48 minutes ago

The Blog Snorkeller
Ex-hack Michael Cunningham on everything.....
P45.net / Blogs / The Blog Snorkeller

« July 2003 | Main | September 2003 »

August 28, 2003

Smoking in Irish pubs and eating fatty food

Back Seat Drivers is a two-handed blog by journalists Jon Ihle and Dick O'Brien - "commentary on the news and the way it is reported".

Their entries this month range from incompetence in NTL and Eircom to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, heatwave deaths on the Continent, Christian fundamentalism in the US, the death of a Nigerian baby in Waterford due to a botched circumcision, the blogging phenomenon, and how the media treat computer viruses...

Since it's a two-man affair, unlike one-person blogs, they bounce off each other's ideas a fair deal. For example, two recent themes have kept colliding: the forthcoming smoking ban in Irish pubs next January, and the proposed "fat tax".

In both cases the Irish Government claims to be intervening on medical grounds. But as Jon points out, there's a crucial distinction between fatty foods and tobacco: "smoking is intrinsically bad for you, but fatty foods are only a component of an unhealthy set of behaviours (over-eating, inactivity, poor nutritional balance)."

Now if you indulge in a fatty takeaway once a fortnight, the fat tax will hardly make a big impact on your eating habits. But why should you be financially punished for these occasional indulgences in the context of a generally healthy lifestyle? Jon writes:

"What makes it especially galling in my case is that I run an average of 15-20 miles per week and play 7-a-side soccer practically every Tuesday and Sunday. My virtues far outweigh (ehem) my vices."

He even proposes balancing out the fat tax with an "exercise credit" - refunds for people with healthier lifestyles. "This could even be a progressive credit with greater rewards for, say, fast times in road races, which would encourage high levels of commitment, or for percentage decreases in body fat."

Dick writes: "What you have to ask though is whether tobacco and fatty foods can really be treated in the same fashion. Tobacco isn't part of a normal healthy diet. Fat is. There's nothing wrong with eating fatty foods, as long as it's in moderation. There's absolutely no nutritional benefit to cigarettes."

Jon adds: "Why should a thin guy like me have to pay extra for food that other people eat too much of? I don't need financial disincentives to keep me from eating a pint of ice cream every night, because I know that if I do, I'll turn into a fat-ass. Fat people know this just as well as I do, they just care less."

Reading these guys, you feel the fat tax is a completely ill-conceived idea.

Jon and Dick are based in Wicklow and Dublin respectively. Jon is a freelance from Long Island in New Jersey, and has also worked as a social research consultant, bagel baker, mapmaker and lab assistant. Dick is a Dub who currently writes for the Indo and Silicon Republic. His previous jobs included brief stints in Dublin City Council and the Department of Agriculture. In their "About Us" section he says "When he isn't writing Dick enjoys reading fiction, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, preferably simultaneously."

Posted by Paul Clerkin at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Shovelling newspaper copy onto webpages

Another minor rant about newspapers and their Web versions. It's a rant about the goal of "automatic transfer" of printed newspapers content to the medium of the Internet.

This goal sounds grand in theory. As soon as today's print edition goes to the printers, somebody somewhere in the office will press a button, and - HEY PRESTO! - somehow some program strips all the content and converts it automatically into your Web-friendly content.

Some chance. It's a holy grail.

In practice, this process can't be fully automated - even if you're using the likes of Adobe InDesign or Quark to create the pages for your print edition.

A selection process will always be involved, and selection will always mean some level of human intervention, rather than automation. It entails a series of conscious, physical interventions by the journalists/webmasters in order to

select an appropriate subset of stories for the Web
then identify their relevant ingredients
finally, there's the possibility or the need to tailor some of these stories for the specific medium of the Web.

Here are some key problems you'll encounter when you try to automate that migration of content from its final form in the print edition (within, say, InDesign files) to the Web.

Your starting point when gathering the material for the Web is the finished version of the stories within the newspaper. This final version will incorporate all corrections and improvements in terms of grammar, journalistic impact, legal considerations etc. You have to go with this version. Any earlier version is suspect, because it may not include these amendments by subs and the newspaper's legal advisers.

This finished version has been bashed around by your subs/designers in InDesign or Quark.

But the key unit of information in this transition from the final print version to the Web version is the individual story - not a page as such or an InDesign file.

So, it's no good simply taking, say, a PDF version of a finished "print" page and extracting all the text and pictures. Any PDF-to-text conversion process I've seen has been wild dodgy. It will include any other stories on the page. It also pays little respect to a collection of text boxes being a single coherent story-unit.

In all likelihood, too, not all stories from the print edition will find their way onto the website. A subsect of stories has to be selected. This selection process involves the application of various criteria - which story is important, or which one is, say, just a notice explaining the bank holidayng times of the newspaper's office?

Some stories will require an accompanying picture. Which one?

If a story (particularly a feature) has too many panels, it is unlikely to work well on the Web as one continuous unit of text, and will either be ruled out of the Web edition altogether, or turned into a proper subset of related stories, or only one main piece is selected and the panels discarded. For various other reasons, not all stories from the newspaper's print edition will make a smooth transition to the medium of the Web.

You have to identify and select the following elements from each story...

ITS HEADLINE. This has to be identified and earmarked as having a separate status to the main bodycopy of the story (and distinguished, too, from crossheads, subheads, captions, quote boxes etc). With some feature stories, this headline might be spread over two or more unlinked text boxes. That's the way many designers do it. Don't knock them. They're working to deadline, and it works for the print edition.
THE INTRO. Some stories in the print edition don't have intros per se. For example, many news stories in the print edition will come with only a byline, so do you need to write an intro for the Web version from scratch? And if it has an intro, this has to be properly tagged as such, with a different status to the headline and body copy etc.
THE "BODY COPY" PROPER. The body copy has several considerations. If, for example, it has a turn (e.g. a Page #1 news story leading into Page #2 or #4, or a Page #23 feature continuing on Page #24), both sections of text will need to be selected and amalgamated, in the right order. All text should be html compliant in terms of special characters, though this part of the process can be automated to a great extent.
THE PICTURE. Some features may have a large amount of pictures, so for the Web version you may need to earmark a particular picture from all of these. Each picture for the website must be converted from its CMYK to RGB format, the resolution will need to be changed from 200 to 72 dpi, and the image then resized to a maximum of, say, 400 pixels. Once the picture has been selected, these steps can be incorporated within a semi-automated procedure in Photoshop, but there's still that question of making that initial selection.
THE PICTURE CAPTION. Some features might not have a picture caption, so you may need to write one from scratch.

So the accountants or the HR department are in love with the idea of a magic button to update a website. But don't think you can ignore all those selection decisions that you have to make in between the print edition and the content ending up in your website's content management system and on the finished webpages. End of rant.

Posted by mick cunningham at 03:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Downsizing from Sherkin Island in Cork to Mayenne in France

As Ireland's Internet movers and shakers go, Triona Carey rocks. Triona rolls. She gets things done and is very much an early adopter. We can still remember how, about six or seven years ago, Triona got various pubs and hotels around West Cork hooked up to the Net, in order to run a weekly online pub quiz.

This was a pub quiz, between teams in five or six pubs, via an online chatroom. They used bog-standard off-the-shelf technology to post the questions and answers between the teams, who'd be supping pints in the likes of the Southern Bar in Dunmanway, the Wine Vaults and the Eldon Hotel in Skibbereen (est 1880), Vickery's in Banyry, Barrets in Coppeen (before you ask, it's a tiny hamlet on the main Bantry-Macroom Road), and the Lifeboat Inn in Courtmacsherry.

