Mike Butcher

I’d like to be able to register on the Channel 4 Dispatches web site forum to discuss the programme on right now. I’d like to. But guess what? You have to register (fine) but your registration “may take up to 24 hours to be approved. If you do not verify your account within four days then your account will be deleted and you will have to register again.” Oh dear. So all that burning anger about supermarkets will probably have gone by then. More to the point, Channel 4 is seriously hobbling its site with this dumb obstacle.

The following is an article by a journalist colleague, Robert Dwek. He doesn’t have a blog, but as this is such a good article (first published in Marketing Week magazine), I offered to post it here. Enjoy.

Read on…

Are you familiar with something called MSM? Do you like fisking? Do you frequent the Blogosphere?

No, I’m not referring to exotic sexual practices in a subterranean night club. I am in fact talking about the most exciting area of the Internet right now – by a long shot.

I’ve referred to web logs (“blogs”) many times before but something seminal has just happened. And this really is hot off the press, as it were.

A blog called The Daily Ablution, run by one Scott Burgess, an American living in the UK, has just forced the Guardian to fire an employee. This is the most impressive direct action yet seen by a single non-professional website.

The Guardian had been employing a Muslim journalist with ties to the extreme and frequently banned organisation Hizb Ut Tahrir. Burgess found this out by Googling the journalist’s name (Dilpazier Aslam).

He was motivated to do so after reading an article by Aslam immediately after the July 7 London bombings. This high-profile piece for the Guardian opinion page expressed anger at moderate Muslims who don’t “rock the boat,” and explained the bombings as a “sassy” expression of opinion.

By Googling the author’s name, Burgess discovered an article he had written for Hizb Ut Tahrir, on a website called khilafah.com (“Khilafa” translates as “Caliphate”). It called for a rather literal form of Jihad, involving the subjugation of all non-Muslim countries.

The Guardian initially tried to ignore Burgess. Ironically for a publication which has championed blogs – online diaries and bulletin boards which are almost free to use and make perfect platforms for activists of all stripes – the Guardian tried to treat his concerns as those of a powerless letter writer.

But this is when the “blogosphere” – the increasingly interlinked world of blogs – sprang into action. The Daily Ablution’s revelations were soon being “syndicated” – cross-referenced using hyperlinks – on hundreds of blogs around the world. Some of these blogs have become very powerful media in their own right, for all their amateur status.

To cut a long story short, Burgess’s revelations were sufficient to force the Guardian to take action. Given a choice between his allegiance to the Jihadist organisation or his continued employment at the newspaper, the journalist in question chose the former.

The Guardian, however, wrote an anonymously bylined article designed to smear Burgess’s character and undermine the credibility of his blog. I, like many other Internet users, am very glad it did so since this is what led me to the Daily Ablution in the first place. Burgess “fisked” – quoted and critiqued, line by line – the attempted character assassination, making the Guardian look even more ridiculous and unprofessional than it already had done.

Thanks to the interactive nature of blogs, a great many people have already commented on “l’affair Aslam” and given the Burgess a great big virtual slap on the back.

His blog has now become famous and will become a must-read for the blogerati. Indeed, my daily “media” reading is now so chock-full of new names and faces offering first-rate information, analysis and insights that it leaves little time for those strange things called newspapers.

How ironic that it was the “MSM” (Main Stream Media) Guardian that resorted, shamefully, to an anonymous attack while the new media little guy has kept his head, and name, above the parapet at all times.

It seems almost unreal but the “MSM” is being sidelined before our very eyes. Bit by bit, the new media landscape is producing a tectonic shift. Blogs are becoming major media channels and are even beginning to benefit from commercial funding. One thing’s for certain, there is no turning the clock back – this is going to get bigger and bigger. The global village is finally a reality rather than a cliché.

Some of the most investigative reporting these days is being done by people like Burgess, using nothing more than a Google search. The implications of all this are far-reaching. I would put it on a par with the invention of the printing press in terms of social change.

Look at what Burgess said when writing to the Guardian to air his concerns about Aslam: “My readers are interested in knowing whether Guardian newspapers were aware of Mr. Aslam’s affiliations before he was hired.” See those magic words? “My readers”. Therein lies the incredible redistributive power of the blog, of which the good socialist Guardian should surely approve. Instead, like all defensive institutions, it tries to silence what it doesn’t want to hear.

