*Notes from a beach.*

News media want things to be new. They feel inhibited from reporting things unless they have a ‘news hook’, whether or not the information would be of value.

Because of this focus on the new, memory is devalued. The ultimate logical extension of this is 24hr news, which has all the time in the world to report, but only the memory of a goldfish with which to do it.

The problem for citizens is that we need to maintain our memory of what people have said and done in the past. This isn’t anything too arduous to ask. We all do it naturally in our private lives. Our opinions of our neighbours, friends and fellow workers are formed and coloured by our memory of everything they’ve ever done or said.

We are all effortlessly maintaining private biographies of hundreds of people we know in our heads.

Their latest actions are always being assessed in the light of that history.

As social animals, we rely on these reputations to help us decide whether to trust a statement or agree to a suggestion.

But this is alien to how the world of our news media works. In that world, every morning the past is erased and the media react to that day’s words and deeds by public figures as though we didn’t know them.

Liars are suddenly asked to give their honest opinions of others. Placemen and stooges are once again independent commentators. Ministers reverse themselves and their new positions are treated as though as credible as the first set.

For the Irish media, Songs of Innocence never become the Songs of Experience because experience requires that meaning be drawn from events over time.

Meaning, for the Irish media, is a heresy.

Meaning is equated to a political position.

Meaning, experience and reality are all rejected as being the same as bias.

For citizens with a memory, the question of how our country got here is not a difficult question. The hard question is how we get elsewhere.

But while our media keep asking the first question and wilfully forgetting the answers, they’ll just keep getting in our way.

Belmullet
Originally uploaded by Conor Lawless

During August of this year I wrote a blizzard of letters for clients of McGarr Solicitors who were worried about their crab fishing pots. As it turned out, they had good reason to be worried.

Traditionally, August is the middle of the Long Vacation, and therefore ought to be a sleepy time for law firms. August was not a sleepy time for either ourselves or Shell E&P Ireland’s lawyers.

The story was not well covered in the national newspapers and had a number of dimensions which were simply missed in the reports which did make it to print. The television news is hopeless for complicated stories such as this. But two news sources did stand out for informing their public. Firstly, the Mayo News made the effort to give its readers a proper overview of events. That linked report, and its accompanying photograph, will tell you more about the real meaning of events than any other paper’s entire output on the topic.

The medium to come up trumps, as so often, was good old fashioned wireless. Both the local radio station Midwest Radio and Pat Kenny’s programme on RTE Radio 1 went further than just reporting events as a clash between equal and opposite forces. They let people to tell their own stories- rather than just reading press releases from the parties who could afford to pay people to write press releases for them.

I’m in Kilkenny today, at Podcamp Ireland. It is a very diverse group of people- more demographically spread than any other gathering I’ve been to.

I was talking about using the PaperRound methodology to teach media literacy, and broader critical thinking, to, mostly, Transition Year Students.

At their suggestion, I’m putting up a set of links to things that I mentioned.

I’ll put up a a longer set of notes later on.

PaperRound Wiki

MediaForum

MediaForum’s Media Literacy Conference

Irish Film Institute’s Moving Images Transition Year Module.

Back in November 2006, when we undertook our first Paper Round analysis, one of the very first stories I read was a front-pager, in a “quality” daily, which purported to alert the nation to the problem of employee fraud but was based entirely on quotes from a man who solved this self-same problem for a living. This story was free (I think) advertising, deceiving the reader by masquerading – as the main front page story, no less – as news.

Today, on the Luas, I came across something similar on the Metro front page. The story, headed, “Sick Staff Caught Out On Facebook”, claimed that “two thirds of Irish workers have had their knuckles rapped after employers discovered their real reasons for skiving by snooping on their pages on the social networking site”. Various other factoids were related in the following paragraphs, all provided to Metro by one Alan Price, of Peninsula Ireland, “a leading employment-law firm”.

This style of story has become familiar to me since I first encountered it; the platonic ideal would be a headline “Hard Water May Cause Cataclysmic Washing Machine Nightmare” over a story whipped up out of quotes from “leading hard water solutions experts, Calgon“. It can be thrown together in about five minutes, out of whatever press release has last arrived into the hack’s email account, and requires no reporting or writing whatsoever. This particular story, with its catchy reference to “The Facebook”, which The Kidz seem to like so much, was a natural for the Metro. Distressingly, it was a natural for the Irish Times and Irish Examiner too.

