Sorry about the jargonistic TLAs there, but that would have been one mammoth post title unless I used them.

I’ve just been watching news coverage of that train derailment in Cumbria. Incidentally, Sky News’ coverage was awful. They had somebody from Virgin Trains on the phone and the questions were unforgivably banal.

Presenter: So, can you tell us something about the train? How many carriages were there on the train, because there seems to be some confusion as to whether there were six or nine carriages.
Virgin Trains man: There are nine carriages.
[Long pause.]
Presenter: Err, can you tell us something more about the train?
[I switch back to News 24.]

BBC News 24 was slightly more watchable. I was thinking about my post about user generated content in the mainstream media. This is exactly the sort of news story where UGC works well.

Quite soon after the story has broken we have seen photographs taken from inside an upside-down carriage that helps illustrate the seriousness of the crash. Of course, the eyewitness accounts are also helpful, although I’m not sure if this properly counts as user generated content (really they are just interviews).

But then News 24 went and ruined it by flashing a “Speak Your Brains Have Your Say” logo at the bottom of the screen and spending a short while reading out viewers’ emails. The first one was quite interesting — a viewer had seen what looked like a flash of lightning from the train line, which they now took to be a train crash. Hardly earth-shattering stuff, but at least it’s not totally banal.

But after that they really started scraping the barrel. The usually unflappable Tim Willcox was stumbling as he struggled to find more interesting emails:

“Err, and we have another one… here…, umm. “Just seen the train crash. Genuine best wishes to all of those involved”… umm. Yess. Do keep those emails coming in.”

This illustrates my point perfectly. With the photographs from inside the train, viewers saw an instance where UGC genuinely added something to the story. Just minutes later, the mundane emails showed up the pitfalls of relying on viewers’ input too much.

And, as Ryan Morrison pointed out in the comments to my other post, it was probably a sign that it was time to move on to another story, even if the train derailment news is still developing.

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about “citizen journalism” and its relationship with the mainstream media. “User generated content” is very trendy at the moment. I had expected that to happen, but it hasn’t turned out quite the way I expected it.

Some people seem dead set on framing the whole issue as some kind of colossal battle between the mainstream media and citizen journalism. But bloggers often depend on the mainstream media for its stories — with a few notable exceptions of course. And by the same token, the mainstream media depends on citizens more and more to send in images of big news events such as the London bombings.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately it has become a sickeningly trendy thing for news outlets to do now. Now every time a turkey sneezes it’s all, “Send us your pictures to news@sky.com”, or even worse, “Have your say by recording yourself on your 3G phone.” I mean really. UGC has become a gimmick used by news channels to make them look all hip and cool.

Channel Five News seems particularly keen on the idea of citizen journalism. But they are so eager to push it forward that they end up completely missing the point. For one thing, one report I saw was an irredeemably dull item about cycle lanes. Not cycle lanes in general. Cycle lanes in one gentleman’s town.

Clearly, this man was quite concerned about cycle lanes (I can’t remember why, it was so boring). But what had obviously happened was that he emailed some special “Speak your brains” email address and some producer picked it up and said, “Great! That’s a really boring story, just like what them citizen journalists are into. Let’s do it!” And then they sent along a professional production crew and got this chap to talk about cycle lanes.

But that isn’t citizen journalism at all. The production crew probably made the decision that he would cheesily present the whole item in his cycling gear, riding down the cycle lanes and then “happening to bump into a camera” and mouth off about cycle lanes in a monotone fashion.

All they needed was a pointless two-way and that would have been it — citizen journalism becomes everything that’s bad about the mainstream media. Essentially it was a normal news report in every way, except that it was presented by somebody with little or no television experience. This is more like Points of View than blogging. In the blogosphere, this “story” about cycle lanes would never have attracted any attention whatsoever. Channel Five decided to put it on its prime time news programme.

The point for me about blogging is that normal-ish people have a big conversation. Sometimes they write about their own experiences and create their own stories about the world around them. People eventually find like-minded people and share their experiences, debate and have a conversation. Channel Five just took some guy with a hobby horse and plonked him in front of a camera.

Radio Five Live recently had some boring thing called “Your Five Live” or something. I think it lasted an entire week. And it was terrible. All week they were trailing a special debate to be. chaired by that voice of reason Stephen Nolan, about “the issue you told us concerned you the most”. Yes, you guessed it — immigration. That issue that seems to attract the regular Five Live phone-in callers but doesn’t seem to fuss people in the blogosphere that much.

I didn’t listen to the debate. I would probably have found it too depressing. It would have been a carnival of the knuckle-draggers. Maybe I am being a snob. Surely these are normal people who have every right to voice their opinion. Well, yes. But any old fool can rant down a microphone.

