of the Queen’s speech as a wordle – and how it compares to 1997′, The Guardian, May 25th

Rogers, Simon II (2010) ‘David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s statements as a wordle’, The Guardian, May 12th

Rogers, Simon III (2010) ‘Conservative manifesto: how does it compare to Labour’s?’, The Guardian, April 13th.

Stodard, Katy (2010) ‘Obama’s state of the union speech: how did the words he used compare to other presidents? As wordles’, The Guardian, January 28th.

Weber, Robert (1990: Basic Content Analysis. 2nd ed., Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Daley made one particular point which deserves further scrutiny.  Apparently she’d like to see Julian Assange arrested for his role in handling the ‘illegally stolen’ diplomatic cables.

I do not remember her being quite so forthright with regard to the Telegraph editors who got their hands on the MPs expenses material early last year.

The question of ethics  (and legality) in this story didn’t really take off at the time – so agog were the public (and no doubt prosecutors) at the waste that was going on in Westminster.

Back then those on the left and right united to defend this act of chequebook journalism, but today it seems  the right are feeling much less solidarity.

It seems that when the invisible hand of American diplomacy is at stake, some find the truth a little too hard to handle.

While this would be an inconvenience for those of us who use the tool to save our bookmarks, by binning the Delicious network much real and potential eureka moments in online search will be lost forever.

This is a massive loss for anyone who wants to make sense of the web, including journalists tracking stories, contributors and other reliable sources online.

If push comes to shove, I’m personally inclined towards either Pinboard (subscription for pro version required) or Xmarks, but there are plenty of other alternatives.

Here follows a short (and very much draft) extract of notes for a book I’m aiming to finish later next year, on online research for journalists.

It covers some alternatives to Delicious for newsgathering and research…

For some, the browsing and searching options in Delicious may seem a little over-restrictive – what of all those bookmarks whose owners haven’t tagged, described or even included a title for their bookmarks – moreover, how valuable can search in this field be, when you can’t search the full text of all links saved in this social bookmarking service?

Certainly Google doesn’t index Delicious bookmarks by default, so are there any alternatives?

As ever, of course there are – several services offer more sophisticated ways of searching your bookmarks, using a range of means.

Since March 2010, Google Bookmarks have been experimenting with public lists – although no where near as thorough or populated as Delicious, Google Bookmarks (which requires a Google account to use) does provide search for the entire page of your bookmarks, giving a researcher more control over the bookmarks which have been shared publicly, and lessening the impact of bad or inconsistent tagging.

Blinklist offer an alternative search option, albeit one with relatively little UK content, and which lacks much of the functionality of Delicious (similar could be said for Faves which contains a good deal of content, but isn’t as robust as Delicious).

Likewise, social annotation tools like Diigo (which incorporates FURL – account required) may be useful here too. CiteULike and Connotea offer an academic take on social bookmarking, and can be a useful accompaniment to Google Scholar for digging out expertise, or esoteric research.

inSuggest offers a bookmark discovery service – just type in your (or any) username to receive suggested new reading.

However, this searcher didn’t have much luck – I struggled to make the Deligoo plugin for Internet Explorer work (and the FireFox extension is not compatible with version 3.6.6.), while Delizzy wasn’t available at the time of writing.

In addition, I wasn’t able to sign up to Simpy, but that doesn’t stop it being a useful place to search other people’s bookmarks. It is possible to construct a Google Custom Search to house your bookmarks, or use sources like Lijit.

It was an enjoyable and insightful visit, where we learned about the state of journalism in four post-Soviet countries: our host nation, Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

A folly in Baku old town, within the city walls, Azerbaijan

First impressions

As we passed through a very eastern passport control, a throng of local taxi drivers beckoned us with some familiar western names: BP and HALLIBURTON. The west has certainly taken its pound of flesh from Azerbaijan in recent years.

Baku, with its graffiti-free old town, and immaculately maintained public buildings, has been converting oil into prosperity since the 19th century.

