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Alt-rock
Trixie Whitley 'Porta Bohemica' due early March 2016
Album release: 'Porta Bohemica' by Trixie Whitley
Release date: March 2016
Label: Strong Blood Music/BMI
More info: Artist website
Porta Bohemica is the name of an old train line that once connected Germany and Austria. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Trixie Whitley, was inspired by the concept of such remote journeys when choosing a title for her latest album. Her sophomore release, Porta Bohemica (Strong Blood Music/BMI), represents an introspective expedition into the depths of her creative identity, culminating in her resolve to fearlessly let go of gratuitous baggage, not needed on future travels.
"The metaphor of an old train line feeds something in my imagination. I related to that sense of travel when making this record because it was an epic undertaking. It involved letting go of my past to embrace my individuality both as a young woman and as an artist. This record has been something of a rebirth for me," the Brooklyn-based artist says.
Trixie Whitley was born in Belgium in 1987 and re-located to NYC the following year. When she was three years old she and her mother, a philosopher and healer, return to Belgium.
From a very young age, Trixie Whitley nurtured a singular creative spirit, springing from her restless inner directive. Art is inherent in her genetics: she is the daughter of the late Chris Whitley, a renowned blues musician and innovative writer; her great-grandfather was Georges Minne , a sculptor and artist, muse and contemporary of both Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele; her grandfather was an upright bass player; her Grandmother was a model, anarchist and bronze sculptor. At the ripe age of three, she made her onstage debut alongside her father. Never resting on her lineage, Trixie set out to craft a unique personal and artistic identity. At age 10, she picked up her first instrument, the drums. The following year, at age 11, she emerged as an intrepid DJ; with residencies at Modern Art Museums and underground festivals, spinning electronica, free jazz, and hip-hop. Throughout her teenage years, she toured with several avant-garde theater and dance groups throughout Europe; including Les Ballets C de la B, Sidi Larbi and Cherkaoui.
Throughout all of this, she developed an affinity for punk rock's nonconformist and D.I.Y. ethics that permeated her fearless genre-bending and daring life choices. After a nomadic transatlantic existence, living between New York and Belgium, and touring throughout Europe with several contemporary dance companies in her early teens, she quit high school at age 16 and took a job slinging burgers at dive while steadily advancing her music career. One of her early efforts impressed the iconic producer Daniel Lanois (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris). At the age of 21, she was enlisted to front his own band, Black Dub, playing alongside drummer Brian Blade and bassist Daryl Johnson. The following year the Black Dub self-titled album was released.
Since 2013, Trixie has emerged as a compelling solo artist with three EPs and one full-length in her catalog. Fourth Corner, her self-released, full-length debut, garnered acclaim from MOJO, Interview, ELLE, Relix, The Village Voice, NPR and The New York Times, among many other publications. Through it's success, she's toured internationally and earned three nominations, as well as a win for Best Female Artist at the 2013 Belgium Music Industry Awards (MIAs). She has performed and recorded with such artists as Robert Plant, Marianne Faithful, Meshell Ndegeocello, Daniel Lanois, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, Joey Waronker, Mark Guiliana, Sam Amidon, and many more.
Trixie's prismatic artistry reflects electronica, R&B, the vulnerable ethos of singer-songwriters, and the unapologetic individuality of punk rock. Although her previous effort reflects her broad tastes, it is with her latest that Trixie creates a transcendent musical miscellany. It even took chucking an earlier version of the record and starting over to achieve the meaning and mastery displayed in Porta Bohemica, which flourished with the help of producer Gus Seyffert (Beck, The Black Keys) and Joey Waronker (Atoms for Peace, Ultraísta).
"I wanted to make people think and feel something honest and emotionally complex in my music--that came from me being present in the creative moment. I ended up finishing two records, the second one being Porta Bohemica, and it really came together at the end of the process," Trixie confides.
The album is bookended by the slow burning "Faint Mystery" and "Visitor." The tracks are stately and spectral, elegantly vulnerable, and convey a desire for lost love in contrasting yet cohesive form. "When I started recording this album, I wanted to tap into complete openness," Trixie explains.
"New Frontiers" puts forth a tender, ethereal soulfulness while "Visitor" cuts to the core with Trixie's honeyed, longing vocals and lonesome piano accompaniment. These tracks are the directional poles of the album, and capture the heart of her artistry. Other standouts include the ominous electronic blues of "Soft Spoken Words" and the lush "Salt." On "Salt," Trixie's vision is at it's grandest with rhythmic piano melodies, atmospheric keys, a big guitar riff, and hypnotic hip-hop beats. Throughout the album, Trixie's lyrics express a resilient emotionality. "I hope my music generates a strength through vulnerability that invites people to be courageous enough to explore what's inside," she says.
Porta Bohemica was nearly a two-year odyssey that profoundly changed the artist. "I came to a lot of realizations making this record," Trixie reveals. "When you let go of your fears, you can start facing your potential and there is an endless palette of possibilities to explore. This is just the beginning, and I feel a lot of excitement and optimism about what's to come."
Porta Bohemica will be released in the UK March 2016. Digital copies available on request.
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Us Amongst The Rest: Follow The Truth
Album release: Follow The Truth by Us Amongst The Rest
Release date: September 29 2014
Label: Two Star Records
Listen: on official Us Amongst The Rest website
Us Amongst The Rest are a four-piece brotherhood of Rock emerging from York. An alliance forged through years of gigs and rival bands, playing since 2012, UATR hold nothing back. Channelling their collective psyche to deliver a raw, focussed, and soulful take on alternative rock, their suitably explosive debut effort Follow The Truth is ground zero, a place from which they hope great things will be born.
Recording the album at InnerSounds Studios with Sam and Joe Graves (Axewound, Glamour of the Kill, Asking Alexandria), and working with such classic and iconic figures, has helped bring together the band's vision for their sound, resulting in an incredibly accomplished debut.
Follow The Truth exemplifies their determination and confidence, and is complimented by an exhilarating honesty. Recent single Bring The Fuel, a track long awaited by a fervent fan-base, is a perfect introduction to newcomers, with its high production values and accomplished musicianship. Elsewhere, tracks like 'Sliver & Lead' and 'Fields of Fray' set the bar high, calling to mind early Funeral For A Friend.
As a back to back body of work, the tracks that make up Follow The Truth stem from the band's own personal struggles, confronting harsh realities, mending relationships, love, loss and ultimately the desire to follow your own path. Perhaps it's the album's penultimate track Rise that sets out the band's intentions perfectly, as vocalist Karl Sandor comments; "As a band (and like all bands) the struggle we faced was to swim out of a sea of musicians, all fighting to be heard. Especially in the town we are from it seems there are almost more bands than there are audiences to listen to them. We unintentionally wrote an album to better define us in our hometown of York".
Us Amongst The Rest are:
Karl Sandor – Bass, vocals
Danny Beardmore – Guitars
Paul Fernandez – Drums
Dan Stockdale – Guitars
Of Montreal announce new album
Album release: lousy with sylvianbriar
Release date: 8 October 2013
Label: Polyvinyl
Listen: Stream new single fugitive air here
Defining Of Montreal is impossible. There are too many perspectives to consider, angles to explore and layers to uncover. Just when you think you have a concept of what kind of creature they are they transform into something unexpected and new. As a result, each album holds the opportunity for re-discovery, re-immersion, re-appreciation.
On lousy with sylvianbriar, this paradigm holds true once more. The record was created with a new songwriting approach, a different recording method, and a fresh group of musicians. Seeking creative inspiration, Kevin Barnes re-located to San Francisco where he spent days soaking in the strange surroundings and channeling the city's energy into his writing. After a very prolific period there, he returned to Athens, GA and assembled the cast of musicians to begin the sessions.
Barnes eschewed computer recording, with its pitch correction, limitless effects plug ins and editing possibilities. Instead, with the help of engineer Drew Vandenberg (Deerhunter, Toro y Moi), he recorded lousy with sylvianbriar in his home studio on a 24 track tape machine. With no computer tricks to fall back on, the band - Kevin Barnes (guitars, bass, vocals), Rebecca Cash (vocals),Clayton Rychlik (drums, vocals), Jojo Glidewell (keys), Bob Parins (pedal steel, bass), and Bennet Lewis (guitars, mandolin) - could only get out of the recordings what they put into them. Most of the tracking was recorded live with the band in the same room together. They worked quickly, with the band members composing their parts on the fly with little second guessing. The album was recorded in just three weeks.
"I knew I wanted the process to be more in line with the way people used to make albums in the late 60s and early 70s," reveals Barnes. "I wanted to work fast and to maintain a high level of spontaneity and immediacy. I wanted the songs to be more lyric driven, and for the instrumental arrangements to be understated and uncluttered".
Opening track and lead single fugitive air feels like a Stones-y anthem, with sparks of Philip K Dick's psychedelic prose, Ralph Bakshi's cartoon violence and William S Burroughs' hyper-paranoia. "belle glade missionaries" finds Barnes lyrically at his most political, backed by a soundtrack that is pure Dylan circa Highway 61 Revisited.
Female vocalist Rebecca Cash makes several appearances on the album, taking the lead on the plaintive raindrop in my skull, where her and Barnes share a Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris-inspired duet.
she ain't speakin' now ranks among Of Montreal's all-time great songs, transforming its brooding acoustic guitar intro into a visceral angst-ridden rocker that sounds like the best moments of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. The album's closer "imbecile rages", a caustic and doleful epitaph for a crumbling relationship, is one of Barnes' most raw and personal statements.
Like the classic albums that inspired it, this is an album to be explored, to be lived with, to be listened to in happiness and in darkness, to be dissolved into. To be played very loudly at parties and with eyes closed, in headphones, alone. It should become dog-eared and dirty with use and it should lessen the blow of our enemies, in all of their forms.
The album will be available digitally, on tape, CD and 180-gram vinyl. 1500 copies of vinyl will be clear green vinyl and available through Polyvinyl's E-store exclusively, while the other retail copies will be pink vinyl. Cassette edition limited to 250 hand-numbered copies on green cassettes, courtesy of Joyful Noise Recordings.
Preorder on Polyvinyl here.
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - 4th album out 17 September
Album release: Fly By Wire by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
Release date: 17 September
Missouri-based indie-pop trio Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin has debuted the first single, Nightwater Girlfriend, from their forthcoming album, Fly By Wire, with Stereogum. Out September 17th on Polyvinyl, the album will be available on CD/Digital, 180-gram coke bottle clear vinyl with a gatefold jacket and collage-style pull-out poster, a special limited edition red/white vinyl exclusively for mail-order, and red cassette tape.