It was a little network, where people could get a taste of this new kind of networking. So it was fun and a bit more besides. It showed these establishments and other local businesses how the Internet could be a handy daily tool, "like the fax" for getting bookings, only it was a lot more than just a fax machine, because you could plug your wares and your culture and stay in touch and have a bit of crack with the teams in the other pubs on a Tuesday night. Yeah, a lot more than just a fax machine. It's hard to imagine having a bit of crack on a Tuesday night with a few pints and a fax machine.

Anyway, Triona ran a local Net consultancy too, Sleeping Giant. She also wrote a blog, but it doesn't seem to have been updated since last October. A shame, because it had some great advice, it was funny and frank, and hopefully she'll take it up again soon.

Personal blogs can come and go - it's the nature of the beast. They disappear because the blogger was too busy, or they moved on, or they died (bloggers don't live for ever), or they ran out of things to say, or their Net access was limited. In Triona's case, it's probably mainly because she has "downsized" from Sherkin Island to France.

She decided to focus on Mayenne, next door to Brittany, in the northern bit of the Pays de la Loire region. And after a few exploratory forays she eventually found her house - "the roof was in a state and the floors needed doing, as well as the usual wiring, plumbing". But they weren't the only things that were patchy. So, by her own admission, was her French:

"Language presented a further barrier when I couldn't explain to the immobilier [estate agent] that I needed their bank details to transfer the deposit electronically. So we ended up flying to France at the end of a November with an envelope full of cash that we paid almost 10 per cent to convert into Francs."

Triona's blog explains loads of other difficulties too, such as French inheritance laws. "We inserted a clause that gets us around the local inheritance laws that would give my property, after my death, not only to my children but to my nieces and nephews and grandchildren and god knows who - probably the family cat. I'm sure it's all very sensible in French eyes but I couldn't make head or tail of it."

Among her tips about Irish people moving to France, she talks about her dealings with notaires. A notaire is a specialist property lawyer or notary:

"They are supposed to be impartial, representing buyer and seller equally. Another piece of advice we ignored was that we should have brought in our own notaire to represent our specific interests - this was definitely a mistake - impartial I don't think so."

And finally "everybody will tell you it's pas de probleme - don't believe them - this is an aspiration rather than a statement of fact."

Triona, please come back soon. Not to Sherkin Island, perhaps, but at least to the Irish bit of the Net.

Posted by Paul Clerkin at 01:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 27, 2003

Irish Born Chinese

What are IBCs? Irish Born Chinese, that's what. Vicky Lee Wei Kay's blog is aimed at second-generation IBCs, and she says the only "no-nos" in discussions on her site are "topics on religion and heavy going political views".

Here are the top search terms for her site at the moment:

hamtoro (129 requests)
korean anime (53)
oish (30)
strong bad cartoon (27)
lego matrix (26)
wonderful days anime (25)
cute flash (22)
good logos (22)
monty python official (13)
meowlingual (13)
irish chinese (11)
cool css (11)
thermal depolymerization (10)
swedish chef muppet (10)
clone wars animation (10)
wonderful days korean (10)
barcode art (10)

Posted by Paul Clerkin at 10:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"Ladies and gentlemen of the electronic jury..."

Last November the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure recommended that Ireland should have "electronic courts". "With the growth of a high-tech economy," it said, "it is of importance that courts are developed to service the modern state in accordance with new tools and expectations..."

It also recommended that electronic versions of contracts / letters / seals / signatures should be given the same status as originals. The courts currently only accept original documents as legal evidence - they regard copies as hearsay.

With electronic submissions, His Lordship (or, er, Her Lordship) would then be able look at depositions or warrants on screen. Presumably our courts would begin to resemble our tribunals, with their banks of monitors in front of the legal teams, and their giant screens for the public to see the PDF "exhibits". The tribunals lurrrrve Adobe Acrobat.

Since November, I've not heard anything more about this committee, but there's one technology they really ought to introduce for members of the jury. I'm suggesting this technology as somebody who has actually served on a jury - as opposed to the vast majority of hacks in this country, who seem to regard themselves as automatically exempt from jury duty and wriggle out of it and thus have no direct experience of being part of this particular arm of the law.

The technology I believe that would really help jurors isn't a fancy PDA or a phone gizmo or satellite telly infrared whatsit or even a new laptop. It's cheap, simple and low-tech: it's a pen or a pencil, and a paper notepad.

The judge in my case said we weren't allowed to take notes. I found this, well, a little disturbing. I find that writing things down helps me to organise my thoughts and remember things. So why we were banned from taking notes is beyond me. Mind you, this was over 10 years ago, so I don't know if this ban still exists or whether it's a blanket ban or what. But imagine if students were banned from note-taking in lectures, or if Oireachtas reporters didn't have the right (and in many parliaments it was fought for over the years as a right) to take notes, or if workers in various crafts weren't allowed to scribble their measurements and calculations and stuff on the back of an envelope.

What's so terribly wrong with a biro and a notepad? It's not much. It's not like I'm proposing that the 12 men and women on the jury should be able to log on remotely and never have to be in the physical court or that the guards be tooled up to their necks with hi-tech stuff like that bloke in "Robocop". That'd be taking things a tad too far.

Mind you, I'd draw the line at giving jurors Web access. You have to draw a line somewhere. God knows what websites for wasting time at work they might end up on.

Posted by mick cunningham at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What is it?

Yes, it's a blog about Irish blogs... (other Irish blogs, that is - not the splendid ones here on P45.net)

Posted by Paul Clerkin at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 26, 2003

Ballyhoo in Google News

Still trying to get a handle on what Google News archives from the Ballyhoo Examiner site. It's updated daily on weekdays, yet Google only catches stuff spasmodically.

At the moment it has the following stories archived:

Hi-tech Gardai And Wireless Broad Band Initiative
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 48 minutes ago

Joy And Relief For Ballyhoo's Leaving Certs
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 24 Aug 2003

Corrrections And Clarifications
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 20 Aug 2003

US Blackout 'Could Spark Sex Drive'
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 18 Aug 2003

Corrections Adn Clarifications
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 4 Aug 2003

Surgeons Say No More Cuts
The Ballyhoo Examiner, Ireland - 12 Aug 2003

See for yourself here

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dear Mayo News (the carnage continues)

Re my request yesterday about your advertising department's email address...

While we're at it, what's the general format of your company's email addresses? You know: does it start with the reporter's first name, or their initial first, or what? Nah, I haven't a clue - and I wonder do you have one either.

RTE has a fairly consistent system. To contact somebody working in RTE radio, say, I know from previous experience that the standard practice for their email address is their surname, then initial of first name, then "@rte.ie". As in

If I want to contact a reporter called Joe Bloggs in the Irish Times, his address would be along slightly different lines:

So what's your lines? What's your format in the Mayo News? Take some of your main news/sports reporters such as:

Regina Hennelly
James Laffey
Joan Geraghty
Elisha Commins
Stephen O'Grady
Jonathan Mullin

Their email addresses in last week's print were given as:

Spot the pattern? Me neither. It's totally incoherent. If you had a reporter called joe bloggs, I could try to guess his address as:

Why do you do this to your readers? Why not give everyone an address in the same format to minimise the guesswork and confusion? It doesn't cost you a single penny.

