I’m taking a few weeks off dealing with blogging and all that ‘meta’ jazz to deal with a busy time in the real world of tangible stuff. Debts, deadlines and numbers that mean more than hits.

Talk amongst yourselves for now. I’ll be back soon with treats.

Welcome to ‘The Battle for Hearts & Minds’.

Found via @AdamWestbrook, this is, no doubt, going to endear the US armed forces to an entire new generation of Afghans.

There’s a great opportunity up for grabs for one lucky third level student at the moment, with three weeks remaining for entries. The winner will get the chance to visit Uganda and become a temporary ‘Crisis Correspondent’, visiting projects run by Goal and Concern in the unstable north of the country.

The project is run by ECHO (The European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Organisation), jointly with partners Goal and Concern, and Carr Communications. The prize is, frankly, a fantastic chance for someone who’s got their head screwed on to steal a march in this area of reporting, which lacks committed souls who understand the problems deeply enough to avoid the typical cliches that come with humanitarian crisis reporting.

Humanitarian crisis reporting is an area that suffers hugely from parachutism. Reporters drop in by plane as a crisis heats up, be it a burgeoning famine or escalating situation of internal displacement for one or other reason. They immediately start counting corpses or, among the living, visible ribs on walking skeletons. The attention a crisis receives peaks and dissipates rapidly, with all but the most scant of attention often paid to the underlying causes. Often, through no fault of their own, journalists are dispatched with a handful of clippings and some flimsy background information on the country into which they are about to be immersed.

Often, what ensues is a frustrating dance between NGOs and journalists on the ground, as the two groups butt heads over sensitive topics. Journalists want access, stats and something splashy. NGOs have their own agenda. Immediacy becomes the name of the game, and it’s the symptoms that get all the coverage, while the root cause goes unchecked.

I know a thing or two about this for a few reasons. One is that I spent a summer looking into humanitarian crisis reporting in Ireland for a thesis, during which I interviewed numerous high-profile journos and media gatekeepers about the problems associated with covering crises. (I compared Ethiopia in 1984 with the Rwandan genocide, and added commentary on the then developing Niger food crisis for good measure).  Another reason is that I spent a year before that studying Aid & Development for a postgrad in what was then UCD’s Centre for Development Studies.

The third reason is that the year after I finished my thesis, I applied for a similar programme to the current Crisis Correspondent which Concern were running. I felt that all the planets were aligned – it seemed to match all my areas of interest and the interview went well, but ultimately I didn’t get it. Up for grabs was an opportunity to visit Concern programmes in East Africa. I spoke to one of the panel after the interview, and was told that it was felt that I posed a threat as I was too curious, too independent. If something went wrong, they guessed, I was not likely to quietly brush it under the specified carpet. In reality, what they were looking for was not a journalist, but a PR intern or multimedia producer, someone who would provide good news stories only and not look too deep.

The recipient of the award that year was another member of my MA class, a top-class journalist who now works for a major national news organisation. I learned from them that there was some wrangling during the course of the trip about what could and could not be covered. The recipient wasn’t entirely comfortable with how it all worked out, but came away with some worthwhile pieces of work nonetheless. The competition was much lower-key than this year’s edition, it must be said, and the candidate was expected to place their work on their own, with no help from the likes of Carr Communications or Morning Ireland.

NGOs need their good stories to be put out there, but equally suffer from suspicion on the part of the public as to how funds and donations are spent and just how efficiently that money is put to use. Fungibility and inefficiencies will always exist in African projects to some extent despite best efforts, and the public often fails to understand this. An example of the suspicion we feel is the latent animosity towards commission-earning chuggers, the most public and abrasive faces of the NGO world. Being seen to hide anything, or try to cover it up, can only lead to further suspicion.

That Concern and Goal are getting together with Carr, who have a mass of media experience, and putting a professional veneer on this kind of initiative is a massive step towards getting better quality coverage for aid & development stories, of which there is a huge abundance. But if you’re a candidate reading this, hoping to be called for interview, my two cents is to play up your creative side, and play down your investigative side. They’re paying for your plane ticket, so it’s unlikely they’ll want someone who’s likely to go opening their closets, looking for those damn skeletons.

I’m hoping to make it to Rwanda in January, and as if reading my mind, a comms rep from Trócaire emailed me the below video along with a request to consider posting it online over the weekend. The video is a stark reminder of the power of something we all take for granted – food. Having just come home from America where the portions are simply obscene, the sight of a child rendered almost immobile by malnutrition is a stunning contrast.

Trócaire seem like late adopters of Youtube. Their official Youtube channel is relatively empty,  whereas their project channel from Uganda has plenty of uploads. This video is a good use of the medium, high-impact but not preachy, it uses strong imaged to convey a simple message – Food insecurity has an immense human impact. The video is part of Trócaire’s campaign against aid cuts was timed to coincide with World Food Day, a day hoping to highlight the fact that one-sixth of the world (more than 1 billion people) are currently malnourished. There’s a thought to digest over breakfast. The images (one of which I’ve nicked and posted above – sorry, Trish…) are similarly well thought-out.

I’ve been receiving more and more requests for links and posts to and from this blog in recent weeks, few of which escape the delete button, but Trish, from Trócaire, had clearly done some research and knew that I linked to Trócaire in the past, was aware of recent posts, and addressed me personally in the email. So, deservedly, here it is:

Box o’ Receipts

Originally uploaded by Jim FraziDiner

Ding Dong, The Bull is gone.

After dogged pursuit by Ken Foxe and backup work by Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan at Gavin’s Blog and TheStory.ie, Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue has been exposed as a spendthrift and after sustained pressure has finally announced he will retire, his massive expense bill having finally caught up with him.

The power of the FOI has been, arguably, the biggest revelation in this saga, as well as the amount of work that it takes from a journalist to expose and wear down one single Fianna Fail TD, despite a litany of financial abuse. Digging stoically through reams of paperwork, while not glamorous, yields results.

It can’t stop there, though, and with all the dust raised by Joxer’s departure, the danger is that the end goal, political transparency, becomes obscured. Joxer could becomes but one high-profile sacrificial lamb, while the core problem remains. What is really needed is a reform of the system of unvouched expenses, something that makes TD’s spend completely transparent to every voter. So who’s next on the chopping block? And will other journalists now take up the mantle of FOI pursuit more virulently?

I’ve often heard it said that anyone who wants to be a politician should be automatically barred from office. Perhaps one way of making the post less attractive to those who see the perks and think they would make it all worthwhile is to make their spending immediately visible. We need a glass wall into the goings on of Dail Eireann.We need to see into the worm farm.

Joxer may, through his iniquity, bequeath us a more transparent system and his departure could improve Irish politics beyond the simple fact of his replacement. But those who claim that John O’Donoghue went into politics for all the right reasons should remember that he’s leaving it for all the wrong ones.

If I had a euro for every time someone watched my social media guru video…I’d have around €20,000 by lunchtime today. Which would be nice.

Last Thursday I spent 30 minutes writing a script and building a little animation around it using a site called xtranormal.com. The vid took a swipe at the self-proclaimed social media gurus that cling to the internet’s bottom rung. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are plenty of good people offering help to individuals and companies when it comes to their online presence. But for every one of those, there are five socmed hyenas lurking in the shadows. (I am neither, it should be said. I’m a returning hack who has taken 18 months out of a journalism career to run a family business, and is looking to return to freelancing.)

I posted the video here, stuck a version on Youtube, and Tweeted about it. And then things took off. It was re-tweeted (copiously, as the character in the vid says) and ended up on the front pages of a few fairly influential blogs in the social media sphere. By lunchtime today, it should be at around the 20,000-view mark.  Not bad for something cobbled together in 30 minutes at zero cost.

The way the video has taken off reiterates its core message. Social media is, for the most part, free and easy to use. If you’re creative with your message, and you can put something together that strikes a universal chord, there’s every chance it will take off and give you coverage beyond your wildest dreams. When everyone’s using the same media, the message becomes all-important.

There are some ‘tricks’ to using social media to best effect, for sure, but there’s no magic circle who own the secrets. For the most part, using social media is the same as anything else – quality makes its mark. Practice makes perfect. Produce the goods and people will take notice. Have faith in your own ability and be prepared to get it wrong before you get it right. (If you need another paragraph of motivational buzzwords call your local social media guru. Please have your credit card details ready.)

The fact that people around the world (Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, London, New York and San Francisco) all claim to ‘know’ the social media guru in my little video shows that the message was clear and universal. No consultants were hired to assist or advise in its production.

Incidentally, I have a pretty good strike rate with slapdash script-writing. The last script I wrote was a ten-minute sketch performed the next day in front of about 400 journalists at the 2005 annual NUJ conference in Scarborough. I wrote a parody of the entire conference, with parts for around ten members of the student delegation, and played the outgoing NUJ president myself. We got a two-minute standing ovation and I was offered a job on the spot.

I’m pitching this to the SFA as a cautionary tale of modern-day snake oil.

Edit: Screw it – have it free via Youtube. If you like it, I have a special offer on great advice on your Twitter account for a mere €500 per half-hour….

Further Edit: Between here and Youtube, this video has now been viewed more than 25,000 times since Thursday. Holy crap.

There’s a bunch of students in Limerick wondering where in hell their lecturer is right now.

It’s all part of the lesson. Students have such a limited perspective – they should really be asking where he’ll be in 2050.

A copy of Stephen Kinsella’s new book Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living dropped in my letterbox over the weekend, and is, unlike many literary contributions by economists, immensely readable. After starting night, I found myself half way through it before going to sleep, which marks it out as accessible to all. I’m an interested layman at best when it comes to economics, and at the half-way point, I can say, hand on heart, that at no stage was I out of my depth. You won’t feel the need to know your GDP from your GNP from your GNI, and Ireland’s current vegetative economic state is laid out in very understandable terms.

Kinsella, an economics lecturer in UL, and a former classmate of mine at CBC Monkstown, is all over the airwaves today pimping the new book. Liberties Press offered a raft of bloggers review copies, which is how I received mine.

His timely ‘history of the future’ avoids painting a hoverboards-and-Robot-Monkey-Butler picture of what life will be like. Kinsella doesn’t expect all that much to change, although electric cars and highly-integrated mobile phone technology do feature regularly in the lives of the Murphys, our fictional family who guide us through the year 2050.

Snippets of their lives in the future punctuate the tale of where that imagined reality originated – the here and now of 2009. That here and now is a terrifying place, and Kinsella picks out some select stats to illustrate this. The Irish collectively spend 1.3billion hours watching television every year. (He points out that if just one per cent of US TV watchers redirected that time productively, they could build Wikipedia from scratch once every three and a half days). Our brains are addled with information overload as the streams of media vying for our attention proliferate. Our health system means our life expectancy is 14 years lower now than what it might be in 2050 (although, Kinsella predicts, the public/private divide in healthcare will be as large as ever). And we’re killing the planet, obviously.

In 2050, NAMA will only just have been wound up. Ireland will be a humid country, prone to flooding and a net exporter of coffee. We will be overwhelmingly elderly, as people choose to have children later, if at all.

Along the way, Kinsella posits suggestions as to how we could prevent some of the calamities and lay the foundations for some solid development. I agree with his call to scrap the Leaving Cert and start again with how we measure aptitude and intelligence. A supertanker port off the west coast makes sense too, orienting our international ties across the Atlantic. His views on nuclear power might be less popular.

I don’t usually review books at the halfway stage, but seeing as how Stephen has seen fit to predict happenings 40 years in advance, I’m sure I’ll be excused predicting that the second 104 pages will be as engaging as the first. If you see a copy, pick it up.

This is where I’ll be on Sunday. Blogging has been light as I’m up to my ears in work. Tweets are about all I can manage.

Spotted today on bikebuyersguide.ie. Nice bike, isn’t it? Check out the hidden surprise, though.

Click here if you’re still unsure why the buyer should beware.