For this new album, the members of SSLYBY returned to the attic where they made their debut full-length Broom, but first they took a 5000 mile detour. After the Boris Yeltsin Foundation in Yekaterinburg, Russia extended an invitation to the band, Phil Dickey, Will Knauer, and Jonathan James spent a whirlwind six days in their namesake's home country this past January: meeting with Yeltsin's close friends and personal translator (who gifted them seven bottles of expensive Russian vodka) and performing at an elementary school after the U.S. consulate named them cultural ambassadors for a day. The trip concluded with a set at Old Nu Rock, making SSLYBY the first American group to play at Russia's largest winter rock festival.
Despite all of its empowering moments, this once-in-a-lifetime adventure also marked a turning point for SSLYBY."I used to joke that we would break up if Boris Yeltsin ever found out about our band," says Dickey. "So I figured this was either the death or rebirth of the band." Happily, it turned out to be the latter. With no one pressuring them to start work on a new album, SSLYBY decided to anyway for the best reason of all - because they simply wanted to. Rejuvenated by the sights they saw and people they met, the three musicians returned home eager to start work on a new full-length. With this desire in mind, there was no better location for Fly By Wire to come together than in the place that started it all: the attic of Knauer's parent's house where SSLYBY recorded their breakout debut album, Broom. The band is releasing a documentary about their life-changing trip this summer, called Discussions With Russians. Watch the trailer here.
Drawing as much from the pop-punk power chords their brains were wired to love as teens in the late 90s, as the multi-layered pop of the 60's and 7'0s they strive to emulate, SSLYBY has been writing songs for over a decade based on the timeless principles of beautiful melodies and good harmonies. From the scuzzy-paired-with-sunny guitar rhythms on handclap-aided first single, Nightwater Girlfriend, to the mid-tempo electro-pop of Harrison Ford, the songs on Fly By Wire are just plain fun to listen to. As a result, the music they create is nothing if not universal. And even though it took a trip to Russia for the band to be reminded of this, one listen to Fly By Wire is all you'll need.
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Wiretree's fourth album, Get Up, to be released on 19 August
Album release: Get Up by Wiretree
Release date: 19 August 2013
Label: Cobaltworks Music
Listen: on official site
Wiretree began as the solo recording project of singer-songwriter Kevin Peroni. After releasing the LP Bouldin in 2007, Peroni recruited other band members to solidify the project. The group released their sophomore effort Luck in 2009, which made its way to numerous year-end Best Of lists, labeled by Blurt Magazine as their "Best Kept Secret". The band have since appeared at SXSW, featured on Austin City Limits and toured Europe. This year the band will play China's biggest music festival, The Strawberry Music Festival, alongside acts like Deerhoof and Travis.
Wiretree's mission statement for Get Up reads thus: unite diverse songs in a compatible way. Peroni, an Austin native, spent his life listening to music from the UK with The La's, Radiohead, The Kinks all currying favour while sitting side by side US artists such as Grandaddy and Dylan. Each of these bands influenced what would become this beautiful patchwork album. Take Us Away beats like a Shins comedown, while elsewhere much of the album is guided by the power pop light of Big Star.
It was a conscious decision then to create an album that sounded homegrown and carefree, the general feeling being that too many modern albums are left feeling overly clinical, sterile and precise. The recording process itself was varied. Some songs were recorded live with the whole band (So Bold, To the Moon), other songs recorded alone (Marching Band, When You Were Young). The remaining songs were done in various studios, using different equipment and producers resulting in sonically different approaches to match the writing of each song. Peroni admits that when these new songs were birthed, it wasn't with the intention of them becoming an album, which perhaps going someway to explain the resulting diversity.
Of the album, Peroni says:
"The album before, I tried using only one producer, I let the band members push the music to more of a rocking sound, and that was good for the time, but it made me want to get back to the roots of how I hear music in my head. I think this new album is one of the most revealing in terms of how I hear and create music in my head."
For many, such diversity might signal a band yet to discover their true direction. But for Wiretree, now four albums in, their path couldn't be more clear-cut; write the songs you want to listen to.
"There are traces of Britpop's cool factor and The Shangri-Las' lilt and sway" - Under The Radar
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Jane's Addiction: Live in NYC - album / DVD out 8 July
Album /DVD release: Jane's Addiction: Live In NYC
Release date: 8 July 2013
Label: Capitol / UMC
From the beginning, Jane's Addiction have thrown the most unique parties in rock, mixing a fierce musicality with theatrical flair onstage. 2012 saw the band — who've always outrageously combined electricity, sex and danger — return to the stage in support of their acclaimed album The Great Escape Artist (Capitol Records).
Live in NYC was filmed in New York City at Terminal 5 on December 29th, 2012 during a special run of North American shows—called "Theatre of the Escapists"- with the band performing in intimate venues, most of which are classic theatres. The alternative rock pioneers — frontman Perry Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins, along with Chris Chaney on bass — captured this immersive theatrical experience on tape and are making available via Live in NYC on multiple formats.
"We chose to play as many of the great theatres that we could find because we wanted to immerse the audience in a unique experience unlike any they have ever seen at a rock show," said FARRELL in the band's tour announcement. "Expect an orgy of musical and visual delights. We like orgies, and hope you do too."
The album will be released on the following formats: Digital, DVD and Blu-ray (running time 69 mins), DVD & CD, CD – both with 12 page booklets and sticker and also double vinyl LP – which is the first live vinyl release since 1987's self-titled on Triple X Records.
Ain't No Right
Ted, Just Admit It...
Been Caught Stealing
Irresistible Force (Met The Immovable Object)
Up the Beach
Ocean Size
Mountain Song
Encore: Jane Says
Owen to release new album, 'L'Ami du Peuple'
Album release: L'Ami du Peuple by Owen
Listen: on Polyvinyl site
The songs Mike Kinsella writes as Owen have always had rock solid lyrical foundations. And on new album, L'Ami du Peuple, the same can be said for the music. Emphasis on the rock.
Anyone vaguely familiar with Kinsella's musical lineage (Cap'n Jazz, American Football, Owls) knows he's far from a one-note musician. And now, he expands his repertoire as a solo songwriter to include a touch of female vocals, pounding drums, and even dueling electric guitar lines that are the closest thing he's done in tribute to his 80s hair metal obsession.
The variety of sounds featured on L'Ami du Peuple can largely be attributed to a new approach Kinsella took to the writing and recording process. Rather than locking himself in a room with mostly finished song ideas for a couple of weeks before emerging with a finished album, this time Kinsella involved producer Neil Strauch (Iron & Wine, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Andrew Bird) from the very beginning and spaced out recording over a few month period.
This enabled him to naturally bring a different mood or vibe to the material he was working on every time he entered the studio - re-evaluating what had been recorded during the previous session and collaborating with Strauch on the direction new songs should take.
As a result, L'Ami du Peuple sounds markedly different than any album Kinsella has released under the Owen moniker.
From the electronic blips and hand claps that punctuate I Got High to the ragtime piano melody running through Where Do I Begin? each track possesses a unique and surprising identity.
"In the past I've stifled a bunch of my influences and leaned on a couple consistently, but this time I just let each song happen as I heard them and had a lot of fun trying some new things," Kinsella reveals.
The benefits of this "anything goes" mindset are plainly apparent on album centerpiece Bad Blood -- a track propelled by a quasi-country stomp that explodes halfway through with an electric guitar solo before dovetailing into a closing crescendo.
Bad Blood also affirms that lyrically Kinsella remains as raw and personal as ever. As the title suggests, the song finds Kinsella lamenting his pedigree: "Bad blood / Hereditary law you can't run away from / (Trust me, I've tried)."
This focus on familial relationships occurs often, but with the addition of a new angle on top of those Kinsella has adopted previously Now the parent of two children, Kinsella finds his perspective on life inevitably shifting from being a "son" to being a "father."
This role reversal adds a new dimension to Kinsella's self-examination of his thoughts and fears. As he explains, "Instead of being a son whose father passed away, I've moved on to being the father afraid of passing."
His anxiety at life passing by too quickly is evident on closing track Vivid Dreams: "How long have I been sleeping? / I'm a dad and my dad's dead."
The question he poses doesn't come with an easy answer, but for an artist like Kinsella who is constantly evolving and reinventing himself, death is just an opportunity for rebirth.
New album from Aimee Mann out 17 September 2012
Album release: Charmer by Aimee Mann
Release date: 17 September 2012
Label: Proper
Listen: http://www.aimeemann.com/
"One of the finest songwriters of her generation." — The New York Times
"One of the top 10 living songwriters along with Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen." — NPR
The long-awaited new album from Aimee Mann, Charmer, will be released in the UK on September 17 by Proper Records. Influenced by what Mann calls the "superpop" of the 70s and 80s, the album is her first release since 2008's celebrated @#%&*! Smilers, which the BBC website called "undeniably beautiful."
Of Charmer, her eighth studio album, Mann comments, "I'm fascinated by charming people and the whole idea of charm. It's hard to remember sometimes that there is usually an agenda behind the act of being charming, and that is what I'm most interested in. Is someone's charm being utilized just to try and entertain people, make them feel special and interesting, or is there a more sinister purpose behind it? Sometimes I think 'charm' can just be another word for 'manipulation.'"
The album also includes a duet with James Mercer of The Shins on Living a Lie. Mann will support the new album with tour dates this autumn.
Charmer was produced by longtime friend and band member Paul Bryan and recorded with Ryan Freeland (Ray LaMontagne, Bonnie Raitt) at Stampede Origin in Los Angeles. Bryan joins Mann on the album, among many other friends and collaborators including J.J. Johnson, Jebin Bruni and Jamie Edwards. Mann wrote all of songs on the album, though two, Living a Lie and Soon Enough are collaborations with Paul Bryan and Tim Heidecker, respectively.
Mann began her solo career in 1993 with the album Whatever and made a name for herself through her independent success and the founding of her record label, SuperEgo. In addition to her solo work, she has appeared on many film soundtracks and composed the soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson's much-lauded Magnolia. Since @#%&*! Smilers, Mann has performed for President Obama and the First Lady at the White House, appeared as herself on the hit indie TV series Portlandia and fast become an internet darling. Named one of The Huffington Post's "13 Funny Musicians You Should Be Following On Twitter," Mann has gained a diehard social media following for her quick wit and stinging observation, much of which is reflected on the new album.
