Robin Brown

EDIT: This literally never worked on any of my blogs. Neat idea, poor execution.

The Guardian has launched a new WordPress plugin that allows self-hosted bloggers to reprint content from newspaper’s website.

The Guardian News Feed plugin is surely designed to act as a direct counterpoint to talk of paywalls and charging for newspaper content and is an extension of the Grauniad’s Open Platform system, which allows people who sign up to access the paper’s massive databanks and develops apps based on it via an API.

There are over 1m articles available published as far back as 1999 available through the plugin, which theoretically looks quite simple, and users can do pretty much anything they want with the articles, so long as they leave the actual content and code alone.

This is pretty much an ultimate expression of the idea of content as online currency – exchanging content, apps or services for traffic, leads and revenue.

In this case, the Guardian content is exchanged for increased traffic, backlinks, harvested data and ad revenues, leading to more exposure, brand equity, SEO juice and cash.

A screenshot of the Guardian News Feed plugin back-end

It’s hard to see a downside for The Guardian. By signing up and republishing articles from the site I had to enter more data about myself and every Guardian article reprinted on my blog gets more backlinks, domain authority and ad clicks for the paper’s website.

Depending on what they do with anchor text and ads, they can probably pull off targeted SEO campaigns and ad campaigns too. Now multiply that by potentially hundreds of thousands of blogs around the world.

In return I get a nifty new toy to play with, potentially higher traffic and – arguably – a little more authority. If I’m clever and use the articles well I could even get a boost in search engines and ad revenues too, if I displayed ads on my blogs.

The exchange is complete, both parties have something of value. It sounds like a win-win situation, and it’s a great way to further leverage the latent value in the Guardian’s article bank, by doing virtually nothing on an ongoing basis.

Already some on Twitter have started to voice their scorn about the plugin. And, really, what we have here is a very clever form of inbound marketing, using the Grauniad’s massive and powerful archive of content – it’s simply leveraging that content to make money in the same way that Murdoch is trying to leverage The Times’ content via a paywall.

Whereas The Times uses content for more explicit transaction – using content as a currency to generate cash directly, the Guardian’s more elegant approach delivers all sorts of other benefits, besides revenues – brand equity, SEO authority, increased engagement – albeit somewhat nebulous and of indeterminate cash value.

But it’s a smart bit of PR too – while everyone was talking about News International’s attempts to place more value on its content by charging for access, The Guardian is throwing its content out to whomever wants to use it; it can be sold as a direct, and opposite, move to that of Murdoch.

Finally, I’d hoped to include an article using the news feed below, but I can’t get it to work – probably something to do with my host I suspect. Which just goes to show that even the simplest, most elegant, ideas can be undermined by a lack of technical nous or user error.

• Go here for instructions and more deetails

As if there were ever any doubt. Today’s front pages from the right-wing newspapers manage to stretch credulity, taste, truth and decency.

It’s in every newspaper editor’s best interests to pick a winning candidate, to maintain the assumption that newspapers are important in deciding the outcome of elections. The option is to buck against that trend to my going off-kilter, like the Guardian this time around, or dig in with sheer bloody-mindedness, like the Daily Mirror.

As expected, there’s the usual roll call of shame from the right-wing tabloids – ranging from the sheer brass neck and wrong-headedness of the Sun’s Obama rip of Cameron to the implication on the front of the Daily Mail that not voting for David Cameron will mean people being burned to death on the streets of the UK.

The Sun’s is by far the most noteworthy, because whoever greenlit that one – presumably bizarre/Bizarre man Dominic Mohan, currently, baffling the editor – has got it so wrong it beggars belief.

Why? Because very few Sun readers will get the reference. Because even the staunchest Tory will not believe the an ideology-free zone like Cameron will really bring anything new to the table. Because the whole thing is an insult to politics, to design, to typography, to paper. It’s truly abysmal.

I expected a typical Sun piece of crap, like Brown’s face in a haggis and GORDON CLOWN wirtten across the top. The sort of childish rubbish we’re apparently all expected to think is hilarious. But the Sun wrongfooted me, by being even worse.

The Mail’s is more insidious, and says much more about the paper’s relationship with its readership. There’s a clear insinuation that unless Cameron gets a strong enough mandate and starts cutting the deficit we’ll all be going to Hell in a handbasket, which uses a picture of someone actually on fire to try and frighten people into following its line. Which pretty much sums up the Mail.

The Express is more prosaic, ramming its message into the sheep-like minds of its readers. Vote Cameron, Brown a disaster, hung parliament a disaster. It’s only a surprise there’s no mention of cancer or Diana in there somewhere. It can barely be thought of as a newspaper any more.

