Posts from — March 2009

All politics is local. All local politics is parochial. And all Fine Gael councillors from the Bailey family in the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown constituency seem unable to turn around without pissing off potential voters. Or maybe it’s just me.

After writing to Maria Bailey, voicing my disgust at a traffic calming plan outside her house and that of her father, Cllr John Bailey, I vented my anger at their repeated bombardment of letterboxes with their literature. It drew the following response, dated 28/11/08, with a promise that it would end:

“I note your annoyance with the information leaflets I personally drop at your house and if you wish not to be kept informed of the issues in your area that is fine with me.  Personally I think it is important that people are kept informed by there public representatives on a regular basis and not just at election time. However as requested I will ensure my leaflets are not put in your letter box.”

The above pic isn’t a trick of Photoshop. It dropped on the mat this week, and it wasn’t the first since Cllr Bailey’s hollow promise, either.

I probably would have let it go, but this morning, while in a rush to get to work, I come up behind her father’s FG-emblazoned campaign van, driving along Glenageary Rd Lower at a snail-like 25km/h, trapping a long stream of frustrated commuters behind it.

What benefit Fine Gael see in preventing voters from getting to work on time and continuing with their junk mail campaign is beyond me.

James Blog: “Do you expect me to talk?”

Twitter: “No, Mr Blog. I expect you to die”

In a filmic parallel, microblog/micromedia phenomenon Twitter has taken a large, evil laser to the crotch of the blogosphere. As Twitter takes flight, the blog post rate, and level of blog interaction, is plummeting to the ground. The result is that blog authority, measured in the traditional blog-to-blog linkage by Technorati, has gone the way of property prices and Brian Cowen’s approval ratings.

Whereas in the past we blogged about something and awaited comments to waft in, that post-and-wait process has been rendered slow and obsolete by the likes of Twitter. Those that still post lengthy blog posts (and they are a dying breed) now solicit links and feedback via Twitter, and get it almost instantaneously. The serial tweeters seem to blog and link less as a result. Purely, unscientifically, from trawling my own reader, it seems that the quantity of blog posts is down, particularly from personal bloggers.

Solis, who wrote about this in an excellent post on TechCrunch, agrees:

“We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.”

It’s a micro migration that may have a positive effect on the remaining blogs. The criticism constantly levelled at blogs and bloggers is that they are largely the inane/insane ramblings of individual or networked cyber-soapbox nobodies. It would be ridiculous to state otherwise. There are nearly a million blog posts hurled noisily onto the pavement of the internet every day. Only a small percentage contain the diced carrot of quality, while most are pure bile.

But will we see Twitter kill off the more splenetic blog posts, as people turn to the Tweet rather than writing (slightly) more considered reactionary blog posts?

Why blog when you can tweet, after all? Why fly a lonely kite of a post into the blogosphere, hoping that someone will read and link to it, when you can tweet and be heard instantly, and actively cajole people into reading your every utterance. Where better to vent your ire than an always-connected community where hordes of other foaming loonies are waiting to respond to your every 140-character, straight-from-the-heart-ego ejaculation? Going into your dashboard to create a reciprocal link is so time-consuming, and yields a small return in comparison. Blogging is running five miles to get a ten-second endorphine rush. Twitter is popping a little happy pill. And in its transience lies some safety. Say something in Twitter, and after 20 more tweets, it’s largely buried in the middle of the heap somewhere. Twitter posts are not so searchable, so your most libellous and off-kilter missive has a shelf-life of perhaps an hour. A blog post is tattoo-like in comparison. It requires surgery to get rid of.

That’s not to say that everyone who gives up a blog as they take up Twitter is a card-carrying maniac with shelves full of Catcher in the Rye and a ‘thing’ for John Lennon.  Twitter is great if you don’t have time to blog. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pop out 10 words via Twitterfox than it is to format a blog post. It’s also more appropriate for a conversation, for intermittent to-and-fro and even for doing business. And you don’t have to listen to the Twitter crazies, either, you can use it as you see fit, follow who you want to follow. If the noise gets too much for you – *unfollow* – it’s that simple.

And, of course, many Twitterers are still blogging, and churning out very good material indeed, so the likely net result is that those that do persist with ‘long-form’ blogging will, comparitively, turn out higher quality material, saving their chaff, the material that was never really blog-grade, for Twitter. Blogs might claw back some of their credibility and authority as a result. Which is good.

