Thursday 1 December 2011

Technology to blame for the street of shame?

When I finally put pixel to plastiscreen over the Leveson inquiry I took the view that maybe things are different today. But I have thought longer and harder and now take a different view. . I still weep and cringe with shame; still ponder what on earth has happened to what we charmingly thought of as a profession. But then I wondered; is it really so different?
Maybe it is just the technology that has changed our behaviour. We can do now what we would have done then, so we do?
Back when I started out as a journalist in 1959 in a dusty old office in Hornsey, north London struggling to master a decrepit Royal upright, horizontal strike typewriter there was a one-liner doing the rounds. "To the average journalist ethics is a county north of Kent..." Not funny really, now I think about it.
Journalists were already pretty low in public esteem. My school howled with anguish at my career choice. My father - a London copper - was seriously concerned. And I was the second of his sons to take the devil's silver. When my later-to-be-wife told her head teacher her plans to join her local paper she said to her mother: "Mrs Smith, you might as well let her go on the street!"
I worked my way to Fleet Street (before I left the job) and I did indeed learn some dodgy ways to operate.
I learned how to blag information. Direct lies were rarely necessary; an innocent voice and a modicum of charm was enough. Hey presto, an ex-directory phone number.
I learned to doorstep. A charming sympathy, some soothing words and you were in. You left with a treasured picture of the deceased/victim/alleged perpetrator.
I knew ho to block a call box line so my copy got to the office ahead of the competition. I learned to read upside down and back to front so I could get what it actually said in the police Occurrences Book, court register etc. I learned to write in my pocket so the victim did not know they were on the record. And more.
Along the way I knew that direct bribery was rare but it did happen and the Soho police scandals among others proved the media was not above bribery and corruption. Yet even so it was mainly either between rogues either side of the tracks or in the search for corruption in public office.
Back at the ranch, even in Fleet Street, if a picture came in showing an unfortunate pose of an innocent person, however famous, it would be binned or at worst filed against stormier times. And only politicians stood the risk of facial postures that matched their words. Even then some degree of compassion was usually shown.
We did use some pretty hard-bitten agencies - the famous or infamous FSNA among them (those who know, will know). And, true at Heathrow, agency hacks would trail stars and wannabes through the terminal (just the one terminal and mostly just the one hack). But mostly they were at least able to walk steadily, not dodge and dash for the exits with hounds in hot pursuit.
And editors did set standards. We were expected to have decent notes and be able to back them, to check vital facts and, if we did not know but it was a reasonable guess we were expected to say so.
You could never have got away with a strange and unusually large item on your expenses - no managing editor would sign it without his boss's OK! The diarist who worked 300 yards off Fleet Street and got away for a while charging a taxi back from the Wig and Pen IN Fleet Street was found out (we reckoned that after lunch at the Wig a taxi was his only certain way of getting back to the ranch!).
So, by the mid 70s I was looking for different way to use my limited talent as a writer and crossed the tracks to Public Relations. Still not what my mum would have called 'a real job' but strangely more honest. After all, everyone knew now what my agenda really was.
Today I begin to wonder whether technology has more to do with what we see at Leveson than a worsening of moral standards.
Back in the day of no motor-drive the snappers task was to get a GOOD picture and not waste valuable film that would waste time being devved. The motor drive gave the chance to take the shot between the good ones.
Then came digital and wasting film was a thing of the past. A brief survey of the multitide of frames and the embarrassing knicker moment was on page three.
Couple this with motor bikes and you can chase you quarry to a kill; literally sometimes.
Then comes the computer, the internet, web sites, mobile phones. Anything is possible. The move from simple blagging to wholesale hacking is but a step. The change from good taste to indecent intrusion a mere millisecond. No need to doorstep; with a bit of real hacking you can be inside their voice mails, their hard drives - everywhere.
And the vast array of opportunities to be 'seen', to be 'famous' to be a 'celebrity' means there are ever more candidates to be intruded upon, scandalised scandalously. A slip of a tweet, a chump on a facebook, a nude on a tube - so much to compete with the paparazzi and the hack that they have to be really inventive now.
So here we are today with the reality that merely being famous is enough to unleash the dogs of war on you. Speaking out of turn when your are famous will get you hunted down and pilloried. And even become the victim of actual lies and invention. Never mind the hacking, utterly illegal anyway. This goes far deeper.
So shame on them and shame on me and shame on all of us. They do it, we buy it.
Hate to say it but it is time for legally backed self-regulation. Yes, I do not want a regulated media; not in a world where special interest groups already have too much power. But newspaper and periodicals are already licensed.
So let's turn the editor's code into the articles of agreement to get a license. And make breaches punishable by removing that licence.
And then make it that only licensed publications will be VAT free or in anyway protected by the newspaper libel laws. Hit them in the pocket whatever other penalty they may face. One strike and you are out even?
Meanwhile, I still say there are a few senior hacks starring at Leveson who are looking good for a while at her majesty's pleasure - and I don't mean the theatre in Haymarket but the one down Pentonville way.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Facebook faces up and marks the spot