This land was once dominated by wealthy, philanthropic oligarchs, whose portraits adorn the stunning restaurant we visited on the second night of our visit.   Azerbaijan is caught between two leviathans; Russia and Iran, whose influence on free expression today passes invisibly across the borders.

The motorway which took us from the airport to the centre of Baku was an uncannily smooth ride. Our host, Director of Azerbaijan’s OSI program, Rovshan Bagirov, assured us that this doesn’t come cheap, but that it represents little strain on the country’s coffers. An Azerbaijani government economist has apparently calculated that they could afford to lay a couple of millimetres of gold for the entire length of this motorway, if they saw fit.  Price is no object in Azerbaijan.

Illuminating?

In and around Baku, every inch of visible public space is backlit, side-lit, or lit from above. At night, green lights are shone on the grass, to bring out its fresh nocturnal lustre. Trees are wreathed in pretty, glowing red berries. Beautiful white buildings, unmistakably Islamic, radiate with eastern opulence. But shining a light on the affairs of the country’s powerful elites is a different matter.

Azerbaijan is not an easy place in which to practice journalism. While there are no shortage of public data to interrogate, getting the message to the masses in a country where radio and TV are heavily censored and blocked, and where distribution of newspapers and pamphlets is tightly controlled, is not easy.

Fountain in Baku city centre, Azerbaijan

Introductions

The Georgian OSI contingent (OSGF), comprising Hatia Jinjikhadze, Marina Ghoghoberidze, Irakli Tsertsvadze and Irina Lashkhi, told us of the media in their country.

Investigative journalism here is driven by broadcasting – their leading TV series is similar in form and content to PBS Frontline. Georgia has a strong post-Soviet tradition of public interest journalism, but this has been curtailed in recent years (certainly since the Rose Revolution of late 2003).

Much work is yet to be done online, where public engagement though currently small, is growing.

The OSGF Media Support Program exists to advocate transparency in the country. Their current initiatives are to support the development of independent media in the capital Tibilisi, as well as across the wider regions, and they are campaigning for a law to stop government interference in public interest journalism.

The Ukrainian OSI delegation gave us a tantalising glipmse of a holy grail in investigative journalism.  The Ukranian Pravda is an online-driven, non-paywalled media outlet which finds space for a rich mix of investigative journalism, while still managing to derive a healthy profit from online advertising.

But here there is no equivalent to the BBC with which to compete, and the Ukranian media market is not exposed to the same levels of competition for its online advertising revenues from the likes of Craigslist or Gumtree.

In this rapidly developing and well-resourced journalistic environment, a subversive TV format has emerged, where public figures are pranked into accounting for their public finance decisions before a live TV audience.

We then heard from Dariya Tsyrenzhapova from OSI Kazakhstan, who described a country whose oil wealth mirrors that of Azerbaijan. She told us of Gennadiy Benditsky, whose investigative work into the embezzlement of public fianances for newspaper The Vremya, has inspired much debate about the leaking of information and public transparency in news media. Here restrictive laws incite self-censorship, and Kazakhstan’s libel laws have a chilling effect on free speech which UK journalists will be able to relate to.

On Thursday afternoon we heard (all too briefly) from Emin Milli (@eminmilli), an Azerbaijani youth activist who described himself as ‘a blogger without a blog’. He talked of the 17 months he spent in an Azerbaijani prison, as a consequence of the free speech activism he helped organise on Facebook. His dignity, and the good humour with which he shared these experiences were humbling, and genuinely inspiring.

I’d like to extend special thanks to Rovshan, whose hospitality and insights into life in Azerbaijan have left a lasting impression. I’d also like to thank Fidan Bagirova, who organised and moderated this event with aplomb.

The Caspian Sea, from Baku, Azerbaijan (slightly wonky)

But some feel FIFA may be playing the man rather than the ball here.

Simon Jenkins at the Guardian has a refreshing take on this rather circular meme.