I am long past being surprised that the broadsheets’ abase themselves before every “consultant” or “expert” with a few statistics that he just pulled out of his hole. Still, today was a new low, because, as more alert readers will have noticed right away, the statistics are absolute nonsense. That nobody in either newspaper had the basic intelligence to notice this, or worse, that they did notice it, and went to print anyway is a depressing notion, if not a surprising one. We are being asked to believe that two thirds of the Irish workforce, which numbers 2,108,500 according to the CSO, not only have Facebook accounts, but allow their employers access to their profiles. Not only that, but these people, all 1,412,695 of them, have all been mitching off from work. Further, every single one of them was caught and disciplined by their employer after a crafty look at their Facebook accounts. To which I reply, with some confidence: “No, you idiots, no they weren’t”, adding, in a weary but affronted tone “what sort of fools do you take us for?”

The story is untrue on its face, but for the sake of completeness, Facebook themselves claim 307,040 Irish users. Though I am no mathematician, that seems to me quite a bit less than the one and a half million odd skivers cited by the “leading employment law firm” in the story. The “leading employment law firm” bit is clearly another unquestioning cut-and-paste from the same press release, because according to the Law Society, there is no such law firm as Peninsula Ireland. A quick google shows that Peninsula specialise in surveys with patently unbelievable findings. Earlier this summer, they announced that “three out of four Irish men in the workplace experience sexual harassment from women, but are too afraid to complain to their employer”. The press was happy to print that for them too. Here’s their website. Bookmark it, and save yourself the price of a newspaper. You’ll still feel dirty inside, but at least you won’t get ink on your hands as well.

Co. Meath, 1 day after the Lisbon
Treaty passes, we presume

Originally uploaded by Editor_Tupp

As Cian on Irishelection pointed out, the Irish Independent yesterday printed a story on the odder anti-Lisbon material available. This story hung on the inclusion of two images from the Flickr pool I had set up earlier in the week. Both images were licenced under a Creative Commons licence, allowing their use for non-commercial purposes as long as the owners were given attribution.

Unattributed use by the Indo breached that licence, of course. The paper has now offered a modest 3 figure sum to Daragh O’Toole, who contacted the paper looking for payment for his image.

Today, the Irish Times, similarly attracted by the striking visuals the story offered ran with the image of Dustin submitted by the publicity-shy Jazz Biscuit and my Mushroom cloud image.

My Mushroom cloud image is more generously licenced than the pictures used by the Independent yesterday- I allow for even commercial reproduction if I’m credited as the photographer. No such credit is given and the story accompanying the pictures makes no mention of the IrishElection.com site, where these pictures was first publicised.

This is a story of newspapers’ lack of respect for the contribution to the national discussion made by Irish bloggers, Flickr photographers etc.

These images were swiped because nobody cared enough about the rights and preferences of their owners to seek permission to use them for a reasonable fee. In the case of my picture, above, they need only have given me a credit. Now I’ll be invoicing the Irish Times for the unauthorised use of my image at a punative rate.

Swiping things from the internet without acknowledging their source may look like a cheap way to fill column inches but as more of their readers become the originators of the lifted material, it carries a very high price.

Yesterday, Feargal Keane reported on RTE Radio 1′s Drivetime that the Lisbon Refendum Commission were spending large amounts of money on advertising on Facebook and Bebo. Keane described the journalistic reaction to this at the press conference as one of guffawing and barely controlled mirth, which sounds about right. This is why young people in Ireland don’t buy newspapers.

Meanwhile in the States tonight, the political blogs are all abuzz because John Edwards is endorsing Barack Obama. In the buildup, more than one blogger writing for print publications noted the following:

“What’s Wendy Button, Edwards’s longtime speechwriter, been doing lately? I hear she’s been writing a secret speech… (Her facebook profile includes this entry for 3pm: “Wendy just finished writing the speech.”)”

In one case, the journalists not only speak the same language as their web-literate audience, but have found innovative ways of using that language in news reporting. In the other case, the journalists don’t understand the language or respect the audience, so they chuckle their way to obsolescence. This internet the kids are all talking about, it’ll never catch on, will it?

Richard Delevan highlights a story from the Sunday Business Post yesterday- Estate Agents accused of supplying false sales prices

It reports that the Irish Time’s Property Editor, Orna Mulcahy, wrote to Estate Agents who were suppling her with sale prices when the numbers being given were be sufficiently fantastic to embaress her journalistic mores.

It is the Irish Times who have been left looking rather foolish.

As Ms. Mulcahy put it herself on Morning Ireland today.

I’ve written about this before, and will be coming back to this later this week.

If you’d like to know what on earth possessed us to do the Paper Round review of newspapers, you can now read an interview with me, Fergal and Copernicus on the Irish Left Review. The other two guys have excellent and thoughtful answers.

While you’re looking at Irish Reviews, the Irish Pirate Review has been pumping out sea-going goodness for the last few days. I am most amused by it.

Around midnight last night I started to recieve a series of bounced Mail Undelivered messages from lots and lot of email addresses in Russia.

This was odd, because I didn’t email anyone in Russia.

