From Bloggers4Labour to Speaker’s Chair: how political blogging gets social

 Bloggers4Labour, blogging, blogosphere, commentariat, Facebook, Facebook generation, Guardian, Last.fm of thought, left-wing blogging, Liberal Conspiracy, on a high, sorted, Twitter  6 Responses »
Feb 222013
 

After meekly exiting Labour’s intranet, Members Net, having blogged for quite a while in its partisan embrace, I stumbled across an outside world of blogging at the hand of Andrew Regan’s now defunct political aggregator, Bloggers4Labour.  I thought this a wonderful device, maintaining as it healthily did the visual and locational idiosyncrasies of individual blogsites, even as it brought together in one sensible place the feeds of each and every one.  It allowed for a wonderful overview of what was bubbling under in the Labour-blogging community; it helped new bloggers get exposure and support from existing practioners; and it served to sustain a worthy sense of common cause in what has often historically been a fractured political grouping.

Andrew really did know how to integrate the needs of readerships by using technology.  He would even supply his own often gently proffered and constructive comments on other people’s posts.  This helped create a point of focus on the wider input which – in a very simple and neat way – helped generate an air of shared purpose.

My memory of Bloggers4Labour was almost entirely positive.  Both Andrew and I, sometimes together, sometimes separately, tried to build on this original achievement with other projects which I was either rather tangentially involved in (for example, Andrew’s Poblish – a super-aggregator designed to outdo Google’s own search in the global field of political blogging) or more directly engaged with (for example, my idea for a Last.fm of political thought).  In all cases, I think what drove him – and certainly myself – was a desire to return, in some way or other, to that golden age of political blogging which Bloggers4Labour – at its most didactic and pedagogical best – seemed at the time to represent.

Instead of cramming everyone together in a single platform – a kind of awful melting-pot as per a United States of Blogging – Bloggers4Labour and the ideas that came afterwards looked to allow individuality to shine through even as the aim was to bring voices together.

A European Union of Sovereign Blogging, if you like.

So if it was such a good idea, why didn’t it quite work out?  Who knows?  Maybe because we didn’t have the resource; maybe because we didn’t quite hone the ideas; maybe, in reality, because it wasn’t such a golden age.  Or maybe because blogging, in a different way, has kind of had its time and has transmuted into other ways of exchanging the information we value.

Blogging always was a bit of a traditional hierarchy of communication: author-led top-down authorities who were often challenged, but never entirely toppled, by those who would hang from their coattails.  Which is not to underestimate the importance of commenters to the good functioning of a blogsite.  Sometimes, the broader reputations acquired belonged more to those who commented than to the original posters themselves.

Symbiotic relationships of thought were ever thus.

Of course, we all know what happened to blogging: Facebook and Twitter.  It was probably going to happen, whatever the company name, whatever the online constitution, whatever the business model.  But Facebook and Twitter both hastened traditional blogging’s demise.

People much better resourced than us English blogging fans were able to re-engineer the instincts behind standard blogging for an instant-fix generation.  And so the beautiful exchanges between considered author-led hierarchies began to lose their dominance on the web.

*

So now we come to February, 2013.  And whilst the domain’s been running for a while, with a fairly traditional blogging platform behind it, SpeakersChair.com – a cross-party political blogging website on which I have had some of my recent posts published – has suddenly had the audacity to suggest, through a massive makeover of functionality, that political blogging might not be as defunct as we thought.

Before this change, SpeakersChair.com was essentially a traditional melting-pot-type blogging platform.  Writers of different political colours submitted their posts for site editors to repost on the site.  We see this model operating successfully in many places: from Liberal Conspiracy to – I guess – even the Guardian‘s Comment is Free.  I think, however, that the new SpeakersChair.com moves away from this model in several significant ways:

  1. From a melting-pot blogging platform like Liberal Conspiracy, where visuals and technologies become common to all authors even as posting rights remain with site editors, it transmutes itself more into a souped-up kind of TweetDeck, where its prime function is to sit as a front-end to both Facebook and Twitter – as well as SpeakersChair.com itself.
  2. The ability – and challenge – of each contributor is to act as an authorial hub around which comment is designed to flow.  I guess this could be the case for contributors who write original posts just as much as it might be for contributors who add their opinions as comments to original posts.  In fact, at very first glance it seems that the deliberate intention is to blur as much as possible the hierarchy between original posters and commenters.
  3. I cannot but help considering this latter innovation healthy: it clearly shows that the designers of this online constitution understand that their version of political blogging needs to “get” social, if it’s to have any decent chance of catching on.  And social is much more than tacking on commenting tools at the tail-end of the professionalising commentariat: social, above all, is a matter of sharing hierarchy and power.

