Andrew Keen on journalism: audio highlights

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 September 2007 at 13:16
Tags: Andrew Keen, BBC, Computer-Assisted Reporting, FarmSubsidy.org, Richard Sambrook

There were some very interesting exchanges in last night’s Frontline Club discussion between Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen and BBC resident new media evangelist and director of global news Richard Sambrook.

Keen brimmed with contempt for those he called the “digital utopians”. Much of his argument seems to be motivated by personal dislike for a handful of prominent new media thinkers — Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Anderson, Tim O’Reilly and Laurence Lessig were repeatedly mentioned by name. Keen says this Web 2.0 crowd combines 1960s counter-culture anti-authoritarianism, with 1980s free-market capitalism and 1990s technophilia and want to replace traditional journalism with blogs. I suspect they would all dispute that characterisation in their different ways.

A bit like his book, the good bits in the discussion were hidden away between sweeping generalisations (”bloggers don’t buy books” was my personal favourite) and personal jabs. The first highlight was an interesting exchange about trust in journalism mentioned earlier.

Keen and Sambrook also talked about the role blogs could have in the future training of journalists. Sambrook says blogging is a useful, if insufficient, training ground for journalists:

In the same clip, Keen accuses “Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and the rest of the mob” of arguing that bloggers do replace, rather than supplement journalists. He says British audiences have recognised that his polemical book is a tongue-in-cheek better than American audieneces.

The strongest point in Keen’s book is that because there is no guarantee of an editorial quality control process, online media demand greater media literacy from their readers — and that this may not actually be in place in society. Unfortunately, he and Sambrook only touched on this point briefly:

During the question & answer session, Keen asked Sambrook about whether the BBC had dumbed down over the past 25 years by pandering to popular interest by running more and more stories about things like Britney Spears. Sambrook deftly evaded the question, but revealed that the most most searched-for term on the BBC News site is, yes, “Britney Spears”.

(Be warned: There’s an extreme close-up recording of a glass of water being poured in this clip!)

One great comment came from Jack Thurston, who runs the award-winning FarmSubsidy.org, a database of Common Agricultural Policy data in a publicly-searchable database.

“Mainstream journalists and mainstream newspapers have lost the ability to run serious in-depth investigations that take a lot of time, a lot of expertise and a methodical approach to a subject, and that gap has been filled by a combination of the journalists who are still hanging on to this traditional and increasingly people online who are expert database programmers or bloggers in some cases.”

Thurston said FarmSubsidy.org had generated many stories by sharing its data with mainstream journalists who otherwise wouldn’t have found it.

Thurston said: “The Washington Post is probably the only exception because it sometimes mounts a big team that will do this type of investigation. But it seems to me that most journalists — whether they’re on the Guardian, on the Herald Tribune or the New York Times — are kind of gifted generalists. And in a way they are the amateurs now because they are the ones who are drawing up on the expertise that is distributed out there that the internet allows to permeate up.”

As a new example of this sort of database journalism being done by non-journalist experts online, Thurston highlighed UNdemocracy. The site, which was launched in beta with no fanfare, makes UN documents searchable and available to the public for the first time.

Read More: The Frontline Club’s own blog has a full account.