And yet some of our press are a little shy in coming forward for praise.  The Mail’s splash today features a box which asks in a rather shouty way, ‘WILL BRITAIN’S MEDIA BE BLAMED FOR MISSING VOTES?’   The Panorama and Sunday Times investigations are mentioned prominently, but the Mail fails to mention that its’ stable-mate The Sunday Mail got the ball rolling with a well-aimed sting on Lord Triesman. Strange…

But FIFA may be getting their own back on the UK’s unruly press if their decisions are anything to go by.

Russia and Qatar came 140th and 121st respectively (out of 178) in RSF’s Press Freedom Index 2010.

That should keep things nice and quite for a while…

My job was made easier given Wikileaks latest release dominating Sunday’s (and Monday’s) papers.  This story (indeed all of the major Wikileaks stories this year) are a testament to the power of Computer Assisted Reporting.

For many years we have lagged far behind the US (and to a lesser extent some continental European countries), but in Wikileaks, CAR in the UK has truly come of age.

However, it would be wrong to assume that CAR is only helpful when looking for needles in haystacks in big, international stories.

CAR is just as useful in a local context.

For that reason (and partly because our course is NCTJ-accredited), I’ve drawn my examples from local news issues; crime in London, and Hillingdon Council’s incomings and outgoings.  The second example in particular, is intended to be taught in conjunction with local Public Affairs.

The files are here:

CAR script_2010_Murray_Dick_2010

CAR_examples_with working_Murray_Dick

Here’s hoping for a revolution in data manipulation in the weeks and months ahead.

Let me explain.

Earlier this afternoon I received an answer to a Freedom of Information request made a couple of weeks ago, to the Cabinet Office.

Unsatisfied with the bald figures occasionally promoted on the site (eg.) I wanted to know what has been the total web traffic to number10.gov.uk over the past year, broken down by UK region, and including metrics for; visits, unique visits, bounce rate, time on site, and % of new visits.

The data has been scanned and is presented as a data-unfriendly PDF, rather than the spreadsheet file I asked for, but you can’t have everything.

And so here it is: Traffic to number10.gov.uk

And what does it tell us? Nothing that translates into a general critique of political engagement throughout the country, sadly. This is due in large part to the inconsistencies between the cities and towns represented in the data, and the ways in which population figures are arrived at via our census and estimates – see here, for example. But the figures are undoubtedly interesting, and they raise a number of questions about different parts of the country in isolation.

Some of those questions would include:

• How can Wembley (with a population of around 57,000) account for more unique visits to number10 than the city of Liverpool?
• Is the lower than average engagement of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish a function of devolution, or evidence of lower engagement in online politics than is the case in England?
• Why do Reading and Salford have such high visitor numbers relative to their population – could it be something to do with the BBC’s presence in these areas? And moreover, does the heavy concentration of media in London have a significant role in (inner) London’s figures?

And then of course, we get to the headline comparison I started with. Politics really has come to something in this country when the government’s principal means of communicating directly with the public receives more traffic from a foreign city (even a capital) than from its 12^th largest settlement.

But when it came to creating a feed for static pages (of which there are many when it comes to tracking local news sources) it didn’t seem to be working.

That would be because Google switched this feature off at the end of last month.   Elsewhere, on an unofficial site, it is claimed Google have said not many people used the function.  Once again (as with the recent demise of Bloglines) it just goes to show how vulnerable specialist research tools can be.

Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives out there, including:

Page-2-RSS

Feed43

Feedity

Feedyes

That said, the only way to avoid the inconvenience of other (mostly free) services going belly up, is to get your sleeves rolled up, learn a bit of programming, and do your own scraping.  There are no shortages of tutorials on how to use  iMacros or Python for screen scraping.  It’s just a matter of how much time you have to put words into practice (I keep telling myself)…

Having started my journey into online via Bloglines, I’m struck with a (small) pang of regret. That said though, I’m one of those who abandoned it over the past couple of years, opting (like so many others) for Google Reader. So how did it come to this?

Well, certainly for every advantage Bloglines had over its competitors, there were always some gremlins in the system. Claiming feeds for your own blogs was a messy business, and their index of feeds was also pretty hit-and-miss. Over the past year or so, Google Reader out-manouvered Bloglines, taking advantage of their wider utilities (and massive subscriber base, which allowed them to offer a slew of share options), and innovating, for example in the provision of bespoke scraped feeds from static content.