As I said, the point about blogging is that you have a proper discussion and a debate. Sometimes Five Live manages this, but more often it doesn’t. You just get somebody inflicting us with his verbal diarrhoea before being cut off by the presenter because it’s time for the news.

And just have a look at BBC News 24 or Sky News. Large chunks of the day are often dedicated to “Have your say” “debates”. What this actually means is numbskulls sending in emails and some editor somewhere picking the juiciest ones which a presenter then reads one line of. What you get is half a dozen emailers all of which have their own personal chips on their shoulder — but no conversation, no debate, no intelligence.

A new programme on Channel 4 caught my eye this weekend. It’s called Homemade, and it actually bills itself as YouTube for the television. People generate their own content and submit it to Channel 4. But once again this completely misses the point. The point about YouTube is that you decide for yourself what you want to watch.

Homemade is still put together by a bunch of television professionals who have chosen what they would like us to watch. The viewer gets no choice in the matter here. And we could especially do without the annoying Dave Berry presenting links between all of the clips.

All we have now is a rag-bag of items filmed on poor-quality cameras. Presumably the producers of Homemade thought the randomness and low quality images was what made YouTube popular. Well, not so. Most people just use YouTube to watch actual television programmes anyway.

The mainstream media needs to realise what user generated content can actually be useful for. At the moment, it is just a trendy gimmick — and its uses get more annoying by the week. People will always want television stations to create quality, big-budget programmes. If people wanted something home made they would watch YouTube, not Channel 4.

As for the news programmes, they need to be more aware that their job is to report the big news stories with expert analysis. If people wanted to know what people on the street thought, they would just read a blog. As things stand, user generated content on news programmes are toe-curlingly embarassing and always encourage me to switch off.

That is not to say that citizens can’t have an input in the news. Images of Concorde on fire and the inside of the bombed train in London genuinely added to the story, and professionals were not in a position to film these. That is the sort of cooperation between “citizens” and the “mainstream media” that can work brilliantly. The rest is just awful, gimmicky rubbish.

This post by Kevin Anderson is very interesting. The key quote:

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the internet as a whole.

There was something interesting in that report about Scottish blogging on Radio Scotland from a couple of weeks ago that I never got around to writing about.

Tim Montgomerie of 18 Doughty Street and Conservative Home was asked about a concern that some people might have about the blogosphere — that people who don’t actually know very much about what they’re writing about can gain a lot of influence. Montgomerie responded by saying that the bloggers that got the most attention were the people who did know something about what they’re writing about.

When I was interviewed for a piece on Radio Scotland last year, I also suggested that the most successful bloggers were people who probably would have been well-known campaigners or journalists anyway (although as I recall, this bit wasn’t used in the broadcast). I cited Iain Dale as an example. His blog is one of the biggest around at the moment, and he was clearly a big figure on the political scene before blogging took off.

Will Patterson then spoiled the whole illusion by going on to suggest that I am one of the bloggers that everybody reads. Well I have to hold my hands up and say that I am one of those bloggers who don’t really know much about what they’re writing about.

Clearly, the idea that “those who do know” are the only successful (or even worthwhile) bloggers is only part of the story about blogs. If it were the case that big names are the only important ones, citizen journalism wouldn’t be seen as important and The Long Tail wouldn’t exist in the blogosphere.

To ask for bloggers to be expert policy analysts misses the big point about blogging, which is that any old Joe Blogs can get out and express his opinion to a wide audience. “How boring,” you might think — and you might be right. I find it absurd that anybody should read my blog. I am only 20 for a start, and I’m a very mundane person. I have almost no life experience and I’m certainly not in any position to be telling Mr X to do y.

But that’s not the point. If you say, “well, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so why should his opinions matter?”, then you might as well throw the whole idea of liberal democracy out of the window. The great thing about blogging is that it is ordinary people — some more expert than others — who are getting their thoughts out there in the open.

I used to struggle to understand why I like blogs so much while I’ve ended up getting less and less of my news via traditional outlets. Recently it struck me. It is common for people to say that all politicians are lying, spinning or toeing the party line. The reason they do this, of course, is that they do not appear on the news in a personal capacity — they do so as a representative of their political party. Of course they will be expected to toe the party line. They would probably be out of a job if they didn’t.

But the same goes for everybody that appears on the news. If it isn’t a politician it will be somebody representing some other organisation — a pressure group, a trade union, a business, whatever. Even when I or Will P or any other bloggers crop up on the news, it is only in our capacity as representatives of (or experts on) the blogosphere.

