News Streams Will Kill the News Cycle
Guido gave a talk at Microsoft’s groovy London HQ to the Online News Association’s UK chapter. We did the usual bit of blogger v journalist banter, laughed at Nick Robinson’s ‘Michael Fish moment‘ and then Guido tried to push his new meme.
Having spent a few years writing the advance obituary for the “Dead Tree Press” as well as pushing the digital disintermediation meme, the new, new thing for the start of this decade is the idea that the “news stream” has killed the “news cycle”. Guido recognises that this might sound a bit like a Steve Hilton strategy memo.
Sorry the above slides are more of an aide memoire than a presentation. The last slide contains the logos of a few “news brands” which are more profitable in aggregate than the whole of what was once called “Fleet Street”. The British newspaper industry is for the most part a form of vanity publishing, not a business.
UPDATE : Just noticed there was live real-time reportage of the event : live blog and Twitter stream.
Surely this means less of a role for new editors. Less control and lower pay. It can’t be true.
Nick Robinson still the butt of most jokes then. No surprise there. Wonder what pearls of wisdom he will spout forth today on TDP. Its easy to identify one cost cutting exercise at the beeb.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Was that a blogospherical info blast from a disaggregated message herder ?
Or as others might be more inclined to say, bullshit.
Cycle recognizes fixed time events where, for politics at least, you can get your message out with most listeners/viewers.
Like for Today or PM or the 6′O clock and Ten O’clock News and of course the Newspaper deadlines as well as the entire weeks rising then falling overall interest in the News.
Until a massive amount of people stop working 9 to 5 and until the 24 Hour News channels stop being 20 hours of recaps apart from natural disasters and other rare occurances, then it’s going to be a News cycle.
You can’t dismiss Twitter and pretend blogging is much different BTW
More characters maybe but still overwhelmingly unpaid amateurs.
It’s news Jim, but not as we know it.
Jersey Jack sounds a bit peeved. I wonder if he will EVER answer my questions
about child abuse on Jersey and his failure to act on it.
You are assimilated and now part of the Borg called Nu Lab
I’ll take a look at this, later, when I am back home.
We should take a moment to remind ourselves of the importance of streams, courtesy of Ghostbusters:
Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
Back on point, I read somewhere recently of a news organisation “holding back” breaking news for its 7pm show. Amazing!
It is not unusual for news outlets to sit on a story for months, if it serves their agenda. Look at the climategate email and code leak. The BBC had that for a month before the blogosphere broke the story, and yet they still refused to cover it, until the BBC’s editorial independence looked very dodgy indeed and they were forced into covering it.
Most of Fleet Street would abide by this gentlemen’s agreement (depending on the story, of course) Now though, the blogosphere means that news cannot be sat upon as easily. The news leaks out through the blogosphere and into mainstream consciousness. It just does not become “official” news, or by extension, “real” until it is reported in the mainstream media.
The trouble is, the mainstream media have been caught blatantly lying about reality so many times now, that they have very limited credibility at all. From WMD, through the war on terror, to climate change, the mainstream media has been entirely misleading in the information it reports.
‘Mainstream’ is a moveable feast and simply a word most often used by those with a partisan political agenda to pejoratively label anything they don’t like.
Almost all the News channels and Newspapers have a net presence, blogs and can feature twitter and youtube pieces.
So are they no longer mainstream ?
Likewise bloggers routinely copy and paste from Newspapers as well as forays into their own broadcasting and using youtube and other Media clips.
So are those bloggers mainstream ?
compare and contrast:
BBC ITV SKY Channel 4
with
David Icke, Whatreallyhappened, informationclearinghouse, rense
Which is “mainstream” and which is not?
Simple comparison.
Which was correct on Iraq’s WMD and the charge that Blair, Bush et al lied to go to war?
Which of the above are climate change alarmists, and which are climate change realists?
The former are mainstream, the latter are not, but the latter have been correct on these things more often than the former.
he’s right
it’s not mainstream to claim to be the son of God and talk about shapeshifting Lizard people
it’s bonkers
There was a huge dig at lobby journalists there
If the slides are the bullet points, are you going to make available the rest of the spiel around your presentation?
What and undermine appearance fees? Nah.