But a bigger issue looms – something often lauded as a victory for the crowd, but which nonetheless has consequences for those who need to find news on a more systematic footing.

A few years ago now, I remember Robin Hamman talk at a BBC online conference of how he gets the vast majority of his news from friends and colleagues via social networks. I didn’t imagine then that the consequences of this for the wider surfing public would be with us so soon, but here we are – and so it’s bye-bye to Bloglines.

Today’s news, following the death of Newsgator a little over a year ago, is part of longer term malaise in the feed reader field. Today only FriendFeed and Netvibes stand in the way of a virtual Google monopoly. Google are one of the few companies who are financially strong enough (and technologically innovative enough) to maintain a viable feed reader service. But will there be adequate incentive for Google to continue innovating this service if there are fewer alternatives to compete with? Classical economic theory might suggest not…

While its great that people are more engaged online today, there are serious consequences for journalists in the death of Bloglines. Its all well and good sharing content with friends online, but when it comes to newsgathering in a systematic way, there is still no substitute for a feed reader.

You can develop an online army of Tweepz, Facebook contacts, and all the rest, but ultimately you risk missing out on important information in your beat unless you take the elements of newsgathering into your own hands, and proactively set up feeds on topics which people aren’t talking about, or sharing. Lets not forget, online engagement is still far from being universal in the UK – the net is still effectively an echo-chamber of thoughts and opinions driven by the more engaged, and the more vocal.

Informational pluralism is at risk if we rely too much on likes, shares and comment.

This suggestion (despite what I found in the Lords’ register of interests) proved to be unfounded.

Two days after publishing this post, I decided to unpublish while I worked out what to do.  Scoring-through the ‘wrong bits’ didn’t seem to do it justice (as the whole article was predicated on something that wasn’t true), but I didn’t want to delete the post forever without finding a solution of sorts.

I decided, having looked at various publishing models which deal with corrections online (and off-), to make this post public again (so the comments stay as they are), but to delete the erronous post, as it serves no useful purpose – and put this explanatory text in its place.

My thoughts on what to do with this post have inspired a conference paper – the slides for which you can view here.

This post was originally published on June 10th, then published privately between June 12th and October 22nd 2010.

It will stay up here from today until I stop publishing on this blog. Or until the end of the world – whichever comes first.

This is especially true if you don’t have a particular specialism, or steady flow of sources and contacts in a particular field.

For the generalist there are many sources which can help.

Media groups often subscribe to events and anniversaries databases such as Foresight, and create their own databases to suite the needs of features writers and journalists.

Of course there is no substitute for a healthy obsession with news – many features work well when woven around a contemporaneous event, report or piece of reportage. But with the dizzying rate at which news is produced and re-produced online, even those with hours to spend scouring out stories to map and develop may struggle.

Though some have the happy knack of summoning up eureka moments (and the perfect pitch) at will, there is a wealth of free content online which, once tamed, can help systematise the mix of creative thought and serendipity required.

Some great features ideas can be inspired (if not necessarily editorially driven) by looking into the past, and spotting interesting events and patterns. Sure, ideas inspired by 50-year anniversaries and the like are arbitrary, and can in some cases suggest nothing more profound than our underlying western predilections for Nature’s abacus and the Gregorian calendar. Nevertheless, if you are struggling to count out good features ideas on the fingers of one hand, there are options out there in the wastes of hyperspace

Getting round the Library of Babel

Wikipedia can be an ungainly beast if you don’t know what you are looking for. And not knowing what you are looking for but knowing when you’ve found it is a fair summation of the feature-writers’ job description.

Other reference tools (subscriptions) can offer helpful advanced search options; helping you look in particular fields, or combine searches between content in different fields, to hone in on particular entries. So, if you are speculatively looking for artists born in London between 1830 and 1840, Oxford Art Online can help you.

