New journalism and new citizenship

Yesterday Marc Chavannes held his