And it doesn't stop there. At the top of most pages in the main paper, you give the newspaper's generic/catch-all email address as:

"e-mail: "

Totally illogical. Why another domain all of a sudden? Yet the "News Digest" page (as in p7 in last week's edition) gives it as

"e-mail: "

So what's your official domain name? Is it Mayonews.ie or Anu.ie?

Many of the regular columns and local news round-ups are done by people with their own personal addresses rather than @mayonews.ie (eg , and ). Why? Wouldn't it be more professional and consistent to give them their own mayonews.ie addresses?

Instead of giving "Ballina Briefs" (done by Betty Moran) the general email address , it's "".

Many local notes don't give any email address at all. So what is the correspondent using to get their copy winging over to you? Floppy disk? On a donkey and cart? What happens if Betty's mail is down or she's sick that week, or she stops doing it and someone else takes over? Then what happens to the email submissions to the Ballina Briefs?

Finally, why do you put the email addresses at the start of articles, instead of at the end?

rgds
potential customer #1023123

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:46 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 25, 2003

Dear Mayo News

What's the email address of your advertising department? I can't find it anywhere in your paper. Do you not want to take this kind of business by email? Or am I missing something really obvious?

rgds
potential customer #1023123

Posted by mick cunningham at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2003

Rules for parajournalism (I)

One of the things that constantly amazes me with P45.net's hoax stories that start on our discussion boards is that the fundamental idea is usually excellent, but then when people make a stab at turning the idea into a convincing-looking news story (let's call it a bit of "parajournalism"), it's usually quite flawed.

It's let down by a few amateurish constructions that you wouldn't get in "normal" reportage. These slips ought to be enough to alert a newsroom that the story doesn't come from a mainstream news source, yet the story is still swallowed by the gullible (but that's another story).

I'm being pernickety, I know, but it's all about being even more convincing.

Here are two tell-tale signs that the story isn't following the usual rules of newspaper journalism...

(1) Too many passive verbs instead of active ones.

The verb is what ought to drive the headline and theng paragraphs. An active verb has much more impact than a passive one, because it has something happening, someone doing something, as opposed to someone having something done to them. For example, compare the following two headlines:

Cowan punches Trimble - active verb
Trimble is punched by Cowan - passive verb

(2) Mucking around badly with collective nouns

You have to pay particular attention to agreement on numbers. For example, a company or organisation is a legal entity - and a singular entity. So it (yes, it is an "it") has a corresponding verb in the singular. So

"Cement Roadstone has bought Heiton Holdings for..." (not HAVE)
"The Green Party has joined the coalition." (not HAVE)

It should be straightforward: a sentence with a single subject takes a singular verb. So

"The government has agreed to the committee's request."

But a double subject must have a plural verb. So

"The government and the IFA have agreed to the..."

Where a preposition joins another word to the subject the verb remains singular. So

"The government, with the IFA, has agreed..."

There are usually two main exceptions to the singular entity rule:

sports clubs/teams
music acts/bands.

"Oasis are to play three dates in Ireland."
"Liverpool are to complete the sale of Robbie Keane for £22 million."

And one final rule: a group, family, cabinet, etc takes a singular or plural verb according to meaning: the family was shocked, the family were sitting down, scratching their heads (not "was scratching its head" - or even "its heads").

Aye, we'll make parajournalists out of yez yet. To be continued...

Posted by mick cunningham at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 20, 2003

Who gives a flying f***?

And what's the main page one story in the Irish Daily Mirror this morning?

EXPOSED
We name writer
who called Bertie
a f*****g p***k
on wedding plane

EXCLUSIVE
By PAT FLANAGAN

THIS is the man who called Taoiseach Bertie Ahern a "f***ing p***k" on an Aer Lingus plane.

Comedian and Sunday Independent journalist Brendan O'Connor, left, hurled the foul-mouthed insult just hours after Mr Ahern's daughter Georgina's celebrity wedding in France..."

What do we learn about Brendan O'Connor from this exclusive story, apart from him telling the taoiseach that he's a fucking prick (or maybe it's a farting plank) and that he flies Aer Lingus? Well, the Mirror explains that he

"advertises butter on TV"
is a "well-built TV comedian"

Irish investigative journalism reaches new heights.

Meanwhile on a more positive note, I see the Ballyhoo Examiner has made it into Google News

Posted by mick cunningham at 06:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 18, 2003

Oh bugger bollix fuck shite gay lesbian dildo penis porn about swimmers from Scunthorpe doing the breast stroke

Yes, after running various email newsletters for more than half a decade now, I'm still amazed at the battery of taboo words out there, words that will get your email message banned from company mail servers.

There you are, typing away with gay abandon, and before you know it you've a hundred mails bouncing back at you. A particular word is on the banned list of SpamAssassin or NaughtyMailKiller, so from then on you learn that the way to avoid the banning software is to type g*y or g-a-y.

I was reminded of this during the recent outbreak of the Blaster Worm virus. One variant of it downloads a file called PENIS32.EXE.

With a filename like that, a lot of emails about that particular worm will never get to their recipients.

There was no mention of "penis32" in the Irish Times on Saturday, which had a quarter-page ad on page 3:

"Important information for Microsoft customers about the Blaster Worm virus".... "Microsoft Ireland is working with our customers to offer a comprehensive set of resources to guard against the Blast worm virus and to arm you with the security tools and information needed to help secure your computer"... etc etc.

By coincidence, the same edition had another quarter-page ad, on page 5:

"Consumer Safety Notice"... "Dairylea Lunchables Stack'ems"... "A small number of packs of Dairylea Lunchables Stack'ems have been found to contain small fragments of wire in the cracker biscuit, as a result of an isolated manufacturing incident at a third party supplier"...

You know the kind of thing. And it ends with an apology: "We would like to take this opportunity to apologise sincerely for any inconvenience or concern this may have caused."

These were the two biggest ads in the main section of that day's Irish Times. Both cases of damage limitation and brand protection. In Dairylea's case, you got an apology. In Microsoft's case, plenty of bits about what to do (at least five paragraphs have the phrase "we recommend"), but not a single apology.

Microsoft wouldn't admit any form of responsibility. Nothing is ever ever ever its fault. Not even anything to do with the Blaster Worm and PENIS32.EXE. But here's the patch.

Oh bugger bollix fuck shite gay lesbian dildo penis porn about swimmers from Scunthorpe doing the breast stroke...

Posted by mick cunningham at 08:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 15, 2003

Information underload and Omagh

'Information overload' is one of the Internet's big, bloated clichés. It has launched a thousand articles and a million search-engine requests. It is one of the Net's most pervasive and persuasive concepts - so much so that you rarely hear about its opposite number, 'information underload'.

Information underload is about the power of radio drama, and the vividness of soccer on the 'wireless' rather than the endless action replays on Sky Sport. It's about Internet Relay Chat and 'online communities' built via pure text on a screen. It's about the 'data compression' involved in telephone sex rituals (as Allucquere Rosanne Stone brilliantly observes in The War of Desire and Technology). And it's about John Cage's most notorious work, 4'33" - four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, played out against a conscious background noise: your own heartbeat, your blood supply.

Information underload is about subtracting sounds and pixels instead of their hyperabundance, and how this apparent absence of data generates more meaning. The paradox is that less can mean more, and pure silence or absolute blank space is impossible. For example, Malevich's all-white canvases show that visual emptiness is impossible because, if nothing else, a blank painting gathers dust. It is always transformed by the patina of time.