Seen, then, as a communication front-end more than a traditional website, seen in fact primarily as a posting tool to various channels, there is no reason why SpeakersChair.com shouldn’t compete effectively with Facebook, web Twitter and even third-party communication tools out there.

I just wonder if there’s also an app in the pipeline.  That imperious world of mobile Internet doesn’t half make or break communication these days.  It surely would serve to complete a beautifully political blogging circle which, for me, started out with Labour’s Members Net, stumbled for a few years after Bloggers4Labour’s major steps forwards – and which could now quite easily find its natural home in a cross-party communication project that, at least in my humble opinion, has everything it needs to deservedly succeed.

The freedom to comment is a responsibility and right – not a marketing tool

 branding, civic journalism, commentariat, Guardian, immersive publishing, in a hole, Internet, marketing-speak, News of the World, normblog, Rob Marchant, WikiLeaks  No Responses »
Sep 202012
 

This piece from Rob Marchant, from the end of August, has just come my way via Bob.  It’s about the Guardian newspaper’s online presence – in particular, the mini-website Comment is Free.  Worth reading in its entirety – so let’s read it.  Meanwhile, I’ll wait for you to catch up.

*

Whilst driving back from Spain this end-of-summer, I remember feeling just about everything Marchant says in his piece: essentially, that something was going haywire for the paper with respect to Comment is Free.  I read Norman Geras’s blog quite regularly too.  I don’t always agree with what he says in his focussed and concise posts, but I always value his measured way of saying it.  And if you’ve been reading the latter’s posts over the past year or so, enough evidence of streaks of left-leaning anti-Semitism has filtered into the daylight of his virtual column for anyone to want to wonder exactly what is happening..

I’m instinctively inclined to believe there is a reason for everything – and when that reason is difficult to understand, it’s simply we haven’t thought profoundly enough.  In the case of Comment is Free, however, the reason really isn’t that deep or disconcerting.  The freedom to comment – in a liberal society, both a sacred responsibility and right – is being used quite crassly as a marketing tool to drive, engage, maintain and sustain web traffic to the paper’s digital advertising.  This is, of course, from a business point of view, entirely understandable.  In an age of “free” content, building a media environment which can continue to pursue the kind of investigative, current affairs and societal reporting the Guardian undeniably provides is a damn difficult job – especially when social media coattails almost require you to engage in good faith with the audience-chasing enemy.

But who said working in the professional media industry was going to be easy?  The greatest challenge doesn’t lie in the money you need to raise; that’s a marketing process, and there are plenty of marketing rules and tools out there.  That’s a question of turning interesting writing into product advertisers want to be seen alongside.  It’s a question of selling.  It’s a question of positioning.  It may, of course, be that advertisers have pretty poor taste these days; it may be that voters and citizens are to be more generally distrusted than the leaders they are supposed to distrust; it may be that social media inputs are, more generally, degrading our intelligences.  But whatever the reality, the job of pushing content consistently has its sector, its costs and its solutions.

No.  The greatest challenge in the kind of publishing the Guardian is currently involved in – moving as it is from a print-based medium to the rough-and-tumble of non-immersive content – lies in striking a balance between informing and engaging in a popular way and informing and engaging in a populist way.

Perhaps we are truly at the edge of a kind of precipice: whilst there are those who say the kind of investigative journalism which brought the Murdochs to heel will never take place without the populism of Comment is Free, there are others who might argue that citizen journalism, properly executed, combined with a revamped form of WikiLeaks-style information dumping, would manage to do the job just as efficiently and just as precisely – as long as, of course, freedom of speech and freedom from consequent government persecution were both guaranteed givens in our societies.