The Telegraph dutifully falls into line with the Tory ‘hope over fear’ nonsense.

The Times is, on the face of it, restrained. There’s even quite a good cartoon, and the whole thing smacks of gravitas. But we all know that the editorial line of the Times is fatally compromised.

The truth is, they’re all compromised. By the lines forced on them by proprietors, by the need to pander to readerships, by the need to achieve a pay-off on back-room deals with media moguls.

This election has been the worst I can remember as far as the right-wing press goes, through their naked partisanship and by neglecting their greater roles as educators and informers.

Things have come to such a head that popular protests against the press were held a week ago. Laura Oliver, on Journalism.co.uk argues that new media may need to fill the objective void left by a partisan media.

The Guardian and Indie have chosen a meek ‘need for PR’ line, which will probably serve well to split the vote. Only the Mirror has come out with any fire in its belly, with a picture of Cameron in his Bullingdon attire.

I think it’s a powerful front page, and there will be some interesting discussions as to where the rights to that image may lie in the future – public domain, public interest? – but it’s still the old tribal drum-beat.

I suppose that an editorial line borne of ideology isn’t really as offensive as one for naked commercial gain, but looking at the selection of paper this morning I just felt depressed.

Depressed that it’s come to this; depressed for the parlous state of journalism in the UK; depressed at the hate and fear-mongering.

The 2010 general election: A willfully stupid, mendacious and depressing election.

Regular readers – there are regular readers, right? – will know that I reserve a special scorn for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free section; a comment and opinion subdirectory that collects viewpoints from across the political spectrum.

In itself, a section like this is laudable. It exposes people to new viewpoints, attitudes and lifestyles that the print version of The Guardian does not. Its strapline is ‘Comment Is Free… but facts are sacred’ – a quote from Grauniad progenitor CP Scott.

It’s a broad church, features some fascinating articles and regularly generates some vigorous debate.

However, I feel that that concept has been somewhat bastardised to create a deliberately provocative and emptily heated section of the website, where drivel like Sarah Palin’s climate change invective is published without comment.

Another recent article on video games relating to rape was similarly witless, and pulled apart by Comment Is Free regulars. And I think that’s the point.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that much of Comment Is Free constitutes link- and flamebait, dog whistling, tail pulling – whatever you want to call it.

It’s like the post on a forum that exists simply to irritate, the equivalent of poking a bee’s nest and running away. In web parlance it’s known as trolling.

It exists to provoke, and provoke it does. There are regularly hundreds of well-informed, well-written and well-argued comments on Comment Is Free posts, coming from many points of view.

Thousands of words of user-generated content, lots of outraged inbound links, lots of return traffic from people keeping tabs on the latest debate.

The Guardian’s site has become a slick SEO machine, as evinced by its URL keyword stuffing and habit of publishing several permutations of the same story, and perhaps a bit too good for its own good.

It’s clever, but it’s a step too far for me. I can’t believe that a lot of Comment Is Free isn’t simply designed to rile up The Guardian’s own readership, the very people who buy the newspaper, in order to generate more copy, links and hits from them.

Is this what happens to a newspaper’s content when too much thought is given to chasing traffic and the holy grail of user-generated content? Is it OK to debase and undermine your moral weight and editorial line in search of more web traffic?

Is the trade-off worth it? Crap, often dishonest, generally lazy, frequently hysterical and badly-structured arguments and articles in exchange for a few more hits, and a bit more cash?

There are other symptoms at other papers – the Indie seems to print a diet of increasingly outlandish lists, while the Torygraph recently printed this beauty, a disingenuous piece of phony conspiracy-theory outrage about Google gaming its own algorithm.

The Telegraph article is breathtaking in its dishonesty, but The Guardian is the worst – a serial offender that sticks two fingers up to its own readership every time it wittingly publishes another bad article.

I’m all for a broad church, I’m all for challenging viewpoints, and I’m all for user interaction – but it’s come to something when the newspaper is the troll.

The news depresses me. But not in the way you might think.

Certainly there is no shortage of terrible things in the world, but it’s the way the public interacts with news that gets me down.

Rather like the way iPods and Spotify can’t fail to homogenise music in the sense that people are less likely to take a punt on a new CD by a band they’ve barely heard, there’s a feature of news reporting on the internet that propels inane, unpleasant or freakish stories to the top of the tree.

The ‘Most commented’, ‘Most read’ or ‘Most emailed’ bars on news pages drive your viewers towards the most valuable or interesting pages on your site and are baited for the casual WILFer. The more people click the higher they get. Things snowball.

This is human nature – the equivalent of sneaking a News of the World (for the tits and gossip) in between the sheets of your weekly Observer (for the sense of moral superiority and cleansing earnestness).