Or take a more recent example: the RUC poster issued a week after the Omagh bombing, five years ago today to a day. As a public appeal for information, the poster was concerned not with the bomb's effects but its cause. Not the blast and carnage, but what had happened just minutes before. It included a photograph taken by a Spanish visitor, Rocio Abad Ramos, shortly before the explosion. The image is simple yet haunting. In the right-hand corner is a bright red car. Through hindsight we know it contains a bomb. Along the sunny street, around the car, are groups of people on a Saturday afternoon stroll. But their shapes are blanked out. Within minutes many of them, including the photographer, will be dead.

Through a twist of history, an innocent, 'ordinary' holiday snap is stripped of much of its visual information - the humans in the scene - and turned into a poster, then reproduced on TV screens and front pages across the world. The RUC decided to 'blank out' the humans for various reasons. Their white outlines seem like ghost-prints, almost like the eerie shadows left on the walls of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. To add to the poignancy, one of the white outlines is unmistakable: it is of a young girl sitting on a man's shoulders.

It is often argued that somehow people have become 'immune' to 30 years of carnage, massacres and explosions, that they have been 'desensitized' by an 'overload' of 'images of violence'. Yet these white shadows of Omagh are the opposite. They have become a major icon of our times, even though they seem to contain no graphic details whatsoever.

Posted by mick cunningham at 09:49 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

That powercut in North America yesterday

or: The journalist vs the geologist

Here's a ramble, about the breakdown in the New York/Ottwa/etc power system, and it's about a much more general problem: how we understand and visualise systems. Scientists and programmers do it every day, but journalists rarely touch upon the subject properly...

I've a few friends who are journalists, and one or two who are geologists. Don't stick them in the same room together though. One lot will wang on about yesterday's machinations in Dail Eireann or the latest spin in some government department about next year's spending on X, Y or Z, while the other will talk about the theories for and against "Snowball Earth", or why they got fed up of working in the Geological Survey and sold out and started working for the Dark Side, some nasty multinational oil company in darkest Africa or the Middle East. (Or they are very boring geologists who know nothing about either Snowball Earth or oil companies).

Obviously the journalist and the geologist work on completely differerent timescales. The one chases after that thing that happened two minutes ago, while the other is plodding away at what happened a few million years ago. But it's not just about timescales. It's about ways of working, and about worldviews that are worlds apart.

Do journos have time to have an overall worldview? I'm not sure any more. But at least during the Cold War, for the poor hack, things seemed reasonably straightforward and black-and-white. The impending apocalypse involved metaphors of chess and deadly endgames; one side or the other would press the button first, ending the delicate balance of the arms race, and Mutually Assured Destruction would begin.

In today's post-millennial era, though, the apocalyptic meltdown is less ultimate and far more messy. It's complex and non-linear. It could come from any one of a series of interwoven systems on the verge of collapse. I'm not just talking about the ozone layer either, or that Y2K bug that came and went, or a bunch of terrorists flying an airliner into the Twin Towers even: those systems could be biological, social, military, economic, yet we have major problems in visualising them, particularly as they interlock and they slide - or wobble - out of control.

Yet instead of concentrating on these systems' chronic, endemic and seriously escalating problems, journalists tend to prefer the one-off glitch, the occasional accident or the big spectacle. It looks better on the front page and the Sky News video wall, it suits the attention span of a news blip.

And our collective consciousness may seem to have grasped one or two famous metaphors from Chaos Theory, but that's just about it. Skip all the other bits, because the butterfly effect means... just one lorry drives across a border, from one farm to another... It carries cattle with the foot and mouth... Farms are cordoned off, then the whole county, then the entire country. Then everywhere. And this causes a huge storm in Tokyo. Or something. And your editor wants you to doorstep some livestock lorrydriver who bent the rules.

Sorry, let's start again. Someone sneezes in a lift in Hong Kong (say), and, thanks to a combination of our hospital systems and international airline systems, within days this causes a major health alert in Toronto. And before you know it, people on the street are wearing masks there too. Eventually the surgical mask becomes the global icon of the year. It's a popular, semi-personal, tangible way to visualise this international threat: a picture of a mask rather than a microbe.

And thanks to modern journalism we will have more of an idea of how people are decorating and customising these masks than questions such as: do disease organisms really exist independently of each other in human populations, or do they form a shifting and complex equilibrium with each other, in systems that last thousands and thousands of years?

The natural and social worlds interact in so many misunderstood ways, with bizarre chains of cause and effect. If the systems are tightly interlocking, they can have unpredictable consequences. Yet, like poor Victor Frankenstein, our optimism rarely lets us see beyond the sum of the parts we've tried to cobble together, to grasp how these parts interact in unexpected, unstable and unforeseen ways.

To complicate things even further, some of these systems come packaged in promises and dreams. New technologies offer ultimate freedom and mobility, they're portrayed as neutral or utopian, but in reality they chain us more than ever to the office, and blur the boundaries between work and non-work spaces beyond recognition.

Similarly, manufacturers portray cars as somehow Outside The System - freewheeling in free space. Yet they are tied very firmly to road networks, to the clogged up systems that become even more choked for every new unit that is added to them. And our planners still don't seem to grasp that new roads lead to bigger traffic jams.

ATM machines, too, have their own form of rush-hours and gridlock, when the lines are longer than those at the counter of the bank ever used to be (before they closed my branch down anyway). And despite all our mobiles and pagers and PDAs, and "home offices" with ever more sophisticated software and computing power and bandwidth, our gizmos have to operate within a messy social context, not despite or outside it. And don't get me talking about computer viruses or spam.

So when lightning strikes and a huge powercut brings several large cities in North America to a standstill, what's the very first question for journalists as opposed to scientists? It's about the effects rather than the causes. It's about the emergency plan, the traffic jams, the initial fear that some terror group outside the system has hit a society once again 9/11 style, as opposed to the problems very deeply embedded in the heart of that very same system...

Posted by mick cunningham at 09:39 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 14, 2003

Restaurant robbers see red

I have to thank Bruce Schneier for this one. He's the author of the ever excellent "Crypto-Gram" email newsletter, and last month's issue referred to a story in the Guardian about the crime rate in Honduras:

"Some women dining out in Tegucigalpa's fancier restaurants always order red rather than white wine, I was told. That way, if a robber comes in with a gun, they can discreetly drop their rings and earrings into the wine glass where they will not be spotted as they would be in a glass of white."

Bruce is intrigued by the idea as a simple security countermeasure. It's a more natural movement than using a serviette / your blouse / the floor. He wonders if restaurants might start offering a cheap house red just for the purpose.

I was thinking the opposite. Maybe a few restaurant robberies in Dublin might bring the price of the house red down to something more reasonable again.

"Waiter, I'll have a glass of the proper cheap wine, just for security purposes mind you."

Posted by mick cunningham at 09:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I'm 53!

Yes, I'm now 53 years old, according to today's edition of the Phoenix magazine, so it must be true. It's on page 16, in a feature about the Caravaggio hoax.

The article seems to have cobbled together a lot of second-hand information, but I can't for the life of me imagine where they'd got the idea that I was 53. Do I look 53? I know I've aged over the past six months of whirlwind publishing, but Mr Clerkin looks well in his picture, which seems to have come from the recent Ireland on Sunday shoot.

Pity they didn't mention the Ballyhoo Examiner (est. 1798), which makes it far older than 53.

Posted by mick cunningham at 05:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 12, 2003

Media Matters

Was in Newstalk 106 at lunchtime on Sunday for "Media Matters". It's a two-hour show, a long time to be in a studio in Mount Street with four other people (and with far better things you might be doing on a hot summer's day like getting ready to watch Donegal in the quarter-final replay with a cool pint of Scrumpy Jack). Yet as usual I came out feeling like I hadn't said the half of what I'd intended to say...