What’s absolutely clear is that – long-term – any attempt to create a vehicle for social change out of the mad pursuit of eye-goggling page impressions is condemned to serious failure.

And to be honest, what I’d really like to recover from my youth is my old and much-treasured Grauniad – that organ of gently idiosyncratic information, humane enough to contemplate regularly corrected spelling slip-ups.  A newspaper which felt it knew what it was to be English: slightly eccentric; an honest combination of reporting and journalistic angles; a slightly inefficient way of covering the news which allowed for real voices, individual styles, good faith and a kind of referred people power.

Those communicators were people, first and foremost.

Not brands, defining their and our expectations.

Marketing has its place, of course.  I just wish those who use it knew what that place was.

____________________

Further reading: I’ve just stumbled across this post I wrote back in spring.  These paragraphs are particularly appropriate, I think, to Marchant’s general thesis:

Which is why it does occur to me that in much the same way as Thatcher lived on in Blair, and in much the same way as Blair’s legislation has facilitated Cameron’s destruction of the Welfare State, so the Guardian‘s proud talking-shop which is Comment is Free has more than a little of that vacuous and morally empty hole which is said to have occupied Murdoch’s empire.

“We do what we do because, essentially, it sells news.”  I imagine these words, of course – I’m hardly privy to the private thoughts of Mr Murdoch.  But in the Guardian‘s trajectory, in its allegedly partial attachment to certain causes – and in its resistance to others – we have the makings of an argument which suggests that our favourite liberal paper has so grown up in the shadow of Murdoch that it has replicated, on the left, whether intentionally or by accident, even his empty soul.

Along with everything this might imply.

Which brings me to my initial question: does Murdoch’s legacy live on in the alleged amorality of the Guardian‘s Comment is Free?

Does Murdoch’s legacy live on in Comment is Free?

 commentariat, Guardian, Israel, normblog, Rupert Murdoch, socialism, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Apr 202012
 

I take it that Norman refers to the Guardian, when he says:

In a far off land, the question has arisen whether a certain newspaper is a conduit for anti-Semitism. Some think so, and others think not.

I’ll play a short substitution game with the next two paragraphs in his piece, which in their original version describe the state of play in relation to the media treatment of Jews.  The originals can be found here.  My version below:

Those who think so point out that the newspaper in question provides space in its pages for the opinions of people on record as hating socialists; space also for those justifying the elimination of socialism from British politics; and space also for writers who deploy well-known anti-socialist themes even while professing that they have nothing whatever against socialism but are merely critics of Labour.

Those who think the paper in question is not a conduit for anti-socialism argue that it can’t be because it has socialists writing for it; and allows space in its pages for people who explicitly condemn anti-socialism; and is a liberal paper with a record of opposing extremism. Some say, as well, that it is the function of such a paper to be open to different points of view, and therefore it is not surprising if, as well as material of the latter kind, this newspaper allows room for material of the former kind.

Norman then goes on to show that the paper in question is actually partial in the causes it takes up and espouses or, alternatively, aims to criticise.

To be honest, I’m inclined to believe that if he feels this way about the Guardian with respect to Jews (if, indeed, it is that paper which is the object of his unhappiness), then – equally – socialists across the country who inhabit that political state which is Labour might feel just as maltreated by the Guardian‘s amoral tendency to “free” comment.

They don’t support our literal extermination – but they do perhaps support our figurative disarming, where this for example is clearly not the case with respect to the Liberal Democrats or even the Tories.

Which is why it does occur to me that in much the same way as Thatcher lived on in Blair, and in much the same way as Blair’s legislation has facilitated Cameron’s destruction of the Welfare State, so the Guardian‘s proud talking-shop which is Comment is Free has more than a little of that vacuous and morally empty hole which is said to have occupied Murdoch’s empire.

“We do what we do because, essentially, it sells news.”  I imagine these words, of course – I’m hardly privy to the private thoughts of Mr Murdoch.  But in the Guardian‘s trajectory, in its allegedly partial attachment to certain causes – and in its resistance to others – we have the makings of an argument which suggests that our favourite liberal paper has so grown up in the shadow of Murdoch that it has replicated, on the left, whether intentionally or by accident, even his empty soul.