There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s something that journalists and editors realise at an early age –you’ll rarely go wrong appealing to baser instincts; morbid curiosity, prejudices, sex, ephemera and crass humour.

So any journalist worth his or her salt recognises this phenomenon and knows how to work it to his or her advantage. Many are the times I’ve spotted a trending topic and dashed off articles accordingly, and there’s even a Google Maps ‘Map of Mayhem’ mash-up on MotorTorque to pander to the ‘bizarre’ aspect of motoring.

My ‘Skoda Goose Smash Terror of IT Manager’ header is one I’m hugely proud of, and it did tens of thousands of hits – viral and search-engine based – in a day because it plays to so many aspects of people’s need for a quick hit of rubbish. It stayed at the top of the ‘Most viewed’ bar for ages, until I had it manually removed.

Various social aggregator sites, most notably Fark, cater exclusively for this kind of news, reflecting and driving its popularity.

But I’ve noticed recently that the ‘Most viewed’ bar is a troubling phenomenon. On my Yahoo homepage and the BBC’s site recently two stories lingered at the top: the former regarding the number of lovers the missing chef Claudia Lawrence is alleged to have had; and another involving a woman trampled to death by a herd of cows. The latter was also at the top of the ‘Most emailed’ widget on the BBC.

It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine the circumstances in which people clicked on – or emailed – these stories, and I find it equally distasteful, disturbing and depressing.

The media is inevitably complicit in these kind of stories (especially those of the strange deaths variety) being so popular and I’ve rolled my eyes more than once at BBC Online’s headlines as they’re so clearly designed to attract this kind of slightly sick attention.

I’ve also noticed than in the case of certain celebrity deaths, sites won’t name the celeb in question in the header, forcing you to click if you want to know who’s snuffed it.

The Grauniad’s problematic Comment Is Free section has turned a kind of lefty bear-baiting into an art form, and it’s increasingly hard to believe it isn’t just designed to piss off its easily-angered community and inspire floods of user-generated content.

To an extent that’s the game these days, and it takes no mean skill in doing well, but the BBC especially rather demeans itself by slyly promoting these stories, once again repeating the bums-on-seats mistakes that is totally at odds with its remit. Entertain, educate and inform? Hardly.

I’m dubious about the news value of the apparently-comical death of the woman killed by the cows, and I’d be surprised to see it afforded any time on the air. As such it’s fairly obvious why stories like this are making it onto the Beeb’s website – hits, pure and simple.

The Beeb certainly isn’t alone in this, in fact pretty much every news site out there will do something similar. But it’s empty traffic, the value of which – monetary or otherwise – is nebulous at best. More to the point it’s fairly unpleasant; death repackaged as entertainment. The sort of thing you expect from Red Tops, not serious news sources.

This might all come off as rather pompous and antediluvian – twas ever thus after all – but the idea that somewhere an online editor is attempting to work the maximum possible traffic from the death of someone’s mother, while someone else is emailing that story to a friend with an accompanying snarky one-liner is pretty sickening, whichever way you look at it.

The web is having one of its occasional spasms about where journalism, the web, content and newspapers are going.

The internet community does this occasionally, in the same way that I sometimes have a chill of fear about climate change but swiftly forget all about it and put the kettle on.

The issue is fairly simple. Everyone cocked up the internet model of delivering content a few years ago by radically overestimating the amount of revenue the internet would generate.

Back then everyone thought the net would replace newspapers, and online ad revenue replace print ad revenue. To a significant extent it has, but it does not deliver anywhere near the revenue needed to replace that lost by print and other traditional media.

Kicking off this latest round of hand-wringing is Rupert Murdoch, who says he will start to charge for online content and Robert Picard, who says journalists need to adapt to a new world, and quickly.

The opposing view, maintained chiefly by web libertarians and social media zealots, is that everything on the internet should be free.

I don’t think either of these positions really addresses the root of the problem. The major issue is that, increasingly, consumers expect to access data, analysis, information, entertainment and services for free.

Clearly, this model is not sustainable, but the alternative is to try to return the genie to the bottle – to persuade people to go back to shelling out for quality information, media and services.

David Hepworth put it like this on his blog:

At some stage users have to start paying or watch the thing they value just drain away.

And therein lies the rub. I think this will be next to impossible in an environment where free music, film, literature and software are the norm.

iPlayer, Youtube, Spotify – all are legal and all are free, though Youtube is apparently in some financial trouble and may be forced to introduce some form of payment model.

Flickr has a premium service, but I’ve heard the Yahoo!-owned site is also losing money. If those services become pay-as-you-go or subscription there’s always Bittorrent.