Some of that is down to pre-match nerves. Some of it is just the result of the general argie-bargie involved in any roundtable discussion and getting your words in, and competing against an agenda that's not of your making. I'm fairly used to all that by now, it's par for the course. But one other problem was that the show gave the distinct impression that its presenter didn't seem know who I was or what I did or what P45.net was all about.

Now it's one thing for a journo to act the innocent and pretend to be the blank slate and not know anything. At times it can be a great journalistic technique: it means that you come to a story fresh and you ask the kind of questions that the ordinary listener/reader might want to ask.

Yet for some strange reason the presenter seemed to think P45.net was something very different to what it actually is.

OK, he clearly knew about our Caravaggio/Berlusconi story and the "Liam Lawlor: The Movie" spoof, but that was just about it. I immediately felt that apart from that he didn't know anything else about P45.net. Worse still, he was talking as if the site was some kind of alternative news agency. Honest. If you didn't hear the show or don't believe me, I'll give a brief example in a sec. But one thing P45.net certainly isn't is a full-blown alternative news agency. And it's not like, say, Indymedia and has never ever pretended to be.

Our site might poke fun at the news. And in our discussion forums we often talk about things in the news. Sometimes our jokes and lists and songs and spoofs are read out by the media and DJs and then become news. Once in a while, too, P45ers share things on the boards that could be construed in the general sense as "a bit of news". (A typical example off the top of the head: the bit of detective work that Diogenes did for the boards about the reluctance of Control Plus Ltd, Dublin's clampers, to give out their address. Yep, that could easily have been a reasonable little news item for the likes of the Sue Denham column in the Sunday Times. And it might still resurface in the mainstream media as something like that.)

But a news agency? Not really. P45.net clearly ain't no alternative online agency breaking news.

It's a site for wasting time at work. It's a form of entertainment, an ongoing public/private discourse, an online community, a bit of satire, some "eejits' guides" and "omatics" and a growing number of blogs on a wide range of matters, and a pile of jokes and the Ballyhoo Examiner. All this adds up to something very, very different to a full-blown alternative news agency. And if you're reading this blog entry on the web (unlike, say, someone who's had it copied and passed on to them by email), chances are you know all this already.

Yet in the first hour of the show the presenter asked me some really bizarre questions such as this one:

"One of the things I would ask you is how [are] you actually compiling your stories? Where are you going? I mean in order to get behind the news stories that we are not being given, i.e. those that are left off the traditional agenda setting, how do you go about it, I mean do you have a fleet of people working for you or what?"

A fleet of wha'? Sorry mister? We made up a few stories, end of story.

Time and again, the presenter and his regular panellist gave the impression that they'd never visited the site.

Unlike some of RTE's radio shows I've been on, where you're quizzed in advance by a producer and you know your answers are going to come back at you as part of the grilling process later on by the presenter, in this case with Newstalk there was absolutely no pre-show telephone "interview". When I was on the phone with the producer last week, the conversation lasted hardly two minutes. He simply wanted to know whether I could turn up on the day, he gave me their address, and I asked who the other guests were, and that was it. (Nice bloke though, and he's hardly to blame - it's probably all a question of time and resources).

So did any of the presenters check out the site? Should radio presenters talk at length about (and around, and around and about) websites such as P45.net that they've never actually looked at? If a journalist on a media show were interviewing someone from a traditional media product - a magazine or a newspaper - you'd expect them to have had a reasonable glance through the mag/newspaper in question. So why are websites so different, particularly when they're being discussed on the radio?

Ironically, I was mainly on the show to talk about hoaxes, and the need for journalists to do some basic research and fact-checking if they want to avoid them. Maybe I should simply have pretended on the show that P45.net WAS the alternative news agency they thought it was.

The Newstalk experience seemed miles away from Katriona McFadden's report on RTE's "Five Seven Live" on July 31st. She'd clearly hung around the site and the forums - over a good few months as it happens - and she'd taken the trouble to print out bits of the Urban Legends (UL) threads. And when the server went belly up after the Caravaggio story went ballistic, she already had those bits printed out in front of her so she could read them out on air to her show's presenter. Right down to the online conversations between Mod_Con and Busaras. I must admit I had a slight tinge of embarrassment - mixed with a lot of pride too of course - when she explained it all, unmasking step by step the stages that you go through to evolve the initial phase of a new UL. But fair play to her.

Posted by mick cunningham at 02:44 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 10, 2003

New sports station on Dublin radio?

To: Liam Hayes
Former editor of Ireland on Sunday, former editor of the Dublin Daily, former captain of Meath etc etc
From: Mick Cunningham

Dear Liam

It's Mick here again. Yep, the scruffy one with the bad taste in loud Merengue music. Anyway, cards on the table: I've heard that you might be applying for a radio licence for a sports station in Dublin.

Presumably you'll want to make it the place where people in Dublin come for the best news about everything from "minority" sports to eircom League and GAA. And I guess you'll have some sort of syndication deal with the likes of Radio 5 Live, and strategic alliances with one or two decent sports websites. As for the finance, maybe you've been thinking about sports stars - Roy Keane as a shareholder, for example? Why not? Or a consortium of other Irish international soccer players about to retire, led by Niall Quinn. Stranger things have happened.

Given all that, I was knocking around a few ideas. Here's a couple of dozen of them, some sensible, some a bit mad...