I’ll sit there watching the news thinking, “can I really believe this person?” They are all experts in their field for sure. But they are also in their ivory towers, seeing things from their blinkered perspectives. Isn’t it strange that ordinary people — who, by definition, make up the vast majority of the population — are seldom properly represented in the mainstream media apart from in some uncomfortable ‘Speak Your Brains’ segment?

The fact that ordinary people who don’t necessarily have an agenda to push or a party line to toe are gaining some influence should be seen as refreshing, not bothersome. I know I’d much rather read the opinions of ordinary people rather than somebody with an agenda to push. I think most other people do as well. Like I said, I am a mundane person and certainly not in a position to be an expert on anything. But plenty of people still read my blog.

Mark Lawson, in an article he wrote having obviously only ever read about half a dozen blogs in his life, once said that:

At its worst, blogworld most resembles a radio phone-in for leftwing men but without a Victoria Derbyshire or Brian Hayes to interrupt the callers who lose the thread and start to free-associate.

This is part of the problem a lot of bloggers have with the “mainstream media”. ‘Ordinary people need to know their place, and we journalists have to be there to let them know when to shut up.’ So you have an letters page in the newspaper which is supposed to represent the views of the ordinary readers — which it does, but only at the say so of an editor. And you have radio phone-in shows where ordinary listeners are often summarily cut off in their prime.

A lot of the people who phone up a radio station do often deserve to be cut off. But here is another magical thing about blogging. We bloggers are having proper debates. We don’t have to worry about squeezing our point in before the news. If somebody disagrees with us they can simply respond either in the comments or on their own blogs.

Soon enough you find out who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t. Poorly-formed opinions have to be revised as they are challenged by others. What we have is the wisdom of crowds. Even though many (but by no means all) of us may not be experts, bad ideas soon get weeded out. This is proper, adult (usually) discussion between — whisper it quietly — ordinary people.

That should be embraced, not snootily ridiculed.

Will Patterson was on Radio Scotland yesterday discussing the rather sorry state of Scottish political blogging. You can hear it here.

Don’t know how sorry a state it’s in? Well, Will P said that (along with the brilliant CuriousHamster), doctorvee is one of the “blogs that everyone’s reading”. I get the feeling that anybody coming here for any top Guido Fawkes-style political blogging will have been sorely disappointed at the list of sprawling rants about moderately disappointing music that I’ve been more likely to post in recent weeks.

I don’t really see this place as a political blog any more. A couple of years ago I really wanted to be a political blogger. Now I can’t really be bothered. I do have the Scottish Blogging Roundup, and I’ve found myself holding back all of my little thoughts about politics for those posts rather than anything I write here. That’s maybe not a good thing. Perhaps I should be more impartial in the Roundup!

Anyway, it’s all very apt because I was actually planning another post on the Roundup blog about this issue. Why is there no Scottish Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale or Tim Ireland? Stay tuned at the Roundup blog for the post on that to come on Sunday, in place of this week’s roundup.

The Radio Scotland report painted a rather more sorry picture than is genuinely the case. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that there are only a “few dozen” Scottish blogs! There might only be a few dozen well-known blogs, but you can bet that for each of them there are at least a dozen buried underneath waiting to be discovered. For instance, Technorati lists 220 ‘Scottish’ bloggers, and they are only the people who know how to tag their blogs for Technorati! Who knows what else is hidden.

That was part of the reason for starting the Scottish Blogging Roundup: to discover more Scottish blogs, and to find a greater variety of views. I think it has partially succeeded, but there is a long way to go before anybody north of the border gets taken as seriously as the big guns like Tim Worstall, Iain Dale et al.

As they say in the radio report, there is a huge opportunity here with the Holyrood election coming up in May. But I seem to remember that the last Scottish Parliament election didn’t get an awful lot of attention in the media (certainly compared to a General Election), and the whole thing went by pretty much unnoticed. I hope the same thing doesn’t happen this year. Maybe we bloggers can make something happen.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, my favourite Scottish political bloggers are Will P and David Farrer.

Update: I forgot to link to this excellent post on the same radio report at Scottish Political News, a good new-ish blog.

The media is changing very quickly, and there are a lot of difficult issues that have to be sorted out. With the massive (and still growing, maybe even still accellerating) success of blogging, podcasting and vlogging, the boundaries between the mainstream media and the pamphleteers are becoming ever-more blurred. This week Michael Grade wondered about the digital challenge.

…I do not believe we are more than two or three elections away from the moment when some commercial channels will be ready to proclaim: “We win it for Tony, Dave, Ming (or whoever).”