But of course Wikipedia doesn’t just contain neat, easy-to-index biographies – trying to give voice to the whole of human history and experience is a messy business.

Wikipedia has an advanced search option, and associated operators, which can help here, The intitle: option, which can be just as useful as the equivalent function in Google, can help with browsing, as can the incategory: option. With the latter you need to know what category you are searching for, and while some speculative searches can be useful, many will return no results.

Nevertheless here are some examples, all angling at a 100 year anniversary of one kind or another (birth years of famous composers, authors and English poets, respectively):

1910 intitle:composer

1910 -list intitle:author

1910 incategory:English_poets

So far so good – but the limitations to both of these operators for browsing through the results are evident in Wiki’s folder structure. There are no hierarchical categories in Wikipedia urls, within which article pages sit (which might, for example, look like: arts/fine_art/artists).

But the /category/ folder can be exploited in an advanced Google search – Google often being a better option for results than the engines of large sites. See these results for a range of 50-year anniversary themes (by category):

+1960 UK site:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/category:

Going back to using Wiki’s search, there are further browsing options.

To get a broader sweep of different fields across time, it can help to take advantage of the many timelines within wiki pages.

There are many individual timeline pages out there (here’s a page listing many of them), but there are also a wealth of timelines within articles – particularly longer ones.

For example, the page for 1910 in the United Kingdom looks like a fairly neat precise of key events, and includes a good few famous births and deaths. But it is far from definitive; there are many other themes, social movements and histories for which 1910 was a significant year, but which go unmentioned on this page (even in the See Also sections).

So a Wiki search for:

1910 UK timeline

…will generate more info, and more options which you can browse down.

The second result in this page, on women’s suffrage, has a timeline with an entry reading:

1910 – Lady Constance Lytton disguised herself as a working class seamstress, Jane Wharton, and was arrested and endured force feeding to prove prejudice in prisons against working class women. Lady Lytton was instrumental in reforming conditions in prisons. The force feeding probably shortened her life considerably

So, you might ask – what is life like in prison for women today, 100 years on? A quick search in Google News shows you a few days ago the Scottish government has made provisions to reduce the number of women in prisons. According to an Equal Opportunities Commission report (in the words of Kenny McCaskill)…

…the health and other needs of women offenders are more complex and wide-ranging than those of male offenders. So that is a range of needs that need to be addressed, be it in prison or in the community.

This in turn raises several questions, which could lead to a feature idea.

Of course if I’d read this news in the first place, I’d not have needed to take the steps to reverse-engineer the idea, but then it’s the final destination rather than the journey which is important here.

But for all the fanfare surrounding this innovation, it’s worth bearing in mind that the government is also currently contemplating whether to kill off of a source of public information that is essential to journalism, and to open society.

Take a look at this document on the Justice Department website – it is Jack Straw’s consultation document on the future of the Edited Register – that’s the publicly available electoral roll to you and me.

Journalists up and down the land use this resource in their day to day work. It is essential toward finding out more about people, and for getting in touch with people in the news. It is used to verify the authenticity of people who come into contact with the media; whether whistleblowers with tip-offs, those who provide UGC, the authors of letters to the editor, and even participants in and contributors to live broadcasting.

Despite the option to opt out which has reduced numbers considerably, the electoral roll remains the only easily available official means of verifying people are who they say they are, which the media need to ensure the legitimacy and representativeness of our news.

So why are the government proposing to do away with it?

A quick glance through the proposal document tells you all you need to know – killing the electoral roll will address (many years too late it could be argued) those marketers who exploit public data in scattershot campaigns.

The report identifies many organisations presumed to have a vested interest in this issue (see pages 10–11) but browsing down this list of professional bodies, government departments, quangos and NGOs there isn’t a single media entity in there. How does the government think the media gets in touch with the public – via osmosis?

Just as many a blogger will be pondering what data.gov.uk and a future of linked data will mean for public accountability, let’s consider how journalistic newsgathering may develop after the electoral roll is taken offline.

Managing contacts: Little black books and online contact databases will get more and more out of date as numbers change and people go ex-directory (and so disappear from directory enquiries – whether hardcopy or online).