Sports fans rock. They roll. They come up with fanzines, songs and terrace chants. They have a great sense of humour. That humour should percolate through the programming. Fans have to be right at the heart of the station. So keep on the lookout for articulate, funny fans. Don't necessarily get them into the studio as regulars, because a studio can be an intimidating place to non-professionals. Maybe record them on their home turf, in a pub say. (More about pubs anon.)
A flagship show that would have some humorous and offbeat elements such as the following:
- Regular Top Ten "Greatest" polls. Greatest World Cup goal. Greatest All-Ireland. Greatest player. Greatest nickname. Greatest cyclist. Funniest sporting moment. Worst mullet. Best food to take along to a match. Greatest sporting film (fiction). Greatest sporting documentary (non-fiction).
- Manager Soundbite Of The Week. With a clip in an OTT voice announcing it (either like Alan Partridge, or like the BBC Radio 4 show Broadcasting House's Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite Of The Week).
- A daft sports slot - from bog snorkelling to extreme ironing.
Invest in half a dozen extra recorders that you can dole out to players and athletes to do audio diaries. An obvious one, I know.
Any station needs soundproof studios. But given that, why not make the studio space sound noisy and dirty and real for a change? Not sterile, but a studio with clinking coffee cups, and rustling papers, and real people coming in and out the real squeaky door. Don't be ashamed of this noise, make it a virtue. It gives a sense of place, and of things happening in a busy newsroom. Even fake it. Yes, the subtle sound of a dozen PC keyboards clattering away (and even the faint sounds of modems, phones and ringtones) when the presenter "pans" over to the results desk. Create a proper soundscape.
I don't know anybody who likes station promos when they become too obtrusive and over-repetitive - Newstalk 106's really do my head in.
The choice of voice on the more generic promos and stings is crucial - it gives a subtle flavour to the station's identity. So think about getting a "sexy" voice to do them - Mariella Fostrup will do nicely.
What are the great sporting sig tunes? The theme tune to RTE's Sunday Game, from a bygone era really, but a real winner. "Soul Limbo" by Booker T and the MGs IS cricket. "The Life of Reilly" by the Lightning Seeds for MOTD's goal of the month (but now used to death by Ryan Tubridy). Anyway. Think surfin' guitar instrumentals from the last 1950s, think 1970s blaxploitation movie soundtracks, think a lot about it. But not Bach. Bach might work on your ringtone, Liam, but it's just not sport.
As a listener, I want really clear strands - within a day's programming and right across the week and within each programme. They should start at proper times, not 20 past or five to. With decent titles. Radio 5 Live used to have great titles (eg "Dirty Tackle"), but now it's gone to the dogs with things like "Sport On Five" or "Sportsweek". Boring.
Have a short "Lucky Gym" slot. Not sure what it's about - I just like the title.
This might be mad, but I was just thinking: supposing you had sports headlines every 15 minutes. Why not have particular sports news at different times - e.g. general round-up on the hour, then soccer at a quarter past the hour, GAA at half past...
No doubt the station will have to be kept lean and mean. So no Eamon Dunphys - they're far too expensive. Similarly, why pay someone like Paul McGrath to do a guest slot once a week for the equivalent of a couple of reporters' wages? No offence to Mr McGrath, but give me a couple of full-time reporters any time. And don't get George Best. Fantastic footballer, an interesting pundit, a warm and witty conversationalist, but do you really want a panellist who's going to be plastered all over the tabloids all the time, if you know what I mean? Save Bestie for that documentary "Better than all the rest - George Best In His Own Words".
See whether it's better to have one long programme (say two hours) about a particular sport once a week, or whether it's actually better to split it up into regular daily 15-minute segments. They can still be folded into longer shows. Check out how tight the BBC World Service's specialist music shows are, many of them just 15 minutes long.
Think club. I'll explain more about that at the job interview.
A regular show about the business of sport. Not over-concentrating on the shareholder and investor stuff (as the Business Post tends to do) but tackling other things like consumer questions, ticket prices, or how much it costs to take part in cycling at a mid and top level, or sporting holidays (imagine a sound diary of going on the road with Liverpool or Celtic supporters club), or getting an accountant who is actually funny (like my one) to go through a small club's running costs and make suggestions.
Sponsorship deals. Think interesting. A bike shop to sponsor a cycling show. Bord Failte to sponsor a fishing show. Paddy Power to sponsor, er, the weather.
Bring personalities and celebrities in on a regular basis to talk about how their fantasy team is doing in different sports (footie, bogball, F1 etc). From Keith Duffy to Elvis Costello and Mary Hannigan.
A sporting memories show, a bit heavy on the nostalgia, perhaps, but should be popular enough if handled well.
Rip off "A Question Of Sport". Maybe instead of doing it with loads of sports people, do it with pub quiz teams, offices.
Get Seamus Martin. Former Sunday Trib, former Irish Times, former lots of things. He took the lump sum from the I.T. a while back, which means he might be available. He's very funny, very erudite. Give him a show called "The Snug" - him and three people recorded in a pub talking bogball, football, in fact anything with balls.
And Ken Whelan. On tips for the nags. Then on big race days (Cheltenham, the Grand National etc), make him do a dummies' guide to bookie shops.
A sports radio station would have to handle a lot of information. That needs a good content management system. Talk to Fiachra.
Think of ways of republishing that information in different ways, from the web to text alerts. Text messaging is bigtime on radio now. But work it both ways - offer text alerts for particular clubs/sports.
Have a strong online presence - unlike the Dublin Daily, which left it on the long finger four months after launch and should have had it nailed down before launch. Not token but participatory, with decent discussion forums, online polls, a web feed of the shows, a blog or two by the journalists, and some of the raw information they come across (eg press releases). Use the website to generate a lot more information, which in turn is fed back into the shows.
Use discussion board technology to organise story ideas on the station's intranet. Each thread is a story idea. Each forum is possibly a show, or maybe a sport.

Right, that's it for now. I'm saving up the rest for the next time I see you.

rgds

Mick

Posted by mick cunningham at 06:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 09, 2003

Techie blogging qs: multiple blogs on one page

Being a complete novice when it comes to Movable Type, RSS and most of XML too, I was searching around for the ways to put the headlines and bits of several blogs from one site onto the one page. Must be easy enough to do, eh?

(Yep Movable Type might be a nifty bit of software, but its official documentation is pretty horrible)

Seems the main ways are:

* The OtherBlog plugin
* Using PHP or SSI includes.

And here's a tutorial that Bus might be reading too. I can actually understand it.

Posted by mick cunningham at 03:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 08, 2003

Spin Solutions is gone

Yep, Tom Murphy has just announced that Spin is to close...

I've known Tom for about nine years, ever since he approached me and Fiachra about the Electronic Frontier Ireland. Tom also runs boards.ie (the other big board in Ireland), and we've had some fun times together over the years.

Having been in a belly-up or two myself, my thoughts are with him. Best of luck, Tom - catch up with you soon when you've a chance to have a breather.

Here's the message Tom sent out this morning

As a result of a last minute withdrawal of an investor and
a cash shortfall to cover the payroll etc. Spin Solutions has
closed its doors after 5 years of trading.

We advised staff at the start of the month that the payroll
was in jeopardy and that we couldnt guaruntee they would get paid.
Despite that and during increasing likelihood that that was looking
certain, the staff here stuck by us and worked with us until
the final decision.

Its a sad day for us but looking back on the 5 years I've had the
privelege of working with some of the finest people in the industry
in my opinion. I'm very proud of the team here and what we accomplished
off our own bat.

Our clients are being sourced continuation of support and coverage
and the company is being wound up properly and will be manned by a skeleton
crew until the end of the month.

Tom Murphy.

Posted by mick cunningham at 10:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 07, 2003

In the midnight hour (LONG)

Here's one from deep in the archives - a piece I wrote about "Broadcasting on the margins with the Chris Barry phone show". I never liked Chris Barry. I never particularly liked his show either. Or the bulk of its callers. But I wanted to write about how the show worked. [Believe it or not I only got paid the princely sum of £52 (BEFORE tax) by the Irish Times for the article, and the feckers wouldn't even reimburse me for my taxi fare home at the end of it. But that's another story...]

APPEARANCES are deceptive. From the outside, the building is completely anonymous. There isn't even a name on the bell.

After the Fort Knox security, you enter a warren of ghostly corridors, but the designer-black paintwork now has all the chips and scratches of a busy, round-the-clock office, a clear reminder that Ireland's "new" local stations aren't new any more.

The glossy Doors and Madonna posters compete with the noticeboards of workaday messages and internal memos, and the faxed requests written in fat felt-tips ("Please play a request for the slaves at Poundsworth, Miss Whiplash, 20, and for Eamonn and Ali who have just got married").

It's the midnight hour, and a flashing studio light announces the start of another phone-in which may finish after three a.m. For better or worse, Chris Barry's controversial late-night show on Rock 104 (as FM104 was then known) has become the raw edge of talk radio in Dublin at the moment.

This is March 1992: the 30-year-old DJ has invited me to sit in on his programme, after several fairly critical reviews and a major controversy earlier in the month: a young man has claimed that his mother had sexually abused him, and that he in turn had frequently abused his daughter. I'd been wondering aloud why Barry's show seemed to attract far more offensive and dangerously disturbed callers compared with ordinary phone-ins. Nutters, in a nutshell. Was it the station, was it the way it handled the calls - or even the time of night itself?