Along with everything this might imply.

Which brings me to my initial question: does Murdoch’s legacy live on in the alleged amorality of the Guardian‘s Comment is Free?

How Ed Miliband is clearly not his own man (and why this is actually a Good Thing)

 commentariat, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, George Osborne, Gordon Brown, High Noon, Margaret Thatcher, on a high, Tony Blair, trades unions  No Responses »
Dec 212011
 

Whilst I’m on holiday, whilst I have my family around me, whilst I remember a whole host of happenstances which are important to me even as their relevance to the outside world is limited … this is when I make connections between the personal and the public.

My previous post focussed on how my friends and family are clearly getting older – though to different effect in each case.  That march of time is something we acknowledge only when we have time to examine and perceive its movement.  And this only takes place when we are at relative rest – something our agitated civilisation really doesn’t care to permit.

More phantoms from the past then?  And to what result?  This time, a perceptive piece which mirrors my thoughts on Ed Miliband at the end of September, where I suggested that in the initial critical reception to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” there was a lesson we could learn about that famously discursive and apparently unfocussed speech by Miliband at Labour Party Conference this year.

Anyhow.  What leads me to reflect once more on this subject is the perceptive piece I mention above and which contains the following paragraphs:

Miliband is doing well at the polls because he’s shifting – albeit very slowly – away from the elite consensus towards a more social democratic position which is more in tune with public opinion. His party has rigorously opposed Andrew Lansley’s unpopular health reforms, which mean the end of the NHS in all but name. And they have unequivocally opposed the coalition’s plans to sell-off the Royal Mail.

What’s more:

But the main thing is that Ed is heading in the right direction, even if media commentators, still wedded to a political model forged in 1979, don’t like this deviation from the script.

As a consequence, Miliband’s Labour Party has become the political equivalent of Stoke City football club. Tony Pulis’s team are continually criticised for their style – or rather their lack of it – yet they keep on winning. “They are doing much better than people think,” Match of the Day pundit Alan Hansen admitted after Stokes’s latest win, their fourth on the bounce. The same could be said of Labour under Ed Miliband.

The article also underlines the important fact that exactly where we should believe it must count – elections themselves – Ed Miliband’s Labour has won five out of five by-elections: the most recent, with an increase in share.

So how do we explain this curious circumstance on the one hand and – on the other – the fact that the media don’t really warm to him?  Although clearly an insider in politics, as far as family legacy is concerned, is he really quite deliberately playing the role of outsider – a “High Noon” kind of lonesome gunfighter … and is it this which means that distances are being maintained?

Look at it rationally.  Thatcher with gusto, Blair with considerable flair, Brown in his own way and Cameron and Osborne with a determined political guile have all collaborated in one way or another to the same kind of political adventure: pulling the wool most definitely over the eyes of the voting public with their various discourses and triangulations.

But what if a politician was wise enough to propose pulling – first of all – the wool over the eyes of the commentariat itself?  That is to say: let’s imagine that Miliband, in this case, intended not to give too many gobbets of psychological stroking in the direction of self-important observers – observers who had become so used to being seen as astonishing crystal-ball gazers, by virtue of a privileged connection and control over the people we actually wanted to vote into power, that they found it absolutely impossible to contemplate that any politician might wish to play a different more solidly democratic game and at the same time be half-competent.

And so they interpret, supposedly on our behalf but surely far more in their own rank interests, that Ed Miliband can’t communicate; Ed Miliband doesn’t know how to fight; Ed Miliband is in hock to big trades union interests; and Ed Miliband is plain and simply the wrong man.

Plain and simply the wrong man not because he’s wrong for us, the voting public, but – rather – because he’s very wrong for the commentariat.

So although I do agree that Ed Miliband is not his own man, it’s not because I think he is a conniving manipulator of dark interests.

Rather, I believe quite sincerely that he believes a dedication to the democratic cause requires him to be our man.

And that, if I am right, will one day be a most refreshing place for us all to be.

Except, of course, for our real phantoms of the past: the commentariat of old.