Establishing the facts: Journalists dealing with breaking news will struggle to establish authenticity where they can’t get in touch with interested parties. This will almost certainly add to the circulation and ‘churn’ of unverifiable news, with no means of other journalists verifying the truth further down the line. It will mean journalists will have to rely more on people coming to them with ‘news’, rather than being able to proactively seek out, assess and establish what is ‘news’ for themselves. This will lead to an even greater reliance on the views of those with loud voice, and an agenda to push.

Investigative journalism: Without a means of piecing together the movements of people over time (via historical data – often available since 2001), it will become very difficult for investigators to establish exactly who it is they are trying to track. The police (if they so choose) will become the only means by which journalists can verify who is who, and where they have gone. Given the fourth estates’ responsibility to scrutinise all areas of the state, and given the meteoric rise in state surveillance, this situation would challenge the legitimacy of our democracy.

Rights to and representation within the news: The media in a pluralistic democracy is supposed to provide a means of expression for the views of everyone in society. If the electoral roll is switched off, there will be no means of getting in touch with those who have no significant public profile. Some in society will effectively be disenfranchised from the news production process.

Unsuitable alternatives: If journalists can’t rely on official publicly available information, there are plenty of alternatives online. But as has been shown many times over the years, there are serious problems inherent to journalists relying on social networks, including:

• Hoax accounts, which are ten-a-penny, and some of which can be fairly sophisticated. Even innocent dummy accounts can cause confusion – as The Express found out last week.
• Widespread confusion over what is ‘public’ and ‘private’ space online – which can lead to serious lapses in judgement. Earlier this week The Sunday Times was censured for intrusion into a Facebook users’ grief. Do we really want to see more of this?
• A significant number of people in the UK are not online, and will likely never be online – including many older people. Again, media’s duty to represent the widest range of opinion will be limited.

Late last year we saw public outrage at alleged phone hacking at The News of the World. If the government removes one of the few remaining legitimate sources for seeking out members of the public, we risk forcing journalists into illegitimate means of gathering contact information. We may see the rise in a black market of personal information which will put strain on privacy provisions within the Data Protection Act.

In short this could be disastrous for the future of news, and for the future of our democracy.

So how do we get around this problem?

It seems to me the answer may lie somewhere between options 4 and 6:

Option 4: Retain the Edited Register, but impose restrictions in legislation on who can purchase it and for what purposes.

Option 6: Improve guidance for the public about the Edited Register.

If the government insists on depriving the fourth estate of access to this information in order to curb cold calls and junkmail, some other provision must be made available. At present access to the full register is only permitted to members of the public ‘under supervision’. This is clearly an unacceptable stipulation for a free press, and would have to be changed.

If government insists on killing the edited version of the electoral roll, they will have to factor in how journalists will ensure the legitimacy and representativeness of our news.

All eyes on you Jack.

Help beat Trafigura’s gag on the BBC by embedding this Youtube video on your website… …and linking to this pdf!

We now know that Mr Hunt would preside over an emasculation of present media ownership rules, whose stifling strictures have nevertheless seen 88.8% of all regional UK titles consolidated in the hands of 20 publishers.

Today’s Conservative proposals are more Big Bang than Peacock Committee – this policy will ruffle the feathers of anyone who values a truly pluralistic media.

But what of wider media policy – for example, how might privacy from media intrusion be protected under David Cameron’s Conservatives?

In terms of defending our liberty from an overbearing state, the Tories certainly talk a good talk on the perils of the surveillance state. Though it is telling that they have refused to rule out returning to New Labour’s Big Brother database in future.

Those currently in opposition who are most vocal on the general issue of personal liberty, David Davis and Dominic Grieve, are both very much at arms length from Cameron’s high command. News Corp., it is rumoured, dealt the killer blow to Grieve’s Home Office aspirations, while Davis will forever represent a threat to Cameron’s leadership, more so if Cameron fails to appease the right of his party on Europe.