Without it, how can we add constructive criticism?
and destructive.
For someone that hosts a blog full of “bar room banter” and very little in the way of anything newsworthy and whose coup of the week was spotting a lookalike without even winning a tenner from private eye this all seems a bit self important
I take that back. Just looked at the slideshow. Its rubbish
and yet this is one of the most successful and influential political blogs in the country? Yeah Tube thumper, you have a strange view of who is qualified to label what Guido does as rubbish.
I know many bloggers who would readily give their right arms to have the readership that Guido has, or the influence on events that Guido has. Let alone both!
Thumper no doubt keeps his right arm strong and free for the left-handed web sites.
Was able to look at it, anyway. I liked it. It is not rubbish. It is a fairly succinct look at what news is. Guido, time for a book on this theme, I think?
Any road up, how will Brown spin the news that he plans to emasculate our armed forces and still keep them fighting in Afghanistan, etc?
Brown to slash the heart out of our armed forces. Is THIS what he means by ‘radical policies? Plus, nobody trusts Ali C.
The whole ‘Army will need to be cut by 20%’ story was teed up yesterday with the ‘revelation’ that 20% of the armed forces were not in good enough physical shape to actually be deployed.
Join the dots – those will be the 20% we’ll be cutting.
Without adequate compensation either. Either that, or someone has a large enough military adventure planned to kill off said 20%.
I could not possibly comment on that though.
It won’t. Why? Well, in sensible circles, it would. However, we ARE talking Brown and Silent Bob Ainsworth, here.
They’ll take BOTH sets of cuts, and pat themselves on the back for saving double the amount!
They will just have to try and line the Taliban up one behind the other and shoot the bullet through the lot of them.
Churchill would be spinning in his grave.
Please accept a full refund and fuck off.
Funny!
I agree! Bloomin’ cheek!
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, get her!
don’t be stupid
bloggers are the most important people in the world
that’s why Andy Coulson couldn’t even be bothered to meet them
he knows how crucial they are to the election
well plenty of arse lickers here arent there. And fancy Guido getting all huffy. Oh well here is a little pressy for you. I love this blog but still thought the slideshow was amatuerish unlike my cartoons which a very professional.
http://political-graffiti.blogspot.com/
Not licking arse. Just telling it how I saw it.
don’t give up the day job
don’t even bother
Whooooosh! /looks up
News Stream killed the News Cycle – On ya Bike!
Video killed the Radio Star
Video klled the Radio Star
But the news river will forever be impeded by the shopping trolleys of {oh i give up}
The news canal is getting a damn good dredging?
Oh deary me I can hear the NuLabor trolls rushing back to der Bunker for guidance on how to handle this one Guido – a bit too high brow for your average deep fried Mars bar addict!
Video killed the radio star.
I killed cock robin.
With my bow and arrow.
I thought newspapers had been vanity publications for decades. Even the great socialist Cap’n Bob was reduced to looting the pension fund to pay for his ongoing expenses.
Just like the Maximum Imbecile.
I’ve been wondering who breaks real news these days?
The Red Tops are only interested in tits “celebs” and the “qualities” are dieing on their arses. Would Watergate have been the cause celeb it was, now?
It suits the rich powerful not have their undies washed in public.
If you filter out the uninformed and political bullshit from blogs there may be a future but it has to be on a knife edge.
As one who loved (only as an amateur) the old hot metal newspapers and everything about them, I find what you say very sad, but if at all off the mark not much. But it’s like the 450 theatres that closed in 18 months when ITV started. There’s no way back.
News stream. Sounds to me like the stream of the screened flow of sewage shortly after it arrives in the sewage farm.
Oh look a piece of sweetcorn.
Don’t forget, 19, sewage farm workers grown some really good tomato plants.
A very fine definition of journalism. Thank you.
if thats ‘the best of’..god help watching the worst
Thanks for posting this Guido, purely from the point of view of my looking into to starting a political blog too, it is interesting to see the analysis of the field and the soil onto which I may be about to dump my manure. Hopefully something may grow from it.
You mean we punters have even shorter memories than……..what was the question?
Good point.
Memories will become a thing of the past.
Mammories.
Guido is spot on.