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Japandroids - new album, single and UK dates
Album release: Celebration Rock by Japandroids
Release date: June 5 2012
Listen: www.japandroids.com/
Vancouver duo Japandroids' long awaited follow-up to their critically-acclaimed 2009 debut, Post-Nothing, will see its release this summer. Celebration Rock will be available June 5th on Polyvinyl Record Co. On May 15, Brian King (vocals, guitar) and Dave Prowse (vocals, drums) will release the first single off the record, The House That Heaven Built as the 4th installment of their 7" series, which also features a B-Side cover of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Jack The Ripper. Listen to the track at www.japandroids.com or read more about the release below.
King recently talked to Pitchfork about recording the album, which was created in Vancouver at The Hive with engineer Jesse Gander, who they had previously worked with on Post-Nothing:
"On a lot of this new record, we actually tried to simulate the sound of what we thought the crowd would do during the songs," says King. "Dave and I were in the studio just screaming out as if we were in the audience at our own show."
Read the full Pitchfork story here:
http://pitchfork.com/news/45701-japandroids-talk-new-album/
Celebration Rock, featuring eight new tracks, will be available on CD/LP/Digital. There is also a limited edition of 1,000 on 180-gram red vinyl available for pre-order at http://polyvinylrecords.com/celebrationrock
Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to the stream of Japandroids' new single, The House That Heaven Built, the band has decided to move up its digital release - it's available now. It also features a b-side of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Jack The Ripper. The 7" will still be available on May 15.
Starting mid-May, Japandroids will head out on what will be a long road of touring. Dates are below.
Japandroids 2012 UK dates
17/5 Cardiff Club Ifor Bach
18/5 Brighton Green Door Store
19/5 Netherlands London Calling/ Paradiso
21/5 Bristol Cooler
22/5 London CAMP Basement
23/5 Manchester Soup Kitchen
24/5 Glasgow King Tuts
25/5 Leeds Cockpit 2
28/5 London Garage
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New EP from acclaimed Irish alt-rock band Susie Soho
EP Release: Susie Soho, Twelve Twenty Seven
Listen / free MP3 download: http://www.susiesoho.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=54
November 25 sees the release Twelve Twenty Seven, the new EP from Meteor-nominated Irish band Susie Soho (the Meteors are Ireland's equivalent of the Brit Awards). The alternative-rock four piece – whose members have opened for and shared the stage with artists such as Damien Rice, The Frames, Mundy, and Damien Dempsey – are also doing a series of live performances around the country this Autumn to promote the release.
Featuring Jason Maher on bass, Niall Campion on guitar and Mia Fitzgerald on drums, Susie Soho was formed by singer and guitarist Tony Fitz in 2009. Describing themselves as "the kind of band you'd get if Dave Grohl and Gemma Hayes had some kind of musical lovechild", their catchy, guitar-driven songs blend a distinctively Irish sound with US-tinged alternative rock.
The band made their live debut at Oxegen 2009; this was followed in 2010 with a Meteor Award nomination for Most Promising Artist and the release of their debut album, Where All The Ladders Start. This record was mixed by renowned Greek electro-acoustic composer and producer Anthony P. (aLfa.P, Stereo Nova, Supermarket) and mastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road Studios (Gorillaz, Coldplay, Lily Allen).
Twelve Twenty Seven was recorded at Windmill Lane studios and features four songs. The EP's themes range from the personal (Your Way Or Not At All; An Eye for an Eye) to the political (Stand Up, which was released as a single in the run up to the last Irish general election), with one track taking cynics to task along the way (Making Taste).
Susie Soho's EP features melodies you can't shake from your head, driving guitar riffs and a punchy, in-your-face alternative rock sound. With these excellent tracks in the can, and new material on the way, they are a band to definitely keep an eye on.
Random facts / talking points:
The band name comes from the the title of the 2000 jazz album "Good Morning Susie Soho" by the Esbjorn Svensson Trio.
Tony Fitz got physics lessons from Dominic of Bellx1, back when Bellx1 and Damien Rice were still Juniper. One thing led to another and Tony ended up opening shows and playing lead guitar for Damien Rice.
Tony has also played with The Frames, and with the late Mic Christopher. It was a great honour for Tony to later be asked by Mic's family to perform at the launch of his album a year after his death, and a New Year's Eve special performance on RTE in his memory.
The band have worked in classic studios such as Abbey Road, London and Windmill Lane, Dublin and are obsessed with studio gear and obscure recording equipment.
The EP's Stand Up track (a recent single) was written as both a commentary on the causes of the anger and frustration that people all over Ireland were feeling in the final days of the last government, when things were looking more and more bleak, and as a call for people to get involved in the process of turning the country around.
Niall has worked professionally in film and television graphics for many years. As well as working on high profile graphics jobs for RTE and the BBC, he has also edited a number of film projects, including Domhnall Gleeson's hugely successful short "Noreen". In addition to directing videos for the band's own music, Niall has made videos for Damien Rice, Frank and Walters, Hybrasil, Bellx1 and Saso.
For more information about Susie Soho, or to request an interview, please email Chris Singleton on chris@prescriptionpr.co.uk or call +44 (0)7790 591707. For live dates, please see www.susiesoho.com.
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CW's "Nancy Drew" Kennedy McMann's Wiki – Age, Boyfriend
Who is Kennedy McMann?
Born on October 30, 1996 in Holland, Michigan, USA, Kennedy McMann is an actress, probably best known for her work on the television series "Nancy Drew", which airs on the CW. She plays the role of the titular character, which is based on the popular book character that has been around since the 1930s.
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Kennedy McMann's Net Worth
As of mid-2020, Kennedy McMann's net worth is estimated to be over $100,000, earned through a successful acting career, even though she's only been in the business for a few years. She was also involved in many other projects, some for charity.
While Kennedy was born in Michigan, her family later moved to Mesa, Arizona, where she would grow up. Her father worked as an actor, while her mother was a novelist, writing mainly in the youth genre. At a young age, Kennedy developed a love of reading books and music, both encouraged by her mother. Shed later attended Skyline High School, the youngest of all the schools in her area.
It was during this time that she discovered acting and became interested in it because you could play characters from books. She also loved stories, as she played a lot of table games in her youth. In high school, she was part of the Performing Arts Club and was also a member of the Valley Youth Theater (VYT).
After graduating, she continued her education and enrolled in a Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is a highly prestigious private university, responsible for many notable alumni in science and the performing arts.
After graduating in 2017, Kennedy found her first professional role on the television series "Away", in which she portrayed Sara Moreland. Based on a series of books written by Michael Grant, the show tells the story of a fictional Southern California town where most of the residents suddenly disappear, while those left behind are trapped in a deadly barrier.
Kennedy McMann
After that event, many of its citizens experience developing supernatural powers, with some leaning more toward good while others become antagonists. All the while, a creature roams the area. The book series has been very successful, with two seasons released based on the and nine novels to date.
After her job there, she made a guest appearance on the television series "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," which airs on NBC and follows a fictionalized version of the New York City Police Department and their Special Victims Unit. The show focuses on victims of sexual crimes such as domestic violence, rape, pedophilia and abuse.
The show is the second in the "Law & Order" franchise and is one of the longest running shows in the US, making it one of the most recognized in the entire franchise. It has won numerous awards during its run.
In 2019, Kennedy was cast in her biggest role to date, as famed detective Nancy Drew in a series of the same name, based on the 1930s mystery novel series of the same name. The character was created by Edward Stratemeyer as a companion and counterpart to the novels "Hardy Boys". Over the years, the character has taken various forms, often modernized to fit the current culture.
 https://t.co/Q2lzoaNZZ
— Kennedy McMann (@kennedymcmann) May 12, 2020
In the 1980s, romance became a common sub-theme in her books, and the novels have been adapted numerous times for both film and television.
The show began production in 2015, but due to numerous network disagreements, it was eventually moved to the CW in 2018. The show features a reinterpretation of several characters from the books, with some of her co-stars including Leah Lewis, Maddison Jaizani, and Tunji Kasim. The show has been running for over a season and is renewed to continue production. Its reception has been mixed, with most critics arguing that this new series doesn't add anything to what other shows have already established in the character, making it nothing special.
Despite that, the role has significantly boosted Kennedy's career.
In addition to his work, McMann offers services through vide, charging low fees for creating short videos for events or others. All proceeds from her work go to charity and she can be contacted through the Cameo website, a hub of past and present celebrities looking to earn a little extra or give back to the community. It has grown into a very large site, with actors, athletes, models and many others offering their personalized video messages.
Kennedy also spends some of her free time playing and promoting the table game"Dungeons and Dragons", considered to be one of the oldest table games and a precursor to the role-playing genre. It allows players to become characters in a fantasy world, often of different races with the ability to fight, use magic and interact with the world. Each game or session is handled by a Dungeon Master, who oversees the world the characters play in and the decisions they make. The game has become very popular in recent years thanks to its fame from celebrities and the internet.
Kennedy is single and there are no reports of past or current romantic relationships on her way. She is still young and has actually just started her acting career, which may mean that she is more focused on work than on long-term relationships. She stays very close to her family anyway and spends time with them whenever she can. She also has a dog that she posts regularly on social media. She admits that she is a big fan of reality television and follows many shows of her liking.
1 Who is Kennedy McMann?
2 Kennedy McMann's Net Worth
3 Early life and education
4 Career Start
5 Nancy drew
6 Other projects
7 Private life
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Ines Rau Plastic Surgery: before and after looks
People are curious about The plastic surgery of Ines Rau and the results she got. Read on to learn more about plastic surgery...
Kimberly Anne Scott Wiki – Where Is Eminem's Ex-Wife Today?
Known from moviesEminem aka 2004as an actressPrime time 2003as herself - Mother of Eminem (segment "The Real EminShort informationDate of...
1 CW's "Nancy Drew" Kennedy McMann's Wiki – Age, Boyfriend
1.2 Who is Kennedy McMann?
1.3 Kennedy McMann's Net Worth
1.4 Early life and education
1.5 Career Start
1.6 Nancy drew
1.7 Other projects
1.8 Private life
1.8.2 Ines Rau Plastic Surgery: before and after looks
1.8.3 Kimberly Anne Scott Wiki – Where Is Eminem's Ex-Wife Today?