Events in Europe may yet come to influence our privacy from media intrusion under a Conservative government. Cameron’s pragmatic compromise to the right of his party, following the signing of The Lisbon Treaty, included revisiting a long standing pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. This policy declaration aired at conference, could yet have unforetold consequences on how our privacy is protected

A glance at the historical development of The PCC’s Code of Practice is instructive here:

(1998) The new wording for the privacy clause, which became Clause 3, was for the first time drawn largely from the European Convention on Human Rights, which the government had by this time pledged to incorporate into British law. It also significantly altered the definition of a private place, which now included both public and private places ‘where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy’. There had been concern that the previous Code had been far too tight in its definition of privacy and would not have protected someone from intrusion who was, for example, in a church or at a discreet table in a restaurant.

When it comes to press intrusion in the UK, the scope of our privacy is contingent upon definitions set out in the Human Rights Act.

If a future Conservative government were to repeal the HRA, there would be no moral impetus to continue with the current definition as set out in the PCC Code. Privacy in the UK would be defined, if defined at all, in a proposed Bill of Rights. In drawing up such legislation, a Conservative government would find no shortage of input from some quarters of the press.

Paul Dacre, chairman of the committee which draws up the PCC’s Code, is a long-standing opponent of both privacy and human rights legislation, describing such protections as ‘wretched’. His approach is an attack on those who challenge his right to enforce Victorian values on the public. This might play well to his readership, but does little for our right to privacy from needless tabloid intrusion.

Meanwhile, The Sun fights against the the HRA in a way which its readers can instantly relate to. Their ‘Give us back our human rights‘ campaign segues nicely into the bonkers bureaucrats in Brussels meme which permeates much of its take on the news.

There will be no support for continuing with HRA definitions in the PCC Code from these quarters. But their perspective on this policy area will be served from within a Cameron administration.

Cameron’s press secretary Andy Coulson, a former editor of the Sun’s Bizarre column and close friend to Dominic Mohan and Rebekah Brookes, will be mindful of just how important it is not to be too prescriptive when it comes to defining the public interest in the regulation of tabloids. This issue caused his political master acute personal embarrassment earlier in the year.

Whether or not he has further questions to answer, it is beyond doubt that Coulson slept through presided over a shameful, and illegal lapse in journalistic ethics while editor of the News of the World. Might we see this lapse in judgement revisited in the Tories’ laissez faire media model?

In terms of wider media policy, we know that Cameron plans to strip Ofcom of its policy-making powers, a move Labour (and some others) have suggested represents a quid pro quo for The Sun’s backing in the run up to election. In the event of a Conservative victory, we will be entering an era of slimmed down self-regulation across all media, which will foster further concentration of ownership, consolidating the power of some figures further still.

Of course no matter who gets in at the next election, until politicians of all colours can be seen to have regained the trust some of them squandered on second home allowances, press self-regulation remains off the political radar.

Nevertheless, the signs are that the defence of our privacy will be a significant challenge in the event of a future Conservative government.

While this is a welcome development in a service which has long been out-innovated (from semantic technologies like Silobreaker, to social discovery via Facebook and Twitter, to superior browsing navigation via NewsNow), there is nevertheless a lingering sense that it could have been so much more.

For example, you can’t personalise, tweak, or clone any of the (admittedly impressive) pre-set sections offered, which is a major let-down in terms of satisfying niche news needs. In a world of long tails and short attention spans, we all need more options.

And while the option to drill down to culturally-specific language when setting up your own sections is great (i.e. football when searched within a European section will bring results on a different sport to the same search in an American section), the fact that you can’t use the full range of advanced functions (i.e. refining by source and byline) is pretty limiting.

You expressly can’t create your own ‘sections’ in the conventional news sense, because the system won’t let you specify exactly which sources you want, or don’t want.

Then again, offering your audience a convenient digital news bundle while traditional media is still working out how to tie up the loose ends of falling readership and revenues, might just have seemed a twist of the knife too far.

And it doesn’t help when uncle Rupert’s breathing down your neck.