News is the stuff that governments, countries, companies, rich people and people who think they are important don’t want to see in print and in pictures.
There are plenty of literate, not poor, baby boomers who will gladly and freely work at embarrassing these ‘institutions’.
Keep on going – but please keep away from the criminal Microsoft
EU’s Neely Krose (spelling?) for ever!
For example I know for a fact that Dick Cheney’s Halliburton was, via its subsidiary, Western Geophysical, working in Libya uninterrupted using rebadged [In Malta] US computers to crunch seismic data all the time US sanctions were in force.
The rebadging involved scratching off ‘Sun’ from the computers and sticking something else over. ‘Stun’ for example.
I know that US citizens were working in Libya exploring for oil and I cannot believe that this was kept entirely secret from top management.
But obviously that would be completely impossible to prove. I mean where on earth would anybody begin to hunt down such a story? And what would be the point now that Dick Cheney has retired to spend more time shooting his hunting pals.
Unfortunately there there seems little correlation between the amount of information disseminated (from whatever source/format) and the extent to which we become better informed as a society. It is the capacity of the individual to assimilate the facts and draw a reasoned conclusion from them which is sadly lacking and this starts in the classroom.
The other teensy problem with the newspapers going out of business is that will only leave Winston Smith and his employers at the BBC in business.
If you are tearing yor hair out at the thought that the Maximum Imbecile is only being sustained at 24% in the polls by a relentless onslaught of misinformation and outright lies pumped out by the BBC can you imagine what the fuckers will be capable of without any dissenting mainstream media.
The mistake we make here on this blog is that we assume that the other 30,000,000 voters are as clued up on the economic clusterfuck and the Maximum Imbeciles hand in creating it. But many folk are entirely taken in by the government’s belt-fed BBC narrative that it’s all the banks and the yanks fault.
The BBC narrative is all: Poor old Brown and the UK, just merrily borrowing 4% of GDP a year in the ‘boom’ when suddenly ‘wallop’ – out of the blue – the yanks just realise that they’ve been lending too much money to morons in Buttfuck, Montana and so, just out of spite, or as a bit of collateral damage they decided to stop lending money to us in the UK too.
Yeah. That’ll be it. It’s all the yanks fault.
And yet this obvious lie is mainstream BBC output. It ‘started in America’. All we need to to to ‘fix’ it is get the banks lending more money and get house prices creeping up again and our economy will be back on track. Look at Fred Goodwin. Don’t look at the government.
I won’t miss the newspapers although I enjoy The Telegraph’s crossword but if the newspapers go top the wall I want the BBC squished right up against the same fucking wall. For balance.
damn right – all the more reason to scrap the BBC.
More independent channels paying their own way please.
Like ITN then?
No mate. The way forward is to make the BBC more democratic.
When it comes to foreign news , the calibre of journalists appears to be declining. Very few really understand the countries they are reporting from, such as MarK Tulley who was born in India , brought up there and speaks some the languages and above isrespected and trusted. If a reporter was to cover Afghanistan properly hwo many languages would they have to speak – Pushtu, Urdu, Dari , Farsi,Uzbek , Arabic ? How many languages spoken in S Africa- Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu , Tamil ?
Reporters also need to now the history, geography, religion, economics and culture of the country. When one sees reporters in different countries in a few days how much information can they obtain ? Probably it is the local stringer who has the information because they speak the languages, so why not why not make them the bloggers?
Quite right. There was a bod on Saturday morning talking about dealing with Afghans. He related the days before the Great Game and how we Brits. used Aghanistan as a buffer state to protect India. Highly insightful. The Yank might take note.
It’s not just the news that is important but the views of the readers that we all find so compelling. A lot of it may well be “bar room banter” as Tube Thumper says above but it’s also fun. There are few Newspaper web sites that allow multiple comments and likewise the best of the read is in the comments not the article itself. Funny how most of them are so called right wing too. The fact is that the left wing newspapers, blogs and MSM, particularly the BBC, are terrified of feedback and have little time for it. It isn’t on the agenda to get peoples views unless they fit with the socialist ideology of this dictatorial and incompetent government.