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La musique (et plus généralement l'art sonore) occupe une place importante dans l'audiovisuel.

L'analyse de ses apports ouvre un plan d'explication qui part du constat que l'emploi de musique dans l'audiovisuel est le résultat d'un processus de création de contenus audiovisuels lesquels doivent être considérés comme des œuvres audiovisuelles dans la définition restrictive qu'en font en France le Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel ou le Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) (les œuvres patrimoniales donnant notamment droit au soutien du Cosip) ou dans la définition large qu'en donne le Code de la propriété intellectuelle (CPI, art. L 112.2.) lequel définit l'œuvre audiovisuelle comme .

L'audiovisuel : un concept large
Pour Mario d'Angelo, la présence de la musique dans l'audiovisuel peut être appréhendée à deux niveaux d'analyse différents :
 le niveau du contenu audiovisuel lui-même
L'utilisation de la musique (comme élément de l'art sonore) répond alors à des considérations esthétiques, de styles et de codes chaque fois spécifiques aux concepteurs d'un contenu audiovisuel. Celui-ci dans sa définition large du CPI (séquence animée d'images sonorisées ou non) peut aussi bien être un film, un documentaire, un reportage, un spot publicitaire, un journal télévisé, pour ne citer que quelques exemples de catégories de contenus audiovisuels. Une analyse sémiotique peut être menée pour chercher à expliquer l'interpénétration des composantes du contenu audiovisuel (images, dialogues, action, bruits, musique etc.) en tant que langages.
 le niveau du rapport d'interaction entre la musique et l'audiovisuel considérés chacun comme un ensemble d'acteurs formant deux systèmes organisés
C'est alors l'utilisation, négociée, d'œuvres musicales, donnant lieu à des rémunérations pour leurs ayants droit (auteurs/compositeurs, artistes interprètes, éditeurs, producteurs phonographiques), qui seront versées par les acteurs du système audiovisuel (individus ou organisations) ayant en charge la production et la diffusion des contenus audiovisuels qui comportent ces œuvres musicales.

Dans les programmes télévisuels, la présence de musique correspond à trois situations types :
 la diffusion par les chaînes de télévision de contenus audiovisuels produits antérieurement (par des producteurs extérieurs ou par des producteurs délégués) et dans lesquels des œuvres musicales (originales ou existantes) ont été incorporées ;
 des contenus audiovisuels résultant de captations de spectacles, de cérémonies ou de fêtes comportant de la musique (par exemple, la retransmission du spectacle des Enfoirés pour les Restos du cœur, ou encore l'ouverture des Jeux olympiques avec la musique qui est diffusée in situ) ;
 la musique liée à la sonorisation du flux télévisuel et à l'habillage des antennes.

Sont généralement distingués les contenus audiovisuels dits de stock (ayant une durée de vie longue) et ceux dits de flux (circonstanciés, dont la valeur économique est moindre car leurs rediffusions sont limitées).

D'Angelo définit le système audiovisuel comme l'ensemble des acteurs qui contribuent à la production des contenus audiovisuels et à leur diffusion. Ce système est in fine structuré autour des enjeux liés à la diffusion télévisuelle laquelle assure une part substantielle du financement) et à son contexte concurrentiel.

Les diffuseurs sont en bout d'une chaîne de valeur (le plus souvent « externe »). Ceux-ci, pour assurer une programmation adaptée à leurs cibles d'audience, commandent ou achètent les contenus audiovisuels (notamment de stock) dont ils ont besoin à des producteurs audiovisuels (y compris cinématographiques) ou les coproduisent avec eux.

Les fonctions de la musique dans l'audiovisuel
La thèse de Mario d'Angelo est qu'une explication fonctionnelle de l'apport de l'art sonore à l'audiovisuel (un contenu ou une programmation) est possible si cette explication repose sur trois éléments :
 les utilisations que font les concepteurs des contenus audiovisuels (producteur et réalisateur) ;
 le travail de création du contenu musical incorporé (original ou existant) dans le contenu audiovisuel ;
 les perceptions qu'ont les téléspectateurs de la musique dans le contenu audiovisuel ainsi produit.

L'étude de la perception des téléspectateurs est par conséquent indispensable. Elle peut se faire selon des méthodes qualitatives et/ou selon des méthodes quantitatives.

La caractérisation de six fonctions apporte une objectivation, d'une part, aux buts qu'ont les concepteurs des contenus audiovisuels lorsqu'ils y incorporent de la musique et, d'autre part, aux perceptions qu'en ont les téléspectateurs. Les six fonctions identifiées (et qui ne sont pas mutuellement exclusives) sont :
 Didactique : la musique aide à la compréhension (donne des clés) du contenu audiovisuel (elle participe à sa lecture) ;
 Émotionnelle : la musique matérialise les émotions ; elle stimule les sens et souligne les aspects émotifs de l'image et/ou du récit; elle stimule l'imagination du téléspectateur ;
 Esthétique : la musique cherche à rendre une œuvre audiovisuelle ou une séquence plus qualitative voire à la sublimer ;
 Identitaire : la musique laisse une empreinte et rend une séquence ou un contenu audiovisuel reconnaissable (mélodie, rythme, harmonisation, instruments, effet sonore…) ;
 mnémonique : la musique s'apparente à un stimulus pavlovien : elle sert à se souvenir ; elle évoque ; elle déclenche potentiellement un processus de mémorisation (de quelques notes ou d'une ambiance) ;
 narrative : la musique est un langage à part entière ; écriture de l'image et écriture de la musique s'interpénètrent.

L'analyse par les fonctionnalités éclaire aussi la question de la valeur ajoutée qu'apporte le discours musical aux autres discours que comporte un contenu audiovisuel ou une programmation télévisuelle. Les chaînes de télévision par exemple, doivent veiller à leur identité sonore. Celle-ci se traduit notamment dans la ponctuation sonore du flux (identification des séquences et des transitions), dans des habillages sonores, dans les inter-programmes et, plus généralement, dans la nécessité de donner des repères aux téléspectateurs en se servant des fonctions que peut alors remplir la musique. De ce point de vue, l'art sonore joue un rôle dont les chaînes de télévision ne peuvent pas se passer.

Notes et références

Bibliographie
 Mario d'Angelo, La musique dans le flux télévisuel, OMF/Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014.
 Michel Chion, L'audio-vision : son et image au cinéma, Paris, Armand Colin, 2005 (rééd.).
 Véronique Cayla, Anne Durupty, Relations entre diffuseurs et filière musicale,  [http:// www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/rapports/cayla/rapportcayla200.pdf]
 Laurent Fonnet, Les programmes: production et diffusion, dans Pierre-Jean Benghozi et Jean-Charles Paracuellos, Télévision, l'ère du numérique, Paris, La documentation française, 2011.
 François Jost, « Un continent perdu. Le son à la télévision », dans Dominique Nasta et Didier Huvelle (dir.), Le son en perspective : nouvelles recherches, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2004.
 David Kessler, L'œuvre audiovisuelle, rapport au Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication,  (téléchargeable sur le site du CNC).
 Philippe Lavat, Musiques et direct télévisuel : 1958-1963, Lille, ANRT, 2008.
 Danièle Pistone, « Paroles et musiques : une perspective musicologique », dans Catherine Naugrette et Danièle Pistone (dir.), Paroles et musiques, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2012, .
 Nadine Toussaint-Desmoulins, L'économie des médias, PUF, coll. Que sais-je?, 2008 (rééd.),
 Raymond Williams, Television, technology & cultural forms, London, Routledge, (rééd.) 1990

Voir aussi

Articles connexes

Liens externes

Musique par thème
Art sonore
Audiovisuel
Systémique

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The difficult decisions you have to make as an international adventure rider are numerous. For a start, the selection of fine wines and numerous other beverages in the airline first class cabin is a decision making process that I wouldn't want to impose on anybody.
Reality TV programs. Love them or hate them, they are the new wave of media entertainment. Production companies love them because they are cheap to produce and usually feature the average punter that, when a camera is pointed at them do something they wouldn't normally do or simply crash and burn. Much like Trail Zone DVDs.
December 17, 2007 on In The Zone DVD is Finally Released!
December 13, 2007 on In The Zone DVD is Finally Released!


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From Cast Lead to Pillar of Defense: How the IDF has learnt to communicate war in Gaza online
In 2009, I wrote a blog post arguing that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had "fallen off the social media bandwagon". Their digital media campaign in support of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was hastily conceived, unimaginative and anti-social.
New tools were used to disseminate traditional military messages with little regard for a new online culture of communication.
How times have changed.
Nearly four years later, the IDF's social media strategy is much more sophisticated, offering online audiences regular and engaging updates on the progress of Operation Pillar of Defense.
Comparing 2009 with 2012: YouTube and Twitter
The differences are striking. In the 2009 post, I included a link to this YouTube video:
As I noted at the time, this bland 'press statement' delivered by Capt. Benjamin Rutland takes place in a washed out 'non-place' with the Israeli flag propped up against the wall. Not exactly engaging content.
It's a far cry from the IDF's most recent YouTube videos which now include short, snappy infographic explainers:
And dramatic images of "precision strikes" in which the viewer is on-board with the missile, transported to a video-game like first person perspective:
(These videos offer a compelling illusion - apparently taking the viewer closer to the conflict, but at the same time distancing the viewer from the human cost as airstrikes appear to primarily affect buildings, infrastructure or only the most "evil" of enemies.)
Back in 2009, Twitter was mainly used as a way of linking to exceptionally dry updates on the IDF Spokesperson blog which were often written in impenetrable military jargon. On both the blog and the Twitter feed there was little evidence of the IDF trying to influence, drive and engage in the conversation around the conflict.
Now the IDF Twitter feed is being written in plain English. What's more, the IDF is also using hashtags (#IsraelUnderFire), encouraging Twitter users to retweet their content and creating imagery that the IDF believe will be circulated by online communities.
It is also posting all manner of facts and figures and commenting on the issues which might affect the outcome of the battle for public opinion.
From 2009 to 2012: The IDF's social media learning curve
In 2009, Noah Shachtman revealed in Wired just how ad hoc the planning for the social media element of the information war had been during Operation Cast Lead, describing the IDF's YouTube campaign as "off-the-cuff" - a last-minute idea by a group of "twenty-something" soldiers.
Shortly after Operation Cast Lead, the IDF's Twitter fell silent for 179 days and only began updating again in August 2009. In December, Haaretz reported that a new media unit would be set up to engage online audiences on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
In the three years since then, the IDF has clearly revisited its approach to social media. According to Reuters the Israeli foreign ministry invested $15 million dollars in social media in 2010 and although the IDF was still learning it was notable that their YouTube channel was beginning to attract the attention of news journalists by the time of the Gaza flotilla raid in May 2010.
A 'behind-the-scenes' TV report demonstrated how the online presence of IDF Spokesperson was updated by a fully operational "New Media desk" by 2011.
Communicating conflict: The blurring boundaries
The 2012 online media campaign for Operation Pillar of Defense is undoubtedly a significant 'improvement' in Israel's attempt to communicate their version of the conflict using social media tools. But challenges remain.
In particular, the use of Twitter more explicitly blurs an already blurred boundary between psychological operations and public information campaigns.
In the last few days, the IDF has addressed all manner of online audiences with its Twitter feed.
Some updates are probably designed to be picked up by journalists - announcing the onset of the airstrikes via Twitter rather than in a news conference was an interesting departure, but hardly surprising given the widespread adoption of Twitter by journalists at media organisations.
A tweet on Sunday was even more obviously directed at journalists:
Advice to reporters in #Gaza, just like any person in Gaza: For your own safety, stay away from #Hamas positions and operatives. — IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 18, 2012
The IDF's Twitter feed is also trying to leverage an active online community which is supportive of Israel's goals by producing content which can be disseminated online through retweets on Twitter and sharing on social networks. Other content, such as the YouTube explainers, can be seen as an attempt to convince sceptics of Israel's military operation.
These activities might all fall into the remit of public information campaigns, but at the same time the account is being used for purposes which could be viewed as a function of psychological operations.
One IDF tweet issued a warning to Hamas operatives and as Stuart Hughes pointed out on the BBC's College of Journalism blog the IDF's Twitter account has also attracted the attention of Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
It is no longer unusual for a war of words on Twitter to accompany armed confrontation. (See also ISAF Media vs the Taliban and the Kenyan Army vs Al Shabaab.)
Communicating messages successfully to different audiences in the same space is problematic, particularly when the 'audience' can write back. Critics have argued that the IDF's Twitter feed is a distasteful addition to an immoral military campaign. The Now Lebanon blog, for example, headlined a post with the title: 'IDF cheerily live-tweets infanticide'.
And the unanswered question is this: what difference, if any, will the IDF's social media campaign make?
A template for the future?
Nevertheless, the IDF's social media campaign in support of Operation Pillar of Defense might prove to be a template for future information operations online as militaries attempt to influence a more fiercely contested informational battlespace.
In 2010, Lt. Gen. W. Caldwell, Dennis Murphy and Anton Menning published an article in the Australia Army Journal in which they suggested that the US military could learn from the IDF's use of social media.
I think they were wrong then in relation to the Gaza conflict in 2009, but they might have subsequently been proved right by events in 2012.
Posted by Daniel Bennett at 11:47:00 pm 0 comments
Labels: 2009, 2012, Gaza, IDF, information operations, Israel, Media, online, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense, social media, strategic communication, Twitter
KIA: The brutal reality of war behind the news headlines
Doug Beattie is a British soldier who has served in Afghanistan with the Royal Irish Regiment. I have long been an admirer of the bravery of his honesty. His willingness to openly contemplate, discuss, debate and publish his experience of war in Afghanistan is unusual, providing a rare insight into conflict in the 21st Century.
Over on his blog 'An Ordinary Soldier', he notes that we the hear the phrase 'Killed In Action' on the news on a regular basis, but in this post he takes us beyond the words to what it might mean in reality:
This is how his post 'KIA' begins:
"You turn on the TV news and there, somewhere after a report on the credit crunch and before the footie, you get the other stuff, events in brief, the stories they haven't got pictures for or don't think are important enough to warrant two minutes all to themselves.
"Amongst these fillers you hear the presenter say, 'A British soldier has been killed in action in Afghanistan after being hit by a roadside bomb'. Killed in action. KIA. It all sounds so unsentimental, so impersonal, so clinical. But it's not. It is usually brutal and bloody and painful. So here it comes, the wretched truth about KIA, a truth you'll never hear, let alone see, on News at Ten. This is what KIA is all about."
It's not 'easy' reading, but the rest is here...
Random thought on news: process and package
Instant and alterable web publication has helped facilitate a shift in emphasis in online news: where previously it was always displayed as a processed package, now it is also presented as a packaged process.
Not a new idea of course, but hopefully never written as succinctly.
OK, it probably has been put even more succinctly...but no time to check that right now so I'll just claim it and carry on.
Drone Journalism in the UK?
This blog started its life as a way of documenting my PhD project which is now long since finished.
I thought I might know by now what this blog is becoming - if anything - but I'm afraid I'm not quite there yet.
Which means the blog has kind of lost it's raison d'être ...and without that there's not a lot to be said by it or for it.
There are a few potential projects in the pipeline which might give it a new direction and hopefully next time you stop by, there might be something more - I'll keep you posted.
In the meantime, I've written something on drone journalism at the Frontline Club which you can read here if you haven't seen it already.
Labels: blogging, drone journalism, Journalism, Media, PhD
US Navy to spend $249 million on "battlespace awareness"
The US Navy has announced that it will spend up to an estimated $249 million on "battlespace awareness".
Last Thursday, the Navy awarded a new contract to five intelligence, computer and security companies to provide both hardware and "the development, integration, and test of intelligence, battlespace awareness, and information operations applications".
In other words, the US Navy is embarking on a major new project in the area of surveillance, technology and data acquisition to provide military commanders with a detailed understanding of any conflict area.
According to the Department of Defense's own definition "battlespace awareness" includes an area's "environment, factors, and conditions", "the status of friendly and adversary forces, neutrals and noncombatants" and "weather and terrain."
The addition of "information operations" in the contract suggests the project will go beyond the remit of geospatial intelligence and may have some capability for commanders to organise messaging campaigns in an attempt to influence various actors in an area of operations.
The contract raises questions over exactly what information the US Navy is intending to collect and in which conflict areas.
The investment can be understood in the context of the influence of 'network-centric warfare' on US military thinking which emphasises the value of a digitally connected force as a means of improving situational awareness and military decisions.
A press release earlier in the year from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) calling for 'big data' projects noted that:
"the demands for actionable information have spiked as warfighters at every level—whether at the planning table or on patrol—are called upon to make well-informed decisions".
The battlespace awareness contract was awarded by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and will initially last until August 2013. The US Navy has options in the contract to extend the work to 2017.
The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center reports directly to the Navy's Information Dominance Systems Command.
After Leveson? A 'State of the News Media' report for the UK
With each day of Leveson evidence new stones are overturned, shedding more light on the wider systemic and cultural problems that contributed to the phone-hacking scandal.
The 'post-Leveson' question becomes ever more pressing, as identified at yesterday's University of Westminster conference, attended by a range of international media researchers, as well as regulation and legal specialists.
But how will the national media report the outcome of the Inquiry?
The media's record in self-reporting is shaky, shown by its reluctance to give any credence to the Guardian's initial story in 2009 revealing serious flaws in the media's ability to self-regulate.
In an article for June's issue of British Journalism Review, Judith Townend and I demonstrate how a combination of personal, professional, political and commercial dynamics led to a failure of the media's role as an accountability mechanism in the public interest.
We believe a useful new accountability tool would be an annual audit of all UK news media content.
The lack of coverage of phone hacking
The failure of almost every other news organisation other than the Guardian to regard phone hacking as newsworthy has been well-rehearsed and we have previously shown that perceptions are backed up by the numbers.
But it's not a lone example of an issue that perhaps should have received more media attention or scrutiny.
We could also look at the reporting of financial institutions prior to the crash in 2008 or the build up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.
As we demonstrate with phone hacking, working out why journalists regard some stories and angles as newsworthy requires significant analysis. But we don't even have a way of systematically understanding and monitoring what news stories are being published and how they are being covered.
This is beginning to seem a little strange in an era when we can collect and organise vast quantities of data from online news articles. There is no longer any reason why we could not monitor the news values of the media in a far more comprehensive manner for the benefit of the future of journalism.
Accessing article data
For the BJR essay, we were able to trace all news articles relating to phone hacking over a four year period. And academic research has benefited from resources such as the Nexis® UK database which allows searchable access to decades of news articles.
But research which considers all news topics is often limited to only a few media outlets for a very short period of time and Nexis® UK is only available through subscription.
In the past, it would have been exceptionally time-consuming, if not impossible to conduct an annual survey of every topic or subject that made the news. Today, nearly every news story that appears in print also appears online and news is relatively straightforward to archive.
Towards an annual audit
By harnessing the potential of "big data" and digital search tools, we should be able to design a sophisticated piece of software which could be used to provide the public with an annual audit of all UK media articles for an entire year.
Data from news stories could be accessed to produce a breakdown of what news subjects were reported, how they were reported, by which journalists, how often and with how much prominence.
This data might be analysed in conjunction with data provided by audiences from clicks on web links and the number of times articles have been shared by web users on other websites. Information that is already being collected internally by news organisations.
This annual review of news could and should go beyond "newspapers" – a category of increasingly dubious relevance in a convergent media world. It could document all major online news sources whether they're newspapers, broadcasters, new media websites or influential bloggers.
Independent researchers could then analyse this data to write an accessible and publicly available online report on the nature of UK news content.
A report which would provide the public with a more detailed understanding of what was regarded as newsworthy and how news topics have been reported.
Learning from projects in the United States
An annual review of this nature is not only possible, it's also already being done outside the UK. In the United States, the Pew Research Center's "State of the News Media" report analysed 46,000 stories from 52 news outlets in 2011.
One section of the report offered a comprehensive understanding of which stories and topics were regarded as newsworthy by American journalists and included data for news being shared by bloggers and Twitter users.
There is also an interactive online feature on the Pew website which means the public can make their own comparisons between the coverage of news stories in different media outlets.
It would be useful to combine this approach with that of the Media Cloud project, run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. This project includes an open source online tool highlighting which key words were used in relation to major news topics on a weekly basis by individual news organisations.
In the UK, perhaps the closest we have to anything similar is Journalisted.com, run by the Media Standards Trust. This website monitors articles written by individual journalists as well as a weekly and yearly round up of which news topics are "covered lots" or "covered little".
This represents a useful starting point, but the depth of data and analysis is limited compared with the projects in the United States.
The value of an annual audit
An annual audit of UK media content undertaken by an independent organisation would only be a small part of much more wide-ranging solution to the issues raised by the phone-hacking scandal.
It would not illuminate journalists' decision-making, hold them to account prior to publication or tackle newsroom culture and practices.
But it is a practical step forward which would provide a comprehensive overview of what stories are making the news and trends in the way those news stories are reported.
It would be an accountability tool that could benefit both news organisations and the public.
For journalists and editors, it would be a useful resource helping them reflect on the shape of their coverage over the course of a year.
For the wider public, it would provide a much more informed starting point for a broad debate on the how the media reports the news.
We would welcome comments, criticisms and suggestions to help us take this idea forward.
Labels: annual audit, British Journalism Review, Guardian, Journalism, Lord Justice Leveson, Media, phone hacking, phone-hacking scandal, State of the Media
A case study in Twitter and verification
[View the story "Twitter reports of Mikhail Gorbachev's death were greatly exaggerated" on Storify]
Labels: 2012, hoax, Journalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, news, Twitter, verification
Links on Twitter and Mapping
I've been coming across lots of interesting mapping links recently. This has not been entirely accidental. Maybe that might come to something one day, but in the meantime here are a few of the things I've found...
A news map of Britain based on clicks on bit.ly links over at The Guardian
If the UK isn't a grand enough scale for you, check out this global newspaper map.
Geofeedia: Interesting new tool to track social media news content based on location-based searches.
Map of Wikipedia edits from Europe anyone?
Or what about a time-lapsed history of Europe map over the last 1,000 years?
Labels: Europe, Geofeedia, history, Mapping, maps, newspapers, Twitter
Media coverage of Somalia
I was at an event discussing the nature of media coverage from Somalia yesterday. It was a very interesting discussion with contributions from various people with experience of reporting from the country. A round up is available on my Frontline Club blog.
Labels: Frontline Link, Journalism, Media, news, reporting, Somalia
Official Twitter response to attacks in Norway
[&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://storify.com/dan_10v11/official-norwegian-twitter-updates-in-response-to" target="_blank"&amp;amp;gt;View the story "Official Norwegian Twitter updates in response to Breivik attack" on Storify&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;]
Labels: 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik, Jens Stoltenberg, Norway, Norwegian government, official sources, Twitter
BBC journalist Stuart Hughes on newsgathering with Twitter and social media
In this video, World Affairs Producer Stuart Hughes talks about his use of social media at the BBC. He was speaking on a course organised by the BBC College of Journalism on 20 April 2012:
I spoke to Stuart Hughes several times while writing my thesis on the impact of blogging on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism.
There are a few things worth picking out here about his changing practices in the newsroom.
Just one to get you started is Stuart's shift away from ENPS towards Hootsuite, a Twitter application.
The Essential News Production System is a piece of software designed by the Associated Press which provides all BBC journalists with news and information from news agency sources and other BBC journalists. First installed in 1996, it is also used to produce TV and radio programmes.
In the video, Stuart points out that he still has ENPS open somewhere on his desktop, but for newsgathering he'll mostly be looking at Hootsuite which allows him to monitor many more sources on Twitter.
Using Hootsuite, Stuart has built different Twitter lists for various news topics and stories so he can keep across developments in each area. Notably, these are not public lists, but are kept private in an attempt to compete with rival news organisations.
If you watch the video, it's also worth looking out for a question halfway through where a member of the audience asks whether Stuart uses Twitter as a "single source", which relates to the BBC's practices over sourcing information.
Labels: BBC, Journalism, Media, news, newsgathering, social media, Stuart Hughes, Twitter
Twitter coverage of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway
Just flagging up an article I wrote for Index on Censorship for the often unrewarded and hardy followers of this blog.
Among other things, I ask: does it make sense to ban the cameras but not the tweeters from the Breivik trial?
(You know the score by now): to read more click here.
Labels: Anders Behring Breivik, ethics, Journalism, Media, Norway, Twitter
Is blogging journalism? A 'celebration' of ten years of asking the wrong question
Martin Belam is off. Leaving The Guardian for something new. Bon voyage sir!
But before he left, he posted a great blog [included especially for Adam Tinworth] about the confusion surrounding journaling and bloggism.
Martin was so piqued by a recent tweet from Media Bistro asking: "Are bloggers journalists?" that he was compelled to try to find out the first online reference to the great question of our age:
"The earliest explicit mention of the question I have been able to unearth via Google though is from 11th April 2002.
"On David F. Gallagher's blog of pictures of New York City, he posted a link to an article entitled "Are bloggers journalists?" with the URL microcontentnews.com/articles/bloggingjournalism.htm.
"Sadly microcontentnews.com has disappeared, so I can't retrieve the actual piece."
In other words, Martin notes, we've just celebrated the 10th anniversary of this particular non-conundrum.
But enough of this already.
Let's just call a blog a blog.
I'm off to find an ice cream strawberry.
Labels: blogging, ice cream, Journalism, Media, news
Research: A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News
Twitter facilitates the spread of news and information enabling individuals to combat censorship and undermine the stranglehold of state-controlled media. It is undoubtedly playing a significant role in a rapidly evolving digital media landscape and 21st century politics. But journalists' dubbing of the events in Moldova, Iran, Tunisia and Egypt as "Twitter revolutions" is perhaps more reflective of the experience of their own changing working practices than the politics on the ground. It points to a Twitter revolution occurring in the newsrooms of media organisations, evident in the increasing importance of Twitter for journalists covering breaking news stories.
Available here to download from the Social Science Research Network.
Bennett, D., 'A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News' in Keeble, R. & J. Mair (eds.), Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, (Abramis, 2011), pp. 63-73.
Labels: BBC, Breaking News, CNN, Egypt, FieldProducer, Iran, Journalism, Media, Moldova, Neal Mann, news, Research, Sky News, Stuart Hughes, Tunisia, Twitter, Twitter revolution
Research: "A Gay Girl in Damascus", the Mirage of the "Authentic Voice" and the Future of Journalism
In the 21st century journalists are making judgements, usually at speed, about whether to trust the identity of a "real" person through their "virtual" representation.
In order to maintain their cultural dominance over the representation of reality and their role in making sense of the world, journalists and news organisations have thus far reiterated their commitment to traditional practices of fact-checking and verification.
This article demonstrates, however, that traditional journalistic practice was not sufficient to spot the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax - a fake blog set up in Syria during the 'Arab Spring'. Instead, it was the adoption of a networked approach to journalism that ultimately uncovered the author, Tom MacMaster.
The article shows that increasingly, understanding and representing reality requires a "mutualistic interaction" between traditional news organisations and the new models of journalism, enabling us to identify, hear and amplify the "authentic voices" calling for political and social change around the world.
Bennett, D., 'A "Gay Girl in Damascus", the Mirage of the "Authentic Voice" and the Future of Journalism' in Keeble, R. & J. Mair (eds.), Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the Arab Spring, (Abramis, 2011), pp. 187-195.
Labels: A Gay Girl in Damascus, Amina Araf, Arab Spring, blogging, Daniel Bennett, Media, networked journalism, news, Research, social media, Syria, Tom MacMaster
So what next...?
People keep asking me this, so I thought it was about time I began trying to answer it.
After Easter I'll be stepping up the search for the next challenge post-PhD.
I've already applied for a Soros foundation fellowship from September for a new project in the area of military use of social media. And I'm hoping to drum up some more freelance social media consultancy work to pay a few bills in the meantime.
But I'm looking for other options and exciting possibilities in the fields of media, journalism, social media, international politics, warfare, conflict, research and academia.
I have a preference for either being based in London or opportunities in any other interesting places outside the UK.
And it would help if research and publishing information was a major part of the job whether tweeting, blogging, podcasting, writing articles, papers or books etc.
I'm also open to exploring more informal partnerships, freelance projects/work.
But I'm not going to take anything off the table, so if something jumps out at me and says: "This is the next exciting thing to be doing", then I'd go for it.
So if you hear of anything, I'd be interested in hearing from you.
You can email me at daniel.s.bennett@kcl.ac.uk.
And you can find out more about my experience at Linked In.
Labels: PhD, the future
Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis
Just a note to say I'm looking forward to taking part in this event on 27 April looking at the future of social media analysis.
There are some great speakers including Kevin Anderson, Pippa Norris, Alberto Nardelli, Simon Collister etc etc...it's well worth checking out the programme.
I'll be moderating the first panel in my role as "independent social media expert" - a title I wouldn't give to myself but I suppose "done a bit of research about blogging and social media" isn't the way to sell yourself.
If you're interested in coming along, there are still tickets available and they are very affordable (for those of you who are worried about budgeting for that 20% increase in the price of pasties.)
If you're affiliated to a university there is a special rate of £37 which you can snap up by emailing info@zero1events.com for a discount code.
Labels: big data, conference, data, Insight 2.0, Journalism, Kevin Anderson, Media, MoD, Pippa Norris, Research, Semantica, social media
A note of thanks at the end of the PhD
I'm not sure if a PhD ever really ends.
There seems to be a lot of bits and pieces I'd like to revise and update. Research that I started as part of the project and I'd like to try to finish up for possible future papers.
I'm also hoping to be able to publish the thesis in book form as well which means I might have to revisit some of it for the 654th time.
But in many other respects the PhD is finished.
I have a piece of paper saying I've passed and the library at King's College, London has a final copy (for a shelf somewhere which will increase the area available in the library for dust-gathering.)
This blog has always been much more of an online research diary and scrapbook than an outlet for my personal story, but I'd like to temporarily hijack it.
I'd be lying if I said the PhD was all a breeze, because with any PhD there are inevitably lows as well as highs. But I'm not somebody who is wondering what the point of it all was.
I've really enjoyed it and I believe it was worthwhile work. I've learnt masses and developed a variety of transferable skills along the way. I believe other people have benefited from the project and others will do so in the future. I've had some great opportunities to do all sorts of exciting things and meet lots of interesting people.
And I'm very grateful for all of that. Rather unfairly, the PhD has my name on the side of the cover, but I am just a small part of the story - the person who brought lots of different things and themes and thinking and hard work together in one place.
And I'd like to say thanks to all the people who made it possible.
In particular, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my family, my friends, my supervisor at the War Studies Department, the Frontline Club, everybody at the BBC who contributed to the project and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding me.
I've also benefited immensely from interactions with people online who have taken an interest in the project whether through comments on blog posts either here or at the Frontline Club or on Twitter.
In fact, I can't imagine doing a PhD without access to a 'virtual office' of ideas, information and support. (Although it's not quite as frightening as the prospect of writing one on a typewriter...but anyway).
Finally, I want to say that I dedicated the PhD to my grandparents, Donald and Iris Mead. They gave so much to me in so many ways, but sadly both passed away before I finished the project.
I also want to mention my friend Lineu Vargas - a man who not only took a keen intellectual interest in my work but who was also concerned with my welfare more generally. He was tragically killed in a car accident last year.
It's a comfort to me that the last time I saw him, I was able to celebrate submitting the first version of the PhD with him.
And I'm sure he'll be raising a glass of good red wine somewhere to join in future celebrations...
Labels: AHRC, BBC, Frontline Club, PhD
For further thought: The aggregator is king...?
In an era of information overload, the aggregator who points you to the most relevant, most useful, most interesting, most entertaining and most timely content and engages with you in the conversation around that content is king.
The Russian Internet: "Open and free"
I've just been reading this encouraging report about the state of the Russian Internet.
It suggests that "bottom-up" agenda setting and collective online civic action are all possible in Russian cyberspace. Government control and influence also remains limited.
The report is based on three years of research by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
I've picked out a few key points:
Openness and civic action
"Overall, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free despite the various ongoing efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government."
"The watchdog function of the Russian Internet appears especially strong. There are a large and growing number of examples of Russians identifying problems of common concern and coming together online to push back against abuses of the state or powerful corporate interests."
"The evidence is compelling that Russians are producing and sharing information online that is collectively determined to be of public importance, and in doing so, circumventing the tighter restrictions on traditional media. The ability of Russians to organize and act on that information appears to be equally, if not more important, than the simple access to information and collective filtration of topics and identification of salient agendas."
Pro-government bloggers
"Critically, we do not find evidence that efforts by the government to push its message online through supporters, paid or otherwise, are very successful. The mere presence of pro-Kremlin bloggers does not necessarily translate into influence as the broader online community is not compelled to link to such blogs or to adopt pro-government messages."
"Pro-government blogs are rarely found on our map of prominent blogs as measured by in-links from other bloggers."
Pro-government Twitter users
"However, we do find that pro-government users are more successfully entrenched in Twitter. Specifically, pro-Putin youth groups like the Young Guards and Nashi, and elected officials allied with them, have a distinct Twitter footprint. Still, we find many of the same oppositional groups as we do in the blogosphere on Twitter (with the exception of the nationalists) so more pro-government users have not crowded out oppositional communities."
"We also found evidence that one cluster of Twitter users—those centered on the Medvedev policy of modernization—is popular primarily because it is promoted by bots and instrumental Twitter users."
Methods of control
"There are two methods for controlling online speech that appear to have a greater impact than pro-government information campaigns and are likely to be perpetuated by the government or their sympathizers to limit speech on the Internet."
"The first is offline attacks and threats against journalists and others critical of the federal and local officials and powerful business interests..."
"The second persistent threat to online speech in Russia is DDoS attacks. The disabling of nearly twenty independent news and election monitoring sites on Election Day is the most extreme and most wide-reaching example of coordinated DDoS attacks in Russia to date."
It is necessary to regulate a 'free press' to protect 'freedom of expression'
Yesterday, at the launch event for this new book on the phone hacking scandal something struck me as problematic with the current debate about the future of the press.
And it was this: the conflation and confusion of 'freedom of expression' with 'freedom of the press'.
It is particularly misleading in the context of the debate around regulation. Regulating the press will undoubtedly have an impact on the 'freedom of the press'.
But regulating the press is frequently described as a move that would have a damaging effect on 'freedom of expression': the more regulation of the press you have, the more 'freedom of expression' will suffer.
What the phone hacking scandal has demonstrated is that quite the opposite can be true: a lack of regulation has meant 'freedom of expression' has suffered. Phone hacking epitomises the way in which 'freedom of expression' can and has been undermined by the 'freedom of the press'.
I cannot see how 'freedom of expression' has been advanced by the risk that a 'free press' will hack into individuals' private expressions of their views in voicemails and publish them to the world.
And this is merely one aspect which made an impact because it was also illegal.
Every time the press publishes a headline which has no resemblance to the story beneath or sensationalises a story or rips a quote out of all context or strips people's Facebook profiles for information or decides it would be in the 'public interest' to silence anonymous bloggers or simply makes up a story, the 'free press' assaults 'freedom of expression'.
Essentially then, the 'free press' damages 'freedom of expression' in two arenas: perhaps most shockingly in the ever-complicating 'private' realm by putting freely expressed private statements into the public domain, but also in the ever-complicating 'public' realm by distorting public announcements.
The latter is one of the reasons why the PR industry in the UK has grown so substantially. Whether you are a politician or representing a company or increasingly an 'ordinary person', it has become necessary to pay people for expert advice on what you are able to freely express in public.
And if the boundaries between the 'public' and the 'private' realms continue to blur, how long will it be before each of us needs our own personal PR adviser to help us work out what we are safe to freely express in our increasingly public private lives?
I believe a 'free press' is vital for democracy. But the time when a 'free press' should have started using that freedom responsibly to stand up for 'freedom for expression' rather than abusing it to turn a profit has already passed.
We need a more effective system of regulation which protects 'freedom of expression' from a 'free press'. And at the same time, we need to ensure that a newly regulated 'free press' is also able to protect 'freedom of expression'.
Not least because 'freedom of expression' faces much greater threats, both now and in the future, from companies and governments around the world.
Labels: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, Journalism, Leveson Inquiry, news, newspapers, phone hacking, press, regulation
Phone Hacking: Exploring 'media omerta'
"[Nick] Davies's work…has gained no traction at all in the rest of Fleet Street, which operates under a system of omerta so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the big New York crime families"
Peter Oborne, The Observer, April 2010
"There seemed to be some omerta principle at work that meant that not a single other national newspaper thought this could possibly be worth an inch of newsprint"
Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian, Newsweek, 2011
Tomorrow I'm heading into London to go to Coventry University. (Yep, you heard me right.) I'll be attending the book launch of The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial. And you can still get tickets here if you are interested.
Judith Townend and I have written a chapter for the book exploring Oborne and Rusbridger's assertions that the press significantly under-reported the phone hacking scandal - a news story which would eventually lead to the demise of the News of the World, several high profile resignations and the ongoing Leveson Inquiry.
We thought it would be interesting to find out just what 'media omerta' looked like by tracing how many articles were written on the subject from June 2006 to November 2011 and when they were written.
Using the Nexis database, we counted up the number of articles written on the topic in various newspapers. (At the bottom of this post, I have provided a more detailed explanation of the methodology we used including the limitations of the data.)
The table below shows the total number of articles written and even further below I have produced (at some personal cost to my capacity for patience with Google Documents) a few pretty graphs which show the cumulative total number of articles at 6 month intervals.
If you roll over the blue dots at each point it will tell you the cumulative total at the relevant point in time. (Pretty cool, huh. And really straightforward to produce with Google Docs...see hindsight kicking in already).
Table: Total number of articles June 2006 - 10 November 2011
The Guardian 879
The Independent 489
The Telegraph 436
The Times 332
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday* 318
Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror 162
The Sun 112
Graphs: The Broadsheets
Graphs: The Tabloids
In the book, we use this as a starting point to explore what all of these numbers mean.
We reckon that explanations for the non-reporting of the phone hacking scandal need to delve beyond simplistic, if valid, assertions of industry cover-up.
To understand why the majority of national newspapers didn't regard phone hacking as newsworthy, it is necessary to unpick a tangled web of contributing factors.
In the chapter, we explore competing professional, political and commercial interests; the failure of other organisations – particularly the Metropolitan Police – to investigate the matter thoroughly; and the intimidating power of News International.
Note on Methods
We retrieved articles for the following search terms in news articles between 1 July 2006 and 10 November 2011: ('phone tapping') or ('phone hacking') or ('voicemail interception') and ('news of the world'). The articles were filtered for 'moderate similarity' ensuring that most duplicates were discarded. Some duplicates may not have been filtered out and it is possible that articles relevant to phone hacking which did not satisfy the search terms were not counted. The data should therefore not be regarded as completely accurate in terms of unique numbers but the approach nevertheless provides a valuable assessment of the comparative weight of coverage given to phone hacking by each title.
*The Nexis database groups Daily and Sunday together.
Labels: Alan Rusbridger, amount of coverage, articles, data journalism, graphs, Guardian, Journalism, Leveson Inquiry, media omerta, news, newspapers, number of articles, Peter Oborne, phone hacking
Social media from the front line
Major Paul Smyth is one of the people responsible for changing the Ministry of Defence's approach to social media particularly in the context of front line operations.
I've spoken to him previously for the Frontline Club about his Frontline bloggers project.
In this interview with David Bailey, Maj. Smyth talks in some detail about how he used social media to tell the story of British military deployments from Kosovo to Afghanistan.
These are a few of the things that caught my eye (after I'd spent a few moments puzzling over the indoor brick wall):
1. In Kosovo, Maj. Smyth began making 2 minute YouTube videos and sending the URLs to journalists in Sarajevo to try to capture their interest. Putting these videos online meant they could also be viewed by military wives, girlfriends and families in the UK.
2. He says that in order to get coverage in national newspapers or on the BBC, he needed an "incredible story". But a blog allowed him to provide "behind the scenes" footage and to publish smaller stories for interested audiences on a regular basis.
3. He targeted influential defence correspondents and outlets such as CNN's i-Report spreading his news "footprint over a wider area".
4. He describes how his blogging team inadvertently trumped the established news procedures of Buckingham Palace and the MoD Press Office.
The team had published a blog post revealing a visit by Princess Anne to Camp Bastion an hour too early. He claims the subsequent coverage of the post on the BBC and in The Times and The Telegraph "surprised a few people".
A heady brew
I like this line in 'What is News' by Harcup and O'Neill on the makings of a good newspaper story:
"...our findings...suggest that certain combinations of news values appear almost to guarantee coverage in the press.
"For example, a story with a good picture or picture opportunity combined with any reference to an A-list celebrity, royalty, sex, TV or a cuddly animal appears to make a heady brew that news editors find almost impossible to resist."
Labels: Deidre O'Neill, Journalism, news, news values, newsworthiness, Research, Tony Harcup
Drones: At war and at home
Continuing my recent theme on the use of drones in journalism, I came across this Guardian article rather strangely entitled: 'Drones in the hands of the paparazzi? It's an ethics and privacy minefield'
There are some interesting observations here and the article lists some of the important questions raised by the increasing use of drones in military contexts:
"Do drones lower the threshold of war, encouraging those who deploy them to be more bellicose? Can they or their operators sufficiently discriminate combatants from civilians in order to comply with international law? Are they proportionate, or so horrifically cruel as to qualify, along with anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, for prohibition? Does their cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon? What effect does their deployment have on the "hearts and minds" of civilians, or the morale of soldiers? Should we worry that Iran appears to have assumed control of a US drone, having kidnapped it out of the sky? And who is to blame when drones go wrong?"
But then right at the end, the article notes that drones are making the leap from foreign to domestic policy which left me with the impression that the piece was suggesting that what we should really be worrying about is the paparazzi using drones.
In other words, there are a few complicated questions about killing 'other people' in foreign lands, but when governments and the media start taking photos of 'us' using drones then we should really become concerned.
I am as worried about privacy, ethics, the media and the use of drones for domestic surveillance as the next person.
But as the article rightly points out (if you read past the headline and the inadvertently misleading structure) there are more pressing "ethical and legal concerns" which we must not lose sight of in future domestic debates on drones.
Labels: drones, ethics, Guardian, Journalism, law, Media, privacy, war
After 22/7: Journalism educators in Norway reconsider training for terror coverage
"Crisis reporting is set to become integral part of a three year bachelor degree in journalism, if plans to revise the degree's curriculum go ahead," writes Kristine Lowe.
Click here for details on how the attacks on Oslo and Utöya by Anders Breivik last year are changing journalism training in Norway.
Labels: Anders Breivik, Journalism, Media, Norway, Oslo, terror, training, Utoya
"Inappropriate" to include bloggers in press regulation
The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that bloggers should not be part of a new regulatory system of the press.
Speaking to a joint committee on privacy and injunctions he said blogs "perform a different role" from newspapers and bloggers "were often not paid".
At the same time, he believed blogs were growing in importance to public and democratic debate.
Citing Guido Fawkes as an example, he said that blogs with large audiences have "huge influence on political discourse" and could do "huge damage to individual reputations if and when they get things wrong".
Despite their potential relevance to the future of privacy law and the use of injunctions, Hunt was concerned at "trying to solve too many problems at once".
He noted that bloggers are already "subject to the laws of the land" including libel, defamation and data protection breaches. But he acknowledged that the law was sometimes more difficult to enforce if blogs are based outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.
In 2009, Guido Fawkes told the Guardian that it was "a jurisdictional nightmare" to send him a writ as his blog was published by a Caribbean company, had a URL in Germany and was hosted in the United States.
The joint committee felt that blogging should warrant more attention as some "big bloggers" were making "a lot of money" and that a new regulatory system should not leave an "open door" for irresponsible publishing.
In a light-hearted moment, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke made it plain that he was "certainly not a blogger", quipping that a "quite disproportionate of nuts and extremists seem to be represented on every blog I've ever known".
Jeremy Hunt interjected to say he had written a blog post last Friday.
To much amusement, Clarke quickly added: "...with the honorable exception of my friend, the Culture Secretary".
Labels: blogging, Guido Fawkes, injunctions, Jeremy Hunt, Journalism, Ken Clarke, law, Media, privacy
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