Grade notes the difference in culture between the print media and broadcasters:

In the UK, we have developed quite different expectations of different media. With broadcasting, balance and impartiality have been statutory requirements: democracy is judged to be served by the absence of bias and partisan editorial agendas. For print, with its long history of struggle against state censorship, democracy is seen to be served by freedom of expression, and is characterised by partisan editorialising.

Television channels are still fairly heavily regulated by Ofcom. This is designed to keep television news impartial, which is said to ensure a healthy democracy. But were newspapers to be regulated in this way it would be rightly called an undemocratic suppression of free speech.

It might seem like a discrepancy. But up until recently, broadcasters were part of a privileged elite. A television channel could have a lot of power. You don’t have to go back far to find an era where the UK had only three and a half channels. People would be stuck with what they were fed. Television audiences of over 20 million, although almost unheard of today, were not that unusual back then.

A license to broadcast was a powerful thing to have. It was a privilege, and with that privilege came responsibilities. As such it was reasonable to regulate these channels’ news output. Otherwise just two or three companies would have had a ridiculous amount of influence over the electorate.

It was very different with newspapers. In theory, anybody could publish a newspaper. It certainly had fewer barriers to entry than broadcasting did. As such, press freedoms were cherished. A diversity of opinions unimaginable to broadcasting was available in print.

Today it’s a very different story. In just a few years it will be the norm for every television owner to have access to a few dozen different channels. There are hundreds available on Sky. It is now cheaper to run some television stations than it is to publish a magazine. And there are certainly more television channels than there are national newspapers.

The traditional analogue terrestrial channels are seeing audiences dwindle. The BBC, ITN, even Sky are all becoming less powerful. Competition has increased greatly. Viewers have so many choices, and broadcasting is no longer so much of a privilege. Yes, many of the new channels have been set up by the traditional broadcasters — but this is more of a damage limitation exercise than anything else.

But it’s not just the advent of digital television that is giving the traditional media companies food for thought. A far bigger problem is being posed by the internet. Young people spend far more time on websites like YouTube and MySpace than watching television. We live in an age where the world seems to be increasingly run by large, soulless corporations. But the internet is making those large, soulless corporations run scared.

Viacom (MTV) is particularly miffed that Generation MTV is fizzling out and almost bought Bebo to try and stay hip (it laucnhed MTV Flux instead). Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace after being slow off the mark to adapt to a new world in love with the internet. Most strangely of all, ITV bought Friends Reunited.

But in terms of news coverage, the emergence of citizen journalism should usher in a new era of free speech in broadcasting. With the advent of vlogging and websites like YouTube, who is to say what is and isn’t broadcasting? It is conceivable that one day soon there will be a blogger or a vlogger who is just as influential as somebody on the television.

For some governments, this means that you should regulate citizen journalists in the same way as you would regulate broadcasters. This year in Singapore the government attempted to gag bloggers during the election campaign. The Indian government also ordered ISPs to block popular blogging sites Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities. Two years ago, French authorities famously arrested a blogger for criticising the city mayor. Does that not all sound like a suppression of free speech?

Citizen journalism has created a new category of person somewhere in between the traditional journalist and the pub ranter. It’s a grey area. We would expect the traditional journalist to adhere to certain standards; we certainly would not expect the pub ranter to. So what should we expect the citizen journalist to do?

People in this arena are becoming increasingly ambitious. There will soon be the launch of a new internet television channel, 18 Doughty Street. Those involved are already among the most successful bloggers around. If 18 Doughty Street succeeds (still a big ‘if’, of course), traditional media companies will have to take notice.

As I said, the reason broadcasters are regulated is because they were in a privileged position. But they are now no longer in such a privileged position. We can get our news from a growing number of different outlets. Today, anybody can write an article or make a film and reach a large audience. There is now genuine competition in the media. There will always be a place for the mainstream media, but they are surely becoming less powerful.

Soon enough Ofcom’s impartiality regulations will look like an anachronism. Soon it should be time to wave goodbye to the impartiality regulations in favour of freedom of speech. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every news outlet would have to become a Fox- or Independent-style ‘views’ outlet. Broadcasters — particularly the BBC — will always want to appear unbiased. There probably isn’t much of an appetite in the UK for a Fox News-style channel — although I can see an opinionated channel based on The Sun being successful.

The point is that we are now lucky enough to be in a position where we have pretty much unlimited access to as many different opinions as we want. So it’s time to celebrate this diversity instead of suppressing it. Murdoch wants to launch a Fox-style channel in the UK? Why not let him? There’ll be thousands of citizen journalists ready to challenge.