smorgasbord-design

I rarely buy a Sunday paper but today I picked up The Observer. That in itself shows how little I have come to care about the overweight £2 supplement-fest of traditional Sabbath newsprint. Irrevocably damaged by the packaging of throwaway DVDs and the cellophane-wrapped glossies that contain 3^rd rate cultural reviews and only smatterings of the kind of reportage that I used to find compelling over a lazy breakfast in Kent.

Inside today’s Observer was a lazy little piece of Twitter bashing by Barbara Ellen. A theme that’s been repeated in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of late. The general opinion goes that Twitter, and by implication almost any (micro)-blogging service, is a window on nothing more than banality, a product of the narcissistic age. Much of the blame is levelled here at celebrity Twitterers, the journalists taking great delight in selecting the most trivial output and demonstrating this as typical of the worth of the medium. At this point it becomes abundantly clear that many of these critics have not actually used Twitter in any way like that which more broad-minded individuals do.

Imagine taking a phial of water from the Thames, glancing at the muddy result and proclaiming the Thames itself boring, mundane. This is in-effect what comment like this is doing, Twitter is a stream, a veritable river of information that is nothing more than a conduit for the Zeitgeist. If you don’t like what’s being said then you don’t much care for the lives we lead for this is them, laid bare, broadcast. Take, for example the counter analogy, does one mundane and trivial piece in The Observer reflect the printed press?

Stephen Fry, whom Ms. Ellen invites to “hang [his] noble head in shame”, has the extent of following on Twitter he has not because of Jeeves & Wooster or Lord Melchett but because Stephen embodies the internet in its current form. He embraces dialogue, real-time output and the genuine excitement of the accessible, switched-on media. To compare his output with that of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s is not really comparing like with like, again it is akin to comparing a vacuous piece in London Lite with The Guardian; both are disseminated by printed press ergo they must they be the same?

But where I think Ms. Ellen’s focus settles is on the apparent hypocrisy of the individuals who bemoan invasions of privacy and liberty but are prepared to bare-all on Twitter; revealing their locations, itineraries and candid personal snaps of their lives. The difference here, Barbara, is that they have chosen to do this. If they are happy to take their self-publicity on which they depend into their own hands and many, many thousands are prepared to engage and converse with them in that regard who are we to criticise?

Later in the self-same paper I read a piece on the demise of MySpace (though it is perhaps over-played) and – in the way that when something vexes you it seems to be in every newspaper, bulletin and water-cooler conversation – it puts me in mind of other pieces I’ve consumed about the end of Friends Reunited and the apparent morbidity of the regional press. Clearly we are in tumultuous times. Consumers are consuming in a bewilderingly fluid manner. As fast as we all try and keep up stars are being born and going supernova with alarming pace. The only trend which runs concurrent in all this is the trend for digital.

Digital allows us all to be publishers and yet, as Demi Moore’s Twitter output has perhaps illustrated, this does not mean that we should. Or at least, that we need to sound the death knell for the traditional media big-guns. On Friday night I watched a superb new documentary series on BBC One (”Adventures In War Sea and Ice“)  which teamed Sir Ranulph Fiennes with Robin Knox-Jonston and John Simpson and tasked them with experiencing the others’ challenging line-of-work. In this inaugural episode, Simpson dragged his cohorts through the inestimable dangers of war-torn Afghanistan in the search of news. What it did perhaps illustrate to me was that John Simpson, carefully skilled orator as he may be, doesn’t actually do much more than collate opinion and rebroadcast it as his comment and insight. This is not to downplay his learned contributions and his ability to sort the wheat from the chaff but in simple terms he does no more than any of us citizen publishers do and thus it comes down to a matter of trust.

Trust is a theme taken up by Nick Cohen in his piece “Who would you rather trust – the BBC or a blogger” itself a response to Clay Shirky’s output “Here Comes Everybody”. Nick’s central theme appears to be that we can trust the (paid) hack more often than we can trust the blogger. On the basis of Simpson’s editing re-telling of his interviewee’s statements I’m not convinced that’s entirely the case. He argues that reporters of this ilk have “earned the right to be believed”. How? By attending a journalism course and spending a few years on the local rag being paid the minimum wage for writing pieces about the County Fair? I simply can’t concur especially when the unfiltered immediacy of a picture posted on Twitter or a video blog from the site of an atrocity demonstrates a vivid humanity that a hastily-scrambled satellite link-up from the rooftop of a distant hotel can never match.

There will always be a place for quality journalism and apocalyptic fears that camera crews won’t be dispersed to capture the stories, display a naivety that somehow citizen journalism and locally-sourced content won’t have an enormous part to play. Because the BBC truck hasn’t rolled into the township does not mean that BBC-affiliated bloggers, editors and analysts cannot take that content and demonstrate their value by producing from it a coherent, insightful and professional piece of news. The BBC’s role will continue to be one of aggregation, sourcing the news from individuals on the ground and overlaying the comment and impartiality for which it is famous. The difference is that the source of this news is increasingly unlikely to be a BBC employee with an expense account, a Marks & Spencer suit and a background in BBC Radio Cumbria.