But any suspicion that phone-ins are rigged, that it's basically the same two dozen callers every night, is immediately dispelled when you see the lines on the switchboard begin to sparkle, in almost predictable waves, like some electronic monster shaking off its slumbers. A hidden city is coming alive.

* * * *

"The drunks are easy to spot, after a few questions," Barry says. "Then you've got people who do everything to cheat the system." He points to their blacklist - Blacklist? yeah, Blacklist - explaining matter-of-factly that "you know, every station has one." It's a neatly typed list, mostly first names and phone numbers. A dozen have been crossed out after "rehabilitation". About thirty more remain. "They're nutters, basically, or alcoholics. Some ring up every minute for three hours, or ring up just to abuse you. You get the usual phone calls," he shrugs, searching for a well-worn phrase. "It comes with the territory."

Barry's literal territory is a desk littered with coffee mugs, water-cooler cups, CDs and office snaps. Two entire walls have steadily mutated into shelves for over 1,500 cartridges and singles. And it's a deliberately noisy, "live" studio. Watch-alarms bleep and machines click away, with the sirens seeping through from the streets below.

At the time of my interview they are basically a two-man operation. Leon Ellison (22) - who has been his regular producer, switchboard operator and "Rottweiler" (as Barry puts it) for most of the show's first 18 months - is screening all the calls through the main switchboard. It's on the other side of the building so they don't have eye contact, they're as virtual as if they were playing Doom on an office network. But the duo find that this way works much better. They make a virtue out of necessity, out of the surprisingly basic resources and the duo's instinctive partnership. "Any more people working on-air would only complicate things," Barry says.

Leon's standard message to callers is quick, no-nonsense, formulaic: "Rock 104 - you're through - right - what's your number - OK put your phone down and I'll ring you back." It starts as a steady trickle, then peaks between 12.40 and 1.20 a.m., when the ratings shoot off the graph and the telephone exchange explodes.

"They've settled down by then, they've sobered up slightly," Barry says. I sneak a peek at my watch's stopwatch function: during one frenetic eighty-second burst, Leon takes seven incoming calls - just eleven-and-a-half seconds a call. His fingers flash around the switchboard, the perfect touch-typist. And all the while he's queuing up the best calls, and giving Barry rapid-fire directions in his left headphone. "It's the way he does it," Barry says, "just barely enough information - he doesn't do a 'War and Peace' on it."

Their perennial topics include "politicians, the Church, sex, contraception, all the taboos you can mention", often "the same subject from a different angle". They usually start with a fairly light item: on the show I'm sitting in on, for example, broadcaster Shay Healy is on the phone defending a "sex scene" sketch in RTE's satirical show Nighthawks. Remember Nighthawks? "It's not the A to Z of Irish sex," he jokes, "more like the A to B." And all the time, the calls are mounting up.

Oliver is just ringing to say the show's great.

Sandra leaves her number (Leon instantly recognises the sound of a pay-phone), but there's no reply when he calls her back.

Susan's perpetually engaged.

Leon asks Derek in another phone booth to "bear with us".

Coin-boxes, working-class accents mostly, with the dialling codes of the marginal suburbs.

* * * *

Turning everything into one long word, a young woman on a manic line says how she's-a-regular-listener-but-they're-just-in-from-the-pub so-can-we-tell-her-what-the-debate's-about-tonight? Then Leon tries to quiz Mary on how she feels about Marie's point, but now Mary's ten feet from the phone. You can just about hear her in the distance, chatting with a mate. Carol is back: "I loss me nerves, I don't think I wanna go on." It's only twelve minutes into the first debate, and Leon has already filtered several dozen callers. On a normal night, he will easily log a hundred or more.

Shay Healy departs at 12.30, and their first record serves as a mood-break for the next piece. Barry gently draws the details out of a woman whose son is being bullied - at the same time he's scribbling keywords to keep some idea of the direction.

Carol sympathises on line two.

Brian's on hold.

There's Siobhan and her battered niece on line one. The DJ takes a back seat as a head-to-head develops between two listeners.

Another info-bullet from Leon: "Guy on line ONE. He's seventeen, FIFTH-form, being bullied at school. [Called] COLIN. He's VERY EMOTIONAL, Chris, be careful." So Colin is connected, a wobbling young voice on the verge of tears, says he can'this mouth without them jeering at him. It's gonna be the highpoint of the night.

Ken comes on, then they lose him, then he's back ("but call me Paul"). A night-worker is worried the boss might catch him on the phone. It's now 1.15 and Leon has stacked another eight "good" calls on hold. Most won't even get on the air.

The next voice turns out to be a rambler - they politely ditch him after twenty seconds. Then just after two o'clock they wind up the subject and take more records, with a pre-recorded piece by "youff" journalist Jonathan Philbin Bowman as another light mood-breaker. Remember Jonathan Philbin Bowman?

At three o'clock it's all over. Back to the records and a few greetings to the lads in the twenty-four-hour factory in Finglas. And Leon is still only half-way through his shift - he's also the DJ in the four a.m. slot, working away through the margins of the night.

* * * *

But margins can also be deceptive. Most of the time the margin of anything is supposed to be insignificant and worthless. Yet when you actually look at how changes occur - in politics or art, in rock or dance music, or films or science - the margins are often far more interesting and important. It's the outer edges, rather than the mainstream areas at the so-called centre of things, which determine the overall shape and direction.

In elections, for example, the dead certs in the safe seats are taken for granted. All eyes are on the dark horses, the floating votes and key marginals. The same is often true about all the biggest and most important changes in Irish radio: they come not from the "inside", at the centre, but on the periphery.

The pressure for pop radio didn't come from RTE or governments, or middle-aged/middle-class civil servants, but from the outsiders, the mavericks on the furthest fringes. And when some of the pirates mutated into the new licensed stations of the late 1980s, most of them didn't copy RTE's most successful formats and shows; they didn't clone or buy up the Gay Byrnes and Marian Finucanes (though some did try). Instead, many of them took previously sideline areas such as golden oldie shows and turned them into entire programming formats. Or very specific seams of music. Or they concentrated on very local news and chat, on things considered far too parochial and peripheral by the national networks, and made it their own.

One of the biggest but least obvious changes on Irish radio in the past two decades has been at night-time, the ultimate marginalised area. It took the pirates to bring around-the-clock broadcasting in the late Seventies, and Radio 2FM followed a decade later - it began 24-hour broadcasting in July 1987; RTE Radio 1 took decades to go 24 hours, then it pitched journalist Vincent Browne against the phone-ins of Chris Barry and Father Michael Cleary (remember him?) on the Dublin commercial stations.

The early hours are where you often find new forms fermenting away. They're hidden by the dark until they are simply too big to avoid. Gerry Ryan of 2FM is a classic example: after the wilderness years of late-night radio, digging away in the graveyard shift, picking up the tricks and making all his learning-mistakes in semi-privacy, he was transferred to prime time and became a household name. The pirates and the new licensed stations broke the limits and changed Irish radio culture for ever. Theyd up the floodgates on the margins, and smashed the myth that radio in Ireland had to be a six a.m. to midnight affair ...

* * * *

"Night-time radio is completely different," Chris Barry says. "The presentation and the audience are different, it's possibly the last hour before they go to bed." He argues that this kind of radio "can't be too predictable, it has to go from deadly serious to trivial, 'light and shade' as they say, it's designed that way."