No-one knows how to make these services pay for themselves, and every day they are available for free it will be harder to convince users to pay for something they’re used to getting for nothing.

I think any efforts to charge for content will be doomed to failure. The net will simply redistribute it for free, via what is now termed ‘extreme aggregation’ and used to be called copyright infringement.

The issue of copyright on the web also seems blurred these days, with so many blogs existing on repasting material from news and picture agencies, with seemingly little consideration of the legalities of the situation.

It’s simple supply and demand. And boy is there demand.

At the other extreme I don’t see how any kind of professional journalism can exist in a world where everything is consumed for free. Where will the revenue come from to pay these professional journos?

Bloggers versus journalists, new versus old, free versus paid

There’s a strange debate I’m kind of in the middle of relating to the blogger versus journalist issue – new versus old media put crudely – as I pretty much qualify as both.

This war of words is chiefly played out between the NUJ, who come off as pompous, snotty and out-of-touch and a coterie of senior bloggers and self-styled Web 2.0 evangelists, who come off as smug and over-confident.

The NUJ is getting its knickers in a twist about citizen journalism taking food off the plates of trained journalists and, as far as the NUJ are concerned, not offering anything like the same quality.

The most strident aspects of the blogosphere stress that newspapers and journalists need to embrace the possibilities of Web 2.0, and seem to me to hint that so-called ‘citizen’ journalism is making pro journalists redundant.

I’m very ambivalent about all of this, because I recognise the value of social media and blogging and engage with it.

On the other hand I recognise the usually superior value in professional journalism, and fear for the future of journalism without it.

This is something I expect we will only realise when all the last newspapers have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Picard’s viewpoint doesn’t recognise the value in strong journalism, although he eventually makes some good points in a hideously waffly article – journalists need to play a part in shaping old media organisations.

Certainly, newspapers can go some way to meeting the new world by training journalists as a kind of all-in-one journalism Swiss army knife, versed in writing, subbing, online writing, coding, image editing, SEO and moving image media.

But that still doesn’t address how newspapers earn money from their content, it will simply reduce costs (and jobs) and goes some way to preparing for a multi-media consumption model.

Where the revenue comes from, especially when it becomes clear that few consumers will be willing to pay for content, is anyone’s guess.

Maybe ad revenues will pick up, maybe some miraculous new platform will figure out how to make money out of freely available content.

But I wouldn’t bet on it, and the method of delivery is rather by-the-bye. The question everyone should be asking is not how to save newspapers, but how to save journalism.

• Image by Noodlepie on Flickr via Creative Commons

It’s gratifying, albeit grimly, to see the Metropolitan Police being brought to account over the death of Ian Tomlinson, a blameless newspaper seller whose only fault was to wander in front of some trigger-happy policemen during the G20 protests last week.

In a series of moves that will be depressingly familiar, the Met has gone through a number of versions of its story concerning what interaction its officers had with Tomlinson. I’m not going to go through the sequence of events, as they have been exhaustively covered in the press and wider media.

What is clear is that, even accounting for some likely confusion about what originally happened, the Met has been lying again in an attempt to cover up the over-zealous violence of its officers, and been embarrassingly caught in act of lying once again.

Those who witnessed the squirming that went on during the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry will have a weary sense of deja vu alongside justified anger that the Met is ultimately responsible for the death of another innocent civilian.

What is heartening about this case, though, is how the explosion in civilian media has brought the police to account and, frankly, will be an increasingly significant threat to police cover-ups in the future.

By all accounts Tomlinson was attacked twice, with several witness accounts corralled by The Guardian and amalgamated into a step-by-step account of the minutes leading up to Tomlinson’s death and the brutality of the police.

The clinching evidence is a video showing a masked, shield-bearing Met police officer shoving Tomlinson hard in the back as he is walking away from a group of policemen. Minutes later he died.

The Guardian’s case is watertight. Having located a dozen witnesses, most of whom took photos showing the sequence of events, as well as a businessman with the key video footage, it has been able to construct a timeline with a previously-unthinkable level of detail.

I’m not immediately aware of such a game-changing development in media in recent years.

Whereas previously press photographers and cameramen from news organisations would be the only chance of capturing something like this, the number of people using media tools will have possibly the most radical effect on police accountability ever.

It’s tragic that this incredible development has been highlighted by the death of Ian Tomlinson, but this event could be a watershed in the way the media, and the public, are able to hold police forces to account.

The Guardian is rightly proud of its scoop and investigative work, but at one point today it had at least four stories that were slight permutations on the same report and the video, in what was an obvious attempt to capitalise on traffic and stuff the website, via url strings and headers, full of keywords.

A distasteful facet of a sad story.

• Image by zongo69 via Creative Commons.