Remember, there’s a reason why it’s called Twitter, although the meaning (below) of the word ‘twitter’ is being eroded rather rapidly by the online phenomenon.

Blog, on the other hand, is a truncation of ‘web log’. And the root of that, the log or record, was always more considered than twittering, which was never meant to be written down. That’s why the captain wrote the log, leaving the cabin boys to twitter amongst themselves. The only other option is that the ‘log’ in ‘web log’ meant a piece of dead wood, making Twitter the green shoot of new growth. But that’s an entire blog post of other metaphors.

Gonna have to turn this off after lunchtime.

As an alum of Dublin’s Metro newspaper, the announcement of its impending merger with the Herald AM in Friday’s Irish Times caused a sharp intake of breath.Metro and Herald AM are reportedly in merger talks, an act of press adultery that brings together three of the most unlikely bedfellows in Irish media, the Irish Times, Independent News & Media, and Associated Newspapers.

It’s a bizarre situation, particularly given the conditions in which Metro set up. The announcement that Associated were going to launch Metro in Dublin prompted INM to launch their own ‘Metro’ as a spoiler, and a safeguard to the Evening Herald’s advertising revenue. The theory was that Metro could cut into the Heddild’s readership and thus, the evening paper’s advertising draw (which recent readership figures seem to rebuff).
A court case over Herald AM using the word ‘Metro’ in its masthead ran and ran, a High Court battle that had the potential to see Metro pulled entirely. Ironically, the disputed paper was to be called Herald Metro, which Associated fought tooth-and-nail to prevent. Now they’re looking at launching the Metro Herald. Both papers survived that scuffle to fight more battles and weather the storms of litter complaints, exclusion from circulation figures and the general collapse of print advertising.

But they survived them only by racking up whopping losses – €11million and counting for Metro by year end 2007, and similar for Herald AM, it is rumoured. (Although, the Sindo took a smug swipe at the Times’ reputation over the merger and its relation to costs at the IT last weekend.)

When I worked at Metro, there were three staff news reporters with the rest supplied by freelancers and wire copy, and the paper was 40 pages thick. For those uninitiated in paper printing, when pages are cut, they tend to go down in fours, and if you’re doing a daily run of 70,000 papers, cutting four pages means 280,000 pages less to print, which saves a lot of paper, in both senses. Since then the number of pages has shrunk below 30. Ad revenue is down – as it is everywhere. Costs have been slashed, and must be cut further.

Although ideologically difficult, the proposed merger obviously makes huge financial sense.

The new paper, reportedly to be called ‘Metro Herald’, will probably turn to INM’s outsourced subbing to cut costs, not to mention their vast resources in sports reporting. Duplicity in distribution will go (along with 100 or so jobs). Two ad sales teams will become one. Two editorial teams will become one. And two into one doesn’t go, so jobs will be cut, cut, cut, no matter how you look at it. Jobs, some of which belong to good people who I know, people who are good at their jobs and could be victims of nothing but circumstance. (Some of whom read this blog and won’t thank me for being a grim reaper). I hope I’m proved wrong and they’re all retained. With a raise.

The cost cuts and the amalgamation of capabilities should allow the new paper to surpass the Metro and the Herald AM in terms of content. I’d hope that the new paper will retain byline journalists, which the Metro always had (and Herald AM didn’t). The only other ‘newspaper’ that gets away without bylines without sacrificing credibility is The Economist. Metro, while not quite at Economist stature, always had at least two named in-house journos (currently Ross McDonagh and Joanne O’Connor), and named its other main contributors, which was always a positively differentiating marker from its Dublin competitor, and one that made it feel like a ‘real’ newspaper instead of just a collection of loosely-assembled wire clippings.

The absence of same made Herald AM feel like something of a ghost paper, every morning’s Marie Celeste. I never met a journalist from Herald AM and one wondered who was, in fact, putting it all together? The end result, say the Times, is likely to be printed at their Citywest press, but where it will be put together, and by whom, is the more ‘pressing’ question.

Originally uploaded by fiannafail

A hands-on demonstration by Micheal Martin, TD.

OK, that’s a cheap shot, but it’s certainly a hands-on demonstration in not preparing material for dissemination that potentially involves, erm, dissemination.

Fianna Fail, as part of their new online engagement, have a gleaming new Flickr page, with pics up from the recent Ard Fheis. And somehow, SOMEHOW, this made-for-juvenile-caption-competition beauty slipped through the filter. It’s so obvious it’s nearly not worth pointing out, but think along LOLPOLZ lines and you’ll see what I mean.

Further down the photostream is another beauty, where Noel Dempsey sneakily gives the electorate the finger, right under the boss’s nose.

Social media are a fabulous way to connect with constituents and potential voters, etc, but although the medium is shiny and new, some of the old rules still apply. Checking your outgoing material for stuff that can be used against you is job one. In press releases this includes wrong figures, typos and other errors. In pics, it’s things like unwittingly showing your subject in a compromising position, or one of the lovely juxtapositions that photographers love (A basketball hoop creating a halo for Bertie being a famous one).

There’s also the question of immediacy. The likes of Twitter (Being consumed en masse by US Senators) mean real-time communications with governments ministers, unfiltered by press handlers and message managers. Green TD Ciaran Cuffe is a prime example of how to communicate online via his blog and Twitter page. But even Ciaran isn’t immune to the kind of rush of blood to the head leading to a quick, seemingly innocuous post that could be spun negatively in tomorrow’s papers.

To the right is a tweet that appeared today, easily spun into: ‘Green TD jokes about own office’s energy standards.’

It’s a no-brainer for a tabloid or other journo to make a story out of this and offer Fine Gael or Labour a pot shot at the Government for free, particularly because Ciaran compares his own poorly-insulated office to that of An Bord Pleanála, another govt agency. And with the likes of Sky News appointing Twitter correspondents, these tweets will get picked up more and more often.

Web 2.0 and social media offer businesses and politicians, and anyone else for that matter, endless new avenues to get their message to the population. But if that message is flawed or poorly managed it’s just more ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

The Green Party’s cycle to work scheme came in for an unwarranted media kneecapping over the weekend, with an article picked up first the Sunday Times being subsequently ‘cogged’ by the Independent on Monday. Both took shots at the scheme, suggesting that interest in the scheme has been minimal, with the Indo saying that only one single query has been fielded so far.

Hogwash.

Last week I spoke to three large bike retailers about the scheme for a feature that will appear in the next Outsider magazine. While all three said that the scheme had received a muted response in sales terms so far, all credited a large portion of that to the weather. No-one wants to bike to work in the winter, and the weeks after it came into effect were the coldest Ireland had seen in more than a decade.

However, both Dublin retailers (Cycle Superstore and Cycleways) said they had already made sales through the programme, with a large proportion of sales so far going to existing commuters looking to upgrade their bikes, and several large employers, who already have discount schemes in place, looking to take the Gvernment-backed scheme on wholesale in the near future. They were expecting uptake to increase considerably as things get warmer and people start cycling more.

The bike scheme is going to make most sense in a dense, heavily urbanised area, where the gains over traffic will be greater for cyclists, rather than in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, the sprawling metropolis where the ST did its research. And people will ask bike shops about the scheme more often than they will approach the monolith of incompetence that is the Department of Finance, with HR departments asking their accountants. One thing the papers got right, however, is that government employees have not yet got on their bikes.

The reason behind this was explained to me by Ray Fearon of the Cycle Superstore, who said that their procurement policies are so complex that it makes it a nightmare for employees. In SMEs, employees can more or less go buy a bike and hand the receipt to their HR departments. Government employees, on the other hand, have to submit three separate quotes/tenders from different suppliers, and state bodies have yet to figure out how to streamline the process.

The scheme is a good one, a simple one to implement for the private sector (having been in place for years in the UK) and deserves promotion. Driving the last knee-jerk nail in the bike scheme’s coffin was a comment from Labour’s environmental spokesperson (excuse the pun) Joanna Tuffy:

“Things like the bike scheme are tokenistic and the fact that there’s only been one query shows there’s no race to it.”

Tuffy was clearly asked by a journalist what she thought of the ‘fact’ that there had only been one query, and was more than happy to shoot off at the mouth purely to get a cheap dig in, rather than checking out her facts first, rendering her contribution to the debate completely useless.

Note: Cian Ginty has a few words to say on the matter, and Ciaran Cuffe went on the Last Word to defend the scheme.