Facebook owns up and a million bloggers dive to the keyboards and Ipads. Mea culpa says Mark and about time too. http://preview.tinyurl.com/d7qcnkb
Like the rest I could not resist a comment. My take is the same as it has always been when our beloved internet demonstrates that the problem is the human being not the interface, or inYERface as it tends to become.
Problem is that each new technology creates its own monsters because that's the nature of the human condition. The invention of fire led to the first home burning down! Wall art includes pornography just as mass printing, the television, video and the internet have done. And each event initially dwarfed the benefits and threatened the development. Even one to one comms like the telephone allowed heavy breathers!
So with the internet. When Mark Zuckerburg added functional inter-mail to an interactive web site he took the nascent social media into new territory. And he and his people made some silly errors along the way that could have scuppered an idea that, as it matures, increasingly looks a Good Thing. What was wrong was that it took a Federal Court to make them accept that you cannot take people for a ride. But hey, look at the UK and Leveson - Mucky Murdoch actually killed the NoW in the mistaken belief that it would all go away!
So good on yer Mark. Now, there are a few other things you could sort out. Like ensuring the conent is a bit more moderated so innocent people do not end up being villified by anonymous monsters.


Tuesday 29 November 2011

Cat stolen from under car!

OK, wait for it. The latest theft de jour is stealing your catalytic converter to get the platinum catalyser in it! Oh yes it is.
My daughter went to her car this week, started it up, thought 'bag of nails this morning'. Then the penny dropped (or rather £200 quid plus) - someone had crawled under the car and snipped the cat box out with a pair of shears.
So be aware, your early getaway may have been preceded by an earlier getaway!

Monday 28 November 2011

So many choices - so little broadband!

Today, yet another rural broadband solution has popped up with little warning. This one is on page 13 of the EDP and has Norfolk Rural Community Council ( see http://www.norfolkrcc.org.uk/wiki/index.php/About) as part of the project.
It is a wireless network solution from a company called ThinkingWISP (see http://www.thinkingwisp.co.uk/) and is also backed by Anglian Farmers ( see http://www.angliafarmers.co.uk/content/home.asp).
It is similar to the solution we have been developing for Lyng, using a wireless transmission from Norwich Airport to a mast at Marsham, north west of the city. It is planned to serve an area around from Erpingham in the north to Drayton,south and from Reepham west to Colitishall east.
Service will be between 3.5Mbs and 13 with data limits between 10 and unlimited. Prices are from £15.99 a month to a business plus service at £50.99. Subscribers will need a suitable antenna and installation as per our set up (no costs is indicated) and the service is encrypted and asynchronous. So it has more potential than ours.
Its sudden appearance without previously showing on the radar is similar to the diocesan project called WIspire. This denies any criticism of a backward looking church by taking a fat fibre pipe to a church at Spixworth (north of Norwich) and then developing a fully meshed wireless network using church spires. It gives ley lines a whole new meaning!
What gets me is that these projects seem to have deliberately kept under wraps. Yet the young CEO of the NRCC says they have 500 expressions of interest already. They got £37,000 funding from Defra and the EU.
I strongly believe that this piecemeal process, of which we seem to be an unwilling part, is not in the best interests of the community at large. Any one of these projects could go under leaving hundreds back at square one - or, worse not connected at all even to BT.