It’s an attempt to converge radio broadcasts, mixtapes and podcasts into the one search-friendly environment – and it works pretty well for finding stuff you haven’t heard yet.

Big media organisations can draw on the knowledge of professional researchers and experts, who will suggest suitable music for audio or visual packages.   Trying to find an equivalent to this wisdom isn’t easy online, albeit searching LastFM for other people who share some of your tastes, and Amazon’s Listmania! lists can both help point you in interesting directions.

Mixcloud offers similar help – just search for an artist you know (you may need to filter the results, using the tabs above) and you’ll find plenty of mixtapes where that artist has been shoehorned amongst others – sure there’s no guarantees that everything will be useful, but I got some interesting results when searching for Serge (Gainsbourg) - including a few French psychedelia artists I’d never heard of before.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, mind – but there’s plenty of potential in here for most tastes.

Gallus Alex Massie has chosen to take those legal bullies on, after taking stock of the wave of outrage expressed across the social media.  A calculated risk no doubt.

I find it interesting, though, that he chose to attack the BBC for not (at the time of writing) having run a story on this (they since, of course, have).

Had Alex done a little research he would know that the BBC were are in the process of being sued for libel having previously reported on this waste scandal, broadcast on Newsnight, on 13 May 2009.

You can hardly accuse them of not having done their part.

Meanwhile, a quick search of trafigura site:spectator.co.uk shows that the Specator’s interest in this story spans as far back as….today. 

Now that’s a smart bit of bandwagonry.

The piece strikes an elegiac note, revisiting the well established old media struggling to come to terms with new media meme.  But two more recent stories would tend to suggest that the era of the mogul are far from over.

Yesterday brought us news that Google’s plans to create its own Library of Babel are being opposed by Angela Merkel.  The extent to which this old school protectionist step was inspired by her good friend, and heir to the Bertelsmann dynasty Liz Mohn, can hardly be ignored.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s Organ Grinder, Peter Preston gave us an insight into just how James Murdoch’s influence has informed the proposed Times+ online subscription platform, toward implementing a Berlin wall round the News Corp empire.  Murdoch Junior’s tirade against the BBC and Ofcom in August have led some to  the conclusion that a Faustian pact has already been signed between the Murdoch empire and the Tories with a view to carving up the future media market.

Others may speculate, but one thing’s for sure - there’s life in the old media dynasties yet.

While I find his particular brand of techno-pessimism a welcome counterweight to some of the techno-utopianism that exists out there, one or two aspects of today’s polemic (issues he raises time and time again) merit taking issue with. Namely:

As Clay Shirky argued last weekend at Ryerson University, the Internet has so confused and collapsed the distinction between audience and author that the ethical rules of the old economy no longer work. The old dichotomies of content and advertising, once governed from above by all-powerful, centralised organisations like the FTC and News Corp, have been made increasingly redundant by the internet.

The implied monopoly on ethical rules embraced by the ‘old economy’ frankly doesn’t line up with this surfer’s day-to-day experience, neither of new media nor old.

To imply that the Internet is a moral wasteland seething with swivel-eyed, loony-tune demagogues, and free-riding spongers, does a severe dis-service to the millions who contribute their well-reasoned opinions, expertise and knowledge.

There is also an implicit golden-ageism about the old media here, which just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps Andrew might further elaborate on just how ‘all-powerful’ the FTC has been historically, with regard to enforcing ethical standards on the US broadcasting media. For example, Commercial Alert, and Sourcewatch both provide several examples and research demonstrating the creep of product placement into news programming there.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have seen a clamour for reform of the Press Complaints Commission. A range of voices from outwith the old media (MediaWise) and within (The Media Standards Trust) are now using the Internet to mobilise, and hold old media to account on policing their ‘ethical rules’. These groups wouldn’t exist if everything in the garden were rosy.

While it is true that the online medium brings with it ethical challenges, to frame the changes we are living through as, in effect, barbarians storming the gate, does no credit either to the new media, nor the old.

Open communication and transparency should be at the centre of media standards. And online can be a very effective platform upon which to develop these virtues.