As one reader of the Daily Ablution wrote on the site: “Clearly, the Guardian dinosaurs are totally outclassed by the far nimbler warm-blooded blogosphere.”

And as blogger Melanie Philips (also a Daily Mail columnist) noted on her much-referenced web log: “The firing is the first (albeit small) British mainstream media scalp taken by the blogosphere, whose vital role in policing and holding to account unaccountable mainstream media has now at last begun to have an effect in Britain and well as in the US.”

For marketers, this media revolution means doing what they have long claimed to enjoy: thinking outside the box. To quote Bob Dylan, “And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.”

By Robert Dwek

robert_dwek AT yahoo DOT com

ENDS

UPDATE: The following is a post I put up in 2005 , attacking Paul Carr, Guardian columnist and internet entrepreneur. As much as I think that in journalistic terms he was totally out of order PR-ing his company in his column (see below for the details) I also don’t want this post to stand forever about how I feel about Carr and his ventures. There will be other things he does I will like, no doubt. So in order that you, gentle reader, have that context in mind, then read on. As much as I am a believer in The Long Tail, I also know that The Long Tail of Bile and Vitriol is not really one worth preserving. We can leave that kind of business to others.

Update 2008: Turns out I was right. These days we get on just fine.

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Is anyone else more than a little bemused that Paul Carr, Guardian New Media columnist, is allowed to rehash his own press release as a column in the Media Guardian? Email me your opinion or log in to comment below.

I feel Paul’s beloved blogosphere – a phrase he likes to recycle EVERY FUCKING WEEK [Update: sorry, the word he overuses is Blogistan] because there is NOTHING ELSE happening in new media is there? – may be about to bite back.

This is not the first time he has written in glowing terms about his own projects, The Friday Project being a case in point. Is this the kind of thing we should expect from a national newspaper?

UPDATE:

Paul Carr has emailed me to protest about my criticism (above) of his column.

Below are the main points of our exchange:

CARR: Did I do something to offend you? I ask only because the last time I wrote about blogs for the Guardian (most recent column aside) was back in February.

ME: Paul, I have become increasingly disappointed that you don’t use the fantastic opportunity you have as a regular columnist in (what’s left of) the new media section to look at many more wider issues in this business.

CARR: Of course it’s a free blogosphere (I believe the word I overuse is actually ‘Blogistan’) and you are entitled to say or think whatever you like about my column, or my work in general. But your latest post just seemed like a particularly vicious attack which came without much justification.

ME: Was it vicious because I said you wrote about blogs “every fucking week” (clearly it’s an erroneous impression, but it’s still an impression), or was it because I pointed out the similarities between your company’s press release and the column? Being vicious is something of a character flaw of mine, and I don’t wear it as a badge of honour by any stretch. My problem is usually aiming for the moon to “hit the next field”. I apologise if I was vicious.

CARR: As regards the bloggers biting back, I’m not sure why you think that’s about to happen. I like blogs and I like bloggers. I write nice things about them all the time and, I hope, I’ve done my bit to tell the non-new media folk who read Media Guardian about the cool and interesting things they’re doing. And I’ve just set up a publishing company to move the best of them into print. Fuck, you’re right, they should be turning up at my door with burning torches.

ME: Yes, you have promoted blogging, and it’s fair to say you have been one of the earliest to do so. (Although plenty of people have been earlier, they just don’t have Guardian columns). Your new venture is clearly of interest to bloggers. But do we have to have it slapped in our faces in your newspaper column? Can’t you rely on your company to do its own PR?

CARR: I write for the Guardian about things I’m involved in because they ask me to. Most Media Guardian columnists write about things they’re doing with their companies and then relate them to wider themes. That’s the point of the column and why it has my company name at the bottom. There’s no suggestion that it’s unbiased journalism and in fact I’ve alluded to my bias several times in the columns. There’s even a picture of me at the top.