It turns out that my main email address smcgarr{AT}tuppenceworth DOT ie has been the victim of a Joe Job- that is to say it is being used as the fake ‘reply to’ email address by spammers. So today my Inbox has been deluged in bounced ads for mickey pills (I’m guessing) in Cyrillic. Many of them include a telephone number.

In recent hours my enterprising Eastern Alter Ego has branched out into selling Maddona Albums and Replica Bulgari watches. I would like to say the following to anyone who has received one of these messages.

People of Russia. I am your friend. I have no Mickey Pills, fake watches or Aging 80s popstrels to sell you, nor would I try to do so if I had.

I have contacted Blacknight, who look after my mail server and they have set me on the path to health again as follows

Unfortunately there is little we can do about this. Your email account is safe, i.e. nobody logged into your account to create this mail. The headers of the email have been modified to make it appear the mail came from you.

The only impact we can have on this is to add an SPF record to this domain. This would list all the mail servers that are valid for mail from your domain to come from. If the mail comes from any other mail server, it would be rejected.

Hopefully this will allow things to return to normal. In the meantime, please do not point your missiles at tuppenceworth.

PS Is it mad to think that this might be related to the vanishing Paper Round wiki?

Last week I noticed something peculiar- The Paper Round’s raw coverage (which was presented in the form of a wiki to allow for interested parties to add their views) had vanished.

If I go to the Paper Round front page now I get

MyWiki has a problem

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

(Can’t contact the database server: Access denied for user ‘smcgarr_i909mwi’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) (localhost))

I don’t know if this is the result of something I have done, or something that has been done to us. I do know that it has happened in the last few weeks, as I accessed it recently. I’ve checked, and the database is still there.

If anyone has any ideas on getting the goodies back online, they would be very welcome.

I’ve written before about Feedjournal, which takes RSS feeds and automatically generates a newspaper-like pdf from them.

Well, it’s now emerged from Beta testing. It even collects and prints the images accompanying the stories. Another step towards the magical personalised Newsbox.

(Pity you can’t load your Feeds in as an OPML file, instead of one by one)

Plagiarism is back in blog discussions again after another apparent piece of fat-fingered filching from Talbot street’s Indo group.

I won’t be taking quite the same line as the McGarr Solicitors blog (as it takes in such lofty matters as whether the People’s Republic of China has managed the previously unconsidered feat of plagiarising the Moon)

Rather, I thought I’d address (from my sickbed) the more mundane question of what you can do if you find your own work being passed off under someone else’s name.

The answer lies in what the work was worth to you.

There is no crime of plagiarism. Try to report an instance to the police if you don’t believe me. [UPDATE: TJ points out that in my muddled state I've forgotten S144 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, which does say that a person who make available in the course of a business trade or profession "a copy of a work which is, and which he or she knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of the work, shall be guilty of an offence."]So if you wanted to take a legal action (and I raise this as an option only because instances of plagiarism frequently prompt exhortations of legal action from bystanders not on risk) what could you claim?

Well, if you were Redmum, say, and found that your photograph had been taken from Flickr and used on the front page of the Metro daily freesheet you could reasonably expect some form of payment. Indeed payment, though not a published credit, for her work was a happy endingin that case.

But what if you’re put out because your blog words have appeared under a journalist’s name in a newspaper now assembled in Talbot Street?

The problem here is that if you wanted to claim damages they would have to be based on your actual losses (or at least losses you could convincingly argue arise from the event). Now if this article is reproduced, verbatim, in next week’s Evening Fleabite what income or monies have I lost? Sadly, none. I made these words available for free. I’m not selling them to you the reader, so I can hardly claim the copied article has undercut me.

Under these circumstances, all that bloggers have to fall back on to discourage plagiarism is naming and shaming. This has drawbacks.

Firstly, it doesn’t appear to be a major source of shame in many Irish newspapers to have published plagiarised material. Indeed, as this tale suggests, the paper will sometimes react to the information by merely attempting to hide the article from the original author, rather than taking it down and looking into how their reader protection processes failed so dramatically.

There is a secondary problem for a blogger who finds themselves wronged by a journalist from the Independant News & Media Group’s stable of newspapers. This is the open hostility of the O’Reilly family to the internet- and bloggers in particular. It can hardly be a coincidence that the newspaper group whose owners and controllers have the most open contempt for-and hostility towards-bloggers is the one whose writers feel most able to steal from them.

Some quotes from Gavin O’Reilly’s recent speech to the Society of Editors-”The USP of the newspaper of the future [will be] built upon journalistic skills that are not simply a God-given right of someone with attitude sitting in a garage in front of a computer, but rather is a skill that is learned and earned.”
…
“Over the past two years, we have radically restructured our internal work flows… The result is that our journalists are now better focussed on crafting content that truly makes us distinctive”

Crafting content takes time- it’s an artisan approach. Until that distinctive stuff is finished I suppose we’ll all have to make do with the blogswipes.