Who listens? "Insomniacs, people who work nights, taxi drivers, nightclubs, a lot of twenty-four-hour food joints - and thousands of people in their homes who won't stop listening until the item's over." And a large section of unemployed people too, who are less likely to have the workaday demarcations between night and day. Roughly sixty per cent of their callers are male, depending on the subject. And as for politicians and their spin-doctors, they cut them off immediately "if they're vote-catching".

Night owls, DJs included, are a breed apart, he says.

"What social life?", he shrugs off the next obvious question. "People have this idea that it must be great - you work all night so you have all day free - that's my pet hate. You still have to sleep."

Barry's first big break was on Radio Nova, the Irish super-pirate of the early Eighties. Then when that wave of pirates disappeared he shifted to Riviera Radio in Monaco, broadcasting in three languages. He feels his show on Rock 104 is giving a space to people who simply don't get the chance on the much more tightly structured daytime phone-ins. And often that can mean "extreme" views, views that people either love or hate.

"People get uncomfortable about it, but they're there, and they're real, and we can't ignore them. I'm not saying that we'd get someone from the Nazi party on the air, but these are the views of a lot of Irish people."

* * * *

Postscript: In spring 1998 Barry was poached by rival station 98FM, and the DJ and his former employers at FM104 became embroiled in legal actions. And where is he now? I haven't a clue.

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 05, 2003

Fantasy Netnewstracker

Nowadays I only make an occasional dip into Google Groups (formerly known as Usenet newsgroups before Dejanews then Google took them over). Some newsgroups have a very low signal-to-noise ratio, others seem to have been hijacked by rabid neo-nazi lunatics. And that's just alt.toys.barbie

But newsgroups do have some great stuff buried in there. Suppose it was based a bit more selectively on "push" rather than "pull" technology - where you could set some search terms and sit back, waiting for an email notification when you get some hits among the latest posts? A bit like Google Alerts, but for newsgroups rather than websites?

One site that does it, mostly as a free service, is Netnewstracker.com. It was set up by freelance writer Kevin Savetz, and it does a daily trawl for you of Google Groups for the phrases you choose, and notifies you when there are new hits.

Anyone else using it? Here are some examples Kevin gives, though you should know them if you've taken time to read Google's own helpfiles:

underwood typewriter -- searches for posts with both words somewhere in the message

"underwood typewriter" -- searches for posts with that exact phrase

"+www.underwood.+com" -- (note the quotes and +s) searches for that URL only. Without the +s you can get lots of extraneous hits.

underwood -typewriter -- excludes articles that include the word after the minus sign

insubject:"underwood" -- (note no space after the colon) only shows articles with your phrase in the subject line

author:"Anna Nicole" -- only finds articles with that name in the From: line

author: -- only finds articles with that e-mail address in the From: line

... add group:alt.typewriters -- to your search phrase to limit the search to a single newsgroup

... add group:comp.* -- to your search phrase to limit it to all comp groups.

He also suggests trying your search at Google Groups first, just to make sure you get the kind of hits you want, and obviously it "works best with search phrases that come up relatively infrequently".

I thought I'd give the service a try - It's free for up to three search phrases. Best to give it some fairly straightforward stuff such as:

caravaggio berlusconi hoax

author:"Bill Gates"

...or let's just play Fantasy Netnewstracker, a new game I've just invented in which you get alerts for stuff you'd basically just like to read that hasn't quite happened yet, e.g.

"irish government" collapses

"nudie pics" "senator mary o'rourke"

author:"Osama bin Laden"

"mary harney" explodes

bertie ahern new mistress add group:soc.culture.irish

Posted by mick cunningham at 02:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 02, 2003

Gotcha! (part two)

Forget about the "one bad apple" stories, such as the recent media kerfuffle about one New York Times reporter who made up stuff.

There are far more intrinsic, widespread, profoundly system-entrenched and subconscious problems within our national newspapers and broadcasting organisations.

There are dangers out there that you'll rarely hear much about in the mainstream media, but which are seriously shaping the way they report the news. Here are just half a dozen of them...

A cut-and-paste mentality - this increasingly governs daily journalism. It's far easier to copy and paste a paragraph or two, deadlines seem to be tighter than ever, productivity is expected to be higher and higher, fuck originality, and god help the traditional idea of checking all them pesky facts.
Spin city. An entire substrata of parasitical PR people and spinmeisters exploit this weakness - a "good" media release is one that can be digested quickly and easily by the media machine (at the end of the day, this means by an overworked hack coming up to deadline) so that it's reproduced in the media in as unmediated a fashion as possible. And when media stop mediating, we're in deep shit.
The "media-will-eat-itself" problem. Once you do manage to plant a story in one media source - a national newspaper, say, or a well-respected major news website - you know that other newspapers and news websites are likely to bite too. Because so much of what the media report today isn't stuff they've actually gone out and found out about, it's stuff they've rehashed, recycled and rewritten from other media, particularly their nearest rivals.
The IT knowledge deficit. Despite managing to learn how to copy and paste, a large number of journalists still have no serious grasp of the Net or of very basic IT tools and techniques. If they've ever used Google, have they ever got past the vary simplest of search techniques? Have they ever used whois? Do they know what an IP number is or where an email really comes from? Could they find out how to read who wrote the different versions of an MS Word document? And if they can't do any of this, do they (a) know who to ask about it, and (b) even know that it's worth asking?
The insularity of journalists when it comes to their own ethics and standards. For example, what was the biggest scandal of P45.net's media hoaxes over the past year? Was it that we were trying to hoodwink the media? Or that they were taken in? Or, worse still, that in some stories - such as the Irish-language speakers arrested by the FBI in Springfield Illinois - some reporters then fabricated extra quotes from these completely fictitious characters?
The buffer zone. Journalists also increasingly have a more general "buffer" between themselves and the rest of civil society, so their mistakes don't come back to haunt them so directly.

Let me explain that last one a bit more. First of all, the traditional career paths in journalism are all but gone. In the 1970s there were no journalism degrees and postgrad journalism courses in Ireland. So a key route to a job in a national newspaper would be the provincial press. It was in a provincial paper that reporters would learn a lot of the basics - how to take accurate notes in the district court, how to get the people's names right at the local agricultural show - and if you didn't get them right, they'd let you know about it in no uncertain terms.

And if you wrote an opinionated piece about them, you'd know full well that you'd have to live with it - because you'd be living in the same town as these people.

The provincial press would give you a good grounding in all these things, in slogging away at the facts, in checking facts, in taking care not to opinionate too much and knowing exactly where and when you could let those opinions loose.

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 01, 2003

Gotcha! (part one)

Understandably, some journalists have been somewhat "prickly" about some of P45.net's most recent media pranks.

Creating false stories to see if them ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate would gobble them up? How dare we.

Feeding them totally made up stuff, from football players' transfer moves to movies about corrupt Irish politicians to Italian prime minister Berlusconi wanting that Caravaggio painting back? What kind of mad or mischievous people would do that? And do it mainly for the crack? Some bloody nerve.

OK, I'm paraphrasing and speculating a bit, but you get my drift. Then, instead of concentrating on finding out how/what/why/where/when these things happened, some of the journos became ultra-defensive. After all, this is "some of their own" we've been having a go at. A profession, a bunch of people who tend to know one another, and who band together when they're under threat. (And I've seen similar stuff at first hand - after all, I myself have been known to dabble in a bit of journalism from time to time).

But why are journalists really under threat? What are the real dangers facing journalism today (besides the concentration of ownership in just a handful of companies)?

Why does the general public have a growing and very significant mistrust of this particular profession - apart, of course, from Veronica and Orla Guerin, who are both saints?

To be continued/...

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack