From the monthly archives:

January 2010

Beautiful game for some

January 28, 2010

SA stadium

Veteran South African journalist RW Johnson says the World Cup won’t do much to improve football administration in his country:

[The South African Football Association] is the battleground for South Africa’s famous soccer bosses, rich men who like cutting a dash and are rough: accusations of attempted or actual murder are not uncommonly flung at them and they are willing to use financial or actual muscle to solve most problems. The authorities are visibly afraid of them. When Irvin Khoza, one of the greatest of all the bosses – ‘the Iron Duke’, as he is known – was found not to have paid his taxes for some time the tax authorities merely called him in for ‘consultations’ and reached a quiet arrangement with him. There was no thought of court action. Similarly, a few years ago the police arrested dozens of referees in ‘Operation Dribble’, having discovered that they had been bribed to fix most of South Africa’s Professional Soccer League (PSL) soccer matches. The police were very pleased at having caught the refs red-handed but then it dawned that they could not be sentenced without the naming in open court of the soccer bosses who had bribed them. This was obviously unthinkable so the refs were all released and continue to manage domestic games in time-honoured fashion.

Or much for the ordinary poor:

The new Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit, on the edge of the Kruger National Park, is a 43,500-seater suitable only for first and second round matches. Its chief feature is 18 giant roof support columns all built in the shape of giraffes. It’s neat, you could say: the soaring necks hold up the roof while advertising the delights of a quick safari in the park between matches. This stadium, which cost more than £100 million, is cheek-by-jowl with a large settlement of shacks. Despite 15 years of ANC governments that have repeatedly promised them houses, jobs and services, the inhabitants of this squatter camp enjoy close to 100 per cent unemployment, have no electricity and lack any provision for sewage or tapped water. Every time they look at the vast new stadium it tells them that it was not thought worth spending on them even a fraction of the money spent on that.

Worse, when the Franco-South African consortium arrived to construct this monstrosity, they said they needed one or two modern buildings (i.e. buildings with electricity and air conditioning, for it gets unpleasantly hot in the lowveld in summer) to house their accounts, architecture and surveying departments. The only two such buildings available were the local schools, so these were taken over and the children booted out. New schools were promised but meanwhile the children were supposed to attend lessons inside empty containers which had neither windows nor air conditioning. Two years later, there is no sign of new schools being built and latterly this has produced violent protests and rioting by the angry residents. It is highly unlikely that any of them will attend games in the stadium but certain that all manner of international celebrities will, mingling with well-heeled locals.

Course, this once again raises the question of the value of major sporting events. On the one hand, it’s clear that World Cups and Olympics can have a catalytic effect on infrastructure development, forcing through road and rail projects that governments might otherwise delay. And, they can help poorer nations find international funding by giving them a “story” to tell investors. [This is true, according to interviews I've done, for Poland and Ukraine, which are hosting the Euros in 2012, as well as for SA ]. On the other side, as Johnson points out, it’s pointless building stadiums that’ll lie half-empty for all but a few matches. And the suspicion is that the whole thing is more about the egos of elites rather than wider development goals. Administrators may to get to rub shoulders with the likes of Sepp Blatter, and Blatter no doubt will give himself a pat on the back for bringing his tournament to a new continent. But the question remains whether, for a poor country, a budget of roughly 2.5 billion Rand (£285m) might be better spent on schools and hospitals rather than bread and circuses.

(Image: South Africa Tourism)

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128 ways to die

January 28, 2010

One part of the Daily Mail’s formula for success: scaring the shit out of people. Be careful around talcum powder, shaving, sausages, hot drinks etc etc.

Bonus warning: anything written by Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens etc.

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Pioneering Long Island

January 27, 2010

Newspaper execs thinking of erecting web site paywalls – that’s you Murdoch – might look at the experience of Newsday. The Long Island, NY daily put up its barrier last October and, at $5 a week, has so far signed up a total of 35 subscribers. A site redesign cost $4m and has recouped about $9,000. Which isn’t great. Even worse, staff at the paper are ready to revolt, according to this:

“The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks,” said one staffer.
“It’s an abomination,” said another.

The likes of the FT or the NYT might say, sniffily, that their content is more exclusive and desirable than Newsday’s. But isn’t this sort of story sort of alarming?

Newsday.com still had 1.5m monthly visits in December – mostly from people who got access as part of TV packages. But it lost 700,000 visits from October.

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Arbitrary justice?

January 26, 2010

Lubanga

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, had a brilliant article in the Atlantic last month about the arbitrariness of international justice. Reporting on the first trial to come before the new International Criminal Court – that of Congolese war lord Thomas Lubanga – he noted that many people in Lubanga’s homeland can’t understand why he’s in the dock while other warlords are still on the lamb (or in government).

Hochschild says:

I encounter more frustration with the Lubanga trial from others I talk to during a week in Ituri. “The ICC has taken the small fish,” says one critic, Abbé Alfred Buju, who is in charge of peace and social-justice issues for the Catholic Diocese of Bunia, “leaving the big fish because they’re in positions of power.” The big fish would include generals and cabinet ministers from Uganda and Rwanda whose support of the militias here did much to prolong and intensify the fighting, while their countries helped themselves to Ituri gold. (Rwanda supplied Lubanga with mortars, machine guns, ammunition, and trainers; Uganda, at different times, supported him and his opponents.) But both regimes are big favorites of the United States, and in choosing whom to indict, in Congo and elsewhere, the ICC has trod carefully to avoid antagonizing the U.S.

The ICC prosecutors have tried to counter accusations of partisanship by going after Lubanga’s peers in other tribes. But the basic accusation is a powerful one and not easily dismissed. There are obvious reasons why the ICC chose Lubanga for its first case, rather than, say, Mugabe or Putin. It wanted a relatively simple case; it required the co-operation of a national government; and witnesses – many of them former child soldiers – were available.

The question is whether this invalidates the ICC’s mission? Because the ICC’s prosecutions are necessarily “selective and symbolic”, is it really putting on some kind of show trial, rather than delivering justice?

Hochschild thinks not. The message the court sends to would-be mass-murderers compensates for its other failings; it is a different type of justice, he says:

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at peace. And I suspect it will be a long time indeed before three Africans in black robes sit in judgment of the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for their endorsement of torture, or Vladimir Putin for his war in Chechnya, or Chinese officials for their actions in Tibet. But if we are serious about the idea that basic human rights belong to all people on Earth, no matter where they live—a principle enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—then a justice system that can cross national boundaries is essential.

Incidentally, those who argued against the Iraq invasion (2nd one) often used something like the argument used against the ICC. Why is it right to go after Saddam when so many other dictators remain, many of them backed by the US and UK? Again, this is a tough argument to refute. But personally I think getting rid of murderous people is a good idea, per se, even if it leaves some behind. 99 dictators is better than 100. This is not to say that, strategically speaking, the Iraq invasion was a good idea. But I do think it was morally justified as a means to stop further genocide.

PS – you can follow daily updates from the Lubanga trial here.

(Image: ICC-CPI)

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‘Sleepwalking into oblivion’

January 26, 2010

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says paywalls are inconsistent with the idea of a free press:

“Fleet Street is the birthplace of the tradition of a free press that spread around the world. There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

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Walls in the mind

January 26, 2010

Needless to say, the New York Times’s decision to erect a “paywall” is a stupid one. What it calls its “metered model” may make sense in the short-term, re-establishing a sense of value, and maximising revenue from non-subscribers. But over the long, it goes against the grain of the web, and consigns the NYT’s journalists to obscurity – something they will surely resent. Forcing users to pay a flat fee for more than a set number of monthly articles (like the FT) may seem fair and reasonable (as in “why should people get something for nothing?”) – but then the Internet doesn’t really do reasonable. The paywall is yet another attempt to protect a business model that needs fundamental reform, not marginal tinkering.

What is depressing is that NYT’s executives seem incapable of more radical thinking. Essentially the decision is a re-run of the ill-fated Times Select experiment. The Times decided in September 2007 to go back to free-for-all after realising that it could not bring sufficient numbers to advertisers. Crucially, its top columnists resented writing for small audiences and pushed for the u-turn. The question is why management thinks things will be different this time?

Some people think that the time has come to make a stand against the anarchists who say Internet content has to be free. They argue that institutions like the NYT have the clout to make the market, giving cover to others to follow suit. When Murdoch announced his own paywall plan in the summer, observers wondered if he could bring the rest of the UK industry with him. Speculation has since followed of private deals between newspaper groups for a co-ordinated paywall push.

Commentators such as Nicolas Carr have backed the NYT’s decision on the basis that it segments the market based on willingness to pay. Thus, the NYT can continue to take in subscription revenue from “loyalists” and “traditionalists”, while making what it can from “freeloaders”. Carr says the NYT decision is smart “particularly when viewed in the context of the Times’s previously disclosed last-man-standing strategy” – which said that it would benefit from demise of newspapers, by picking up readers from failing outlets. Carr doesn’t however say that the NYT’s new plan will work.

Backers of the paywall, such as this BBC executive (how nice to rely on public money!) normally accompany their support with expressions of regret for the newspaper industry’s troubles, and talk of the need to protect quality journalism. This conflates different issues, however: the sustainability of a particular business model, and the future of journalism. Newspapers tell us that their survival is essential because they are the only institutions that can protect journalism. It may be, however, that lighter-weight models would serve journalism better, and that the problems of the newspaper industry are precisely what is hurting journalism.

The question is surely how to build a sustainable model over the long-term. Felix Salmon points out that the NYT’s move is one to protect short-term interests:

This is, of course, exactly the approach that the NYT’s management would take if it felt that it was managing a company in terminal decline, and wanted to squeeze as many dollars out of it as possible before it dies. Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.

Salmon says the inevitable impact of a paywall is that bloggers will stop linking to NYT articles, because they won’t want readers not being able to access what they are linking to. The NYT will rely increasingly on “destination” visitors – people who come direct to the NYT, rather than via third-parties. Because of NYT’s legacy, the destination audience may remain fairly large (TimesSelect had 227,000 subscribers when it closed) but what happens when older and richer customers start dying off? How will the NYT reach new audiences?

If the game, then, is maximising readership and advertising, how should newspapers go? I think the first thing to recognise is that the Internet changes the position of the journalist vis-a-vis the news organisation. “Name” journalists, such as Thomas Friedman, have a lot more power than they used to. They don’t necessarily need an august masthead to reach large numbers, and as brands in their own right they don’t need the implied credibility either. Given his hatred of TimesSelect, we can safely assume how Friedman feels about being metered. He is just the sort of frontier-thinking type who could leave the NYT, beefing up his own web site and doing his own marketing. In this, he would be following some music industry stars, who have either gone out on their own, or re-negotiated superior deals with the labels.

Newspapers would do well to strike similar deals, rather than putting journalists under greater pressure, and limiting their audiences. A better idea would be to allow journalists to build up followings via their own blogs, and then splitting the ad revenue. This would give journalists an incentive to work harder at blogging, rather than seeing it as just another chore, and increase their sense of self-worth at the same time.

Writing in the Atlantic back in 2006, Michael Hirschorn explained how communities make more money than readers who click and move on:

Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Posts Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth

The NYT has yet to say whether its blogs will be included in the metered plan (the FT’s blogs don’t seem to be). Salmon thinks they will be. Either way, what the NYT move shows is that the industry still doesn’t get it. To me at least, this announcement feels like a desperate late-era step when what is needed is a fundamental rethink. Aside from distribution, news organisations should also consider how the Internet could provide opportunities for novel types of news-gathering – opportunities that might also have the benefit of saving money. Surely a more distributed structure, in which more reporters and editors work away from a high-cost office, is the way to go. Rather than dismissing the blogosphere as “pajama journalism”, newspapers should look at why blogs have gone from strength to strength and try to incorporate the best of them. Instead of building large new office spaces (as the NYT, Guardian and Telegraph have all done in recent years), they should build more flexible, lower-cost models that play to the Internet’s strengths and give journalists the freedom to be creative and entrepreneurial.

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Obama’s not finished

January 22, 2010

Thank god we have the American media to comment on American politics. If we left it up to the UK press, we’d be forever in the dark. Three cheers for the Internet and its ability to denationalise media-coverage! Obama’s one-year anniversary was marked by stories of his party’s special election defeat in Massachusetts. Many saw the opportunity to see in this untimely reversal evidence for a long-term decline. For example, Anatole Kaletsky in the Times had this to say:

The crushing defeat of the Democratic candidate to succeed the late Edward Kennedy as senator for Massachusetts, does not only wreck Mr Obama’s hopes of signing a health reform Bill this month, the main objective of his first year as President; far worse, as Massachusetts is the most solidly Democratic state in the union, it portends defeat for Democrats all across America in November’s congressional elections.

Massachusetts was the only state to vote Democrat in the most lopsided election in US history, the 1972 re-election of Richard Nixon. So the import of this defeat is undeniable even to the most Panglossian of left-wingers: if the Democrats could not hold Teddy Kennedy’s seat, no Democratic legislator anywhere in the US is secure.

The implication is that America and the world must now prepare for the longest lame-duck presidency in history, lasting at least until the 2012 election and, perhaps, until 2016

This analysis is not only wrong on the merits (see below) but also demonstrates the tendency of the media to want to write the BIGGEST STORY POSSIBLE. It’s not enough to present the loss of a 60th Senate vote as a set-back. It has to be seen as a decisive and dramatic turning point. The one-year anniversary makes the story all the better because of the symbolism.

Kaletsky presents himself as a level-headed observer, but he writes – in this case at least – more like a journalistic hack. His analysis is caught in the swell of the current moment, rather than a calm accounting of Obama’s actual position. In fact, Obama is still likely to enact much of his program – save for his climate change legislation perhaps – and my guess is that, come November, he’ll still be in steady control of all three branches of US government.

What did Massachusetts reveal about the “people’s” view of Obama’s program? Not a lot. Certainly not about healthcare, his signature dish. Massachusetts is unusual in having some of the best healthcare in the US – a universal provision more universal than what the bills that recently went through Congress allow. Massachusetts voters voted to keep their superior coverage, because neither candidate campaigned to repeal it. Scott Brown, the Republican candidate, argued that Washington should not be allowed to impinge on what local people already have – which is hardly an indictment of socialized medicine. Ezra Klein writes a good post about the craziness of those who see the Massachusetts vote as anti-public health.

Why did the Democrats lose, though? First, their candidate. Martha Coakley turned a lot of people off, especially red-blooded men. Second, national Democrats took their eye off the prize. There were other things going on before and after Christmas (healthcare, terrorism, Haiti) and the special election didn’t become a priority until too late (Coakley was 30 points ahead in December). This is a bad excuse – but it is a good reason for the Democrat’s defeat. Obama lost not because of his policies so much as his party’s electoral readiness, which is something different.

A better explanation is that the people of Massachusetts are angry as hell – not necessarily with Obama, but the whole damn shooting match. George Packer argues in the New Yorker that Obama’s rational gradualism is unsuited to a populist age:

the whole drift of political currents—especially in the wake of last night’s Massachusetts result—is away from Obama’s agenda, and toward a kind of populism that, like a wild fire, can shift directions with any light wind that blows through and quickly burn up large tracts of land (it just immolated Martha Coakley). This is a politics that Obama has never been comfortable with. His preferred approach, as we’ve learned this past year, is to bring together his relatively non-ideological advisers, let each one argue a point of view, then make a decision on the rational basis of evidence and expertise, and explain it to the public in a detailed, almost anti-inspirational manner. Thus the bank plan, the Afghanistan policy, the “jobs summit,” etc. A Democratic politician recently told me that the best way to get Obama to do what you want is to tell him that it’s the unpopular, difficult, but responsible thing.

If Obama has any ideology, it’s this process. It is not an approach that’s easily adapted to leading and guiding the volatile hearts and minds of a beleaguered and cynical public. My guess is that it’s driven his political advisers around the bend many times.

Andrew Sullivan embellishes on Packer’s theme here.

Obama’s governing style may be a problem – but it hardly dooms him to defeat and disaster. What he needs is better presentation and more forceful messaging. His attack on the banks yesterday showed his ability to turn on the anger when needed – as he did several times during his campaign. In this case, thankfully, his populism coincides with good policy: breaking up the banks is surely a good idea on the merits, aside from being necessary politics.

More substantially, Obama remains in a good position. His capture of 60 votes in 2008 was always somewhat fortuitous anyway – at the extreme of what he could have hoped for. He still has 59 votes in the Senate, and a massive majority in the House. He can get a lot of stuff done – including healthcare. Surely, after the shock has subsided, the House will pass the Senate bill, thus obviating the need for further Senate votes, and achieving many of the Democrats’ and Obama’s goals. Obama can then move on to further crowd-pleasing initiatives, including bank-bashing, immigration reform, and restoring economic confidence. (His climate change legislation may be in trouble, though.)

The problem in all of this is not Obama, but 1) the media, which seeks to escalate the smallest setback/controversy to the greatest extent (the cliche about selling newspapers is true; the rest can be put down to journalistic vanity and ignorance), and 2) the American system, which denies the ability of election-winners to govern properly. Even with a big election victory, and majorities in both houses, Obama has had to fight for everything he can get. America’s Founders envisioned a system of checks-and-balances, where sensible men would disagree but eventually compromise. In today’s partisan environment, and the blatant obstructionism of the Republicans, that is impossible – 60 votes or no. Either America’s politicians re-learn the art of bipartisanship, or they change the laws of the Senate to allow simple majority voting (instead of super-majorities). If the Republicans continue to block everything, Obama should blame them for the impasse and start pushing for a change in the rules.

If he fails at this, and fails with his agenda too, we shouldn’t blame him for everything. Obama’s problems are unusually complicated – they are party political as well as systematic. But I think we are a long way from the end of Obama. The problem with the media is that it wants to call everything instantaneously, instead of seeing developments over the long-haul. My guess is that, once the dust has settled, Obama will come out fighting, the Republicans will overplay their hand, and Obama’s momentum will be restored. In the history of his presidency, the Massachusetts defeat will be an embarrassing footnote, rather than a era-defining moment.

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Tiger’s shame and ours

January 21, 2010

Just been listening to a discussion on Radio Five Live about Tiger Woods being photographed entering a “sex addict clinic”. The presenter and two journalists (sports journalists) were congratulating the head of a photographic agency who’d just sold the picture around the world. All agreed what a scoop it is. And the head of the agency, who’s name I’ve forgotten, was boasting of his team’s “investigative skills”, not to mention the high six-figure sum the photo accrued.

First, I’m not really sure what a story about someone’s sex life is doing on a sports radio network. Tiger Woods visiting a sex clinic has nothing to do with golf. But then that’s the BBC’s business. I suppose there’s no football to report on tonight.

Second, I don’t think we should be congratulating people who make lots of money out of other people’s misery. This paparazzo is invading someone’s privacy at a moment of grief. I also think that these journalists are awfully sanctimonious about sex, all of a sudden. Half of Fleet Street has conducted affairs, and yet here they are pontificating on the shame of Tiger and all his wild women. Not to condone adultery, which I think is generally a wrong thing, but Tiger has been doing something lots of guys would like to do – ie have sex with lots of women, preferably at the same time. That’s not a good thing, morally, but we shouldn’t apply higher standards to Tiger just because he’s good at golf.

Most importantly, I think it’s bad that this paparazzo gets to wrap himself in the flag of investigative journalism. It was laughable in the interview because one minute he was talking about his agency’s good honest methods, while the next explaining how they co-operate with many celebrities to get pictures in the papers. The worst thing is that these people exploit hard-won press freedoms for non-worthy ends. They will, for instance, claim that the Tiger Woods picture is justified in the “public interest”, when only a poor view of the public’s interests could allow such a view. It’s bad enough that we have trashy journalism at the expense of serious stories. It’s worse that we have to listen to its perpetrators lauded live on-air.

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