What is news anyway but some other guy’s (no pun intended Guido) point of view on an event. The blogosphere allows us all to have an opinion and quite right to. The next step is government by the people of the people through the net, rather than by a bunch of yes men chosen by a closed political
party selection process, or worse appointed and arrogant Lords & Ladies not elected by anyone. And it’s coming faster than the elite robber barons and champagne socialists think.
You are part of something much bigger than you imagine Guido.
Totally agree, with all that CF, but there is a danger of it being stopped in its tracks, only a slight danger at the moment, but I still feel a slight unease (because power aint gonna like it) about just how much influence sites like this could have. Control of the ‘mode of production’ and all that.
Fair play though to the Grauniad and ‘Comment is Free’. You can vent your fury at left-wing jackasses in person and they generally let it stand. Except for that supercillious arsehole Monbiot and his global warming cult.
no he imagines he is much bigger than you could imagine
Well said, 45, I agree.
Oh dear God, apart from everything else – and I do mean everything – ‘media’ is a plural. Correct your slide show.
People in glass houses should not throw stones mate.
I looked at your blog, poor punctuation and grammar abounds.
You’re just an old medium.
What’s wrong with that?
I knew you’d say that.
bender
I’m a happy medium.
but what about in our time, dessert island discs, great lives, the archers, gardners question time. mastermind, university challenge. who else would satisfy our need for some culture rather than buublegum for the ears and eyes
Nasty Easters or Filthy Wossy or £150 a year taxes or Robot Robinson?
I was a bit pissed off then the 6 o’clock news was used as an advertising medium for some shit programme later (can’t remember what).
This must be stopped.
They’re largely produced by independents these days – have an Archers channel and pay for it if you like: I know I would.
I saw the breakdown of costs of the BBC fairly recently, and it might have said that most of it goes on BBC1. If the BBC was like odd and worthy “PBS” it might only cost £50 a year.
Of course even for that, you don’t NEED 1970′s comedians to look at falling down buildings, but it helps if you want to make money selling pointless DVDs for the christmas market.
what nostalgia……..have another cup of cocoa and one of nell’s hobnobs
No 6 month enquiry into it’s future by unheard of Sir This That and the Other by you then eh Johny 7?
I don’t suppose you want the job of the enquiry chairperson then?
It would be good for pig farmers though.
Brilliant!
This will be the first election where Twitter and blogging will have an effect. The stage managed stunts arranged by the main parties and lapped up by the lobby scum like Toenails, Toilets and and Sir Shite will be pulled apart by bloggers and ordinary members of the public.
We all know that the lobby fodder scum often don’t report things that happen on the stump for fear of being shut out of the ‘team’ but bloggers have no fear or pay masters.
What I want to know from Guido is are there any plans to do any live webcasts so we can hear real debate and not the shite churned out by the MSM?
The BBC won’t be able to get away with the leftie bias it has done in previous elections. Bloggers will be able to report the FACTS and publish documents and photographs that the BBC won’t.
The BBC will always edit things to put Labour in a good light and the Tories a bad one. The party who embraces the online media will be the one that gets its message out best. We’ve already seen the power of the likes of Facebook with the xmas No1 battle and the Wootton Baset protests, add in Youtube, Twitter and bloggers like Guido and the BBC will have to be very careful.
I ain’t go no bike…dooh
[...] Il succo è che Twitter non è giornalismo e che i “cicli di notizie” sono stati sostituiti dai “flussi di notizie”. Per chi volesse leggersi gli appunti di Guido, basta cliccare qui. [...]
zuck off
Hahahahahaha – can’t believe you used powerpoint. OFSTED would have ripped you a new arsehole.
The BBC, again.
Nick (there’s no hurricane coming) Robinson is running a trail on Radio 4.
The trail asks what the political process might be to stop child benefit for the middle classes. Not, how can the government ensure a fairer distribution of of child benefit, but how we target the middle classes and get away with it.
What a tw@.
Astonishing how sticky the ‘mincing up an feeding to pigs’ meme has become, is it not?
And how sticky the ‘d’ key can be.
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Academics sometimes use persistent and countercyclical unprofitable enterprise activity as a simple proxy for the shadow economy. Sometimes, there’s more to play for than just vanity.
[...] Guido Fawkes noted recently, we are moving away from a news system where stories are broken usually by common [...]