ME: Perhaps you are right? Perhaps I am confusing what I perceive to be the only major column left in the national newspaper industry (outside perhaps of John Naughton in the Observer) with a brief to write about “real” new media with what is essentially – as you put it – your brief to give a personal-eye-view about being inside a new media company and how that is going. However, I’m afraid to say I’m still just plain disappointed. I basically expect better of you than to write a column off the back of a your own press release, (which describes you as Editor in Chief and “an experienced journalist with a regular media column in The Guardian”). In my book, people like that don’t write those sorts of columns, bluntly. I expect that of advertising executives, not journalists. There’s also a country mile between the average ad agency executive writing in the Guardian saying: “This occurred this week and I think it means X to the ad industry,” and saying (I paraphrase) “We’ve just set up a company, aren’t we clever and aren’t Chrysalis chumps. In fact they even publicly said they love our idea, so we sent them flowers, the poor misguided old fools.” It’s like Steve Jobs writing a column and, when Sony announces its new MD for Walkman, writing: “Our iPod is fab, but get those guys at Sony! What a bunch of jokers, etc etc.” Yes, it’s fair play to say that your column, which is branded as you and your company and has a big health-warning slapped all over it, is your opinion. It does not pre-suppose that the readers understand that, in this instance at least, this is tantamount to a press release for your company. Apart from anything else, anyone so au fait with ‘Blogistan’ and its machinations should be hardly by stung by a posting on… a blog. And especially when – let’s be honest – you have effectively just indulged in some knocking copy at the expense of a newly-announced rival to your firm, namely Chrysalis.

CARR: If you want to do the column yourself, why not email The Media Guardian editor? For what it’s worth, I’ve always enjoyed your writing and I think it would be interesting you read about the projects you’re involved in. Alternatively drop the readers’ editor a line and ask him to investigate. Either way, I’m genuinely sorry to have pissed you off. Keep up the good work with Mbites. Best regards, Paul

ME: In turn, for what its worth, I think you are a good writer. That’s probably why you have lasted as a columnist so long – you are opinionated and write well, whether or not you are objectively right or wrong, week to week. But here’s the issue – please don’t sully your own, very good, writing and the amazing opportunity you have with that column, to cross the line directly into PR. Lastly, it may be of some comfort to you to know that I have had almost no response to this post, so it is clearly of niche interest! It’s a sure bet that you have many more fans than I do, and far more influence. And if you’d like to have a pint to have a proper slug-out face to face that’s fine. Cheers, Mike.

UPDATE II

Paul writes again to say:

He’s not the only person who writes the New Media column.

He’s says he’s not squandering the column because he’s written about a lot more subjects than TFP (Google Print, the Advertising Standards agency, the death of Hunter S Thompson, the TVSF directive and internet censorship etc) – none PR-ing TFP.

He doesn’t use the column for his own personal PR, but “I do however know more about my own business than about anyone else’s, so I am more comfortable relating to personal experiences rather than trying to second-guess those of others.”

I’m at TED.com, the annual uber-conference about the convergence between technology, advertising and design. Although this year it’s very much about the affect technologies can have on global development, social collaboration, media disruption and the like. This one is billed at TED Global, held in Oxford, although it’s very much and American style event – not least because getting press accreditation has been a nightmare!

Just heard an amazing chat from a guy from Worldchanging.com about technologies and design ideas which are having an affect on the developing world.

I appear to have encouraged Foundcity.net to launch in the UK. Yay! See here for the first ever post.

Dear terrorists. Think you are going to scare us, huh? Kindly fuck off.

(I’ll write this up just as soon as I’ve recovered from standing up for 12 hours with no food and little water. Meantime, bloody AOL are hocking the one downloadable track from the concert on Windows machines only! Forcing others to go to bit torrent etc).

I went to the O2 Wireless Festival tonight in Hyde Park (see Flickr images, left).

I’ll be brief. Babyshambles were OK. You can see the appeal. Endearingly shambolic. Kasabian were in a league of their own however. Truly, the Happy Mondays for the noughties, but with a little more edge, and seriousness. They will go far. Killer basslines and hooks. I love a bass player who just stands there and does nothing but belt out amazing riffs.

Anyway, the point of 02’s vast sponsorship exercise was to get people to text messages and MMS pictures of themselves to the stage video screens.

Well, it kind’ve worked.

There was something slightly uncool about the whole idea however. It’s a bit like your uncle asking you to come up at the wedding and play peas pudding hot on the recorder for the rest of the family. Taking a picture of yourself and MMSing it to the stage screen.. well, maybe a few teenagers enjoyed it… I can see it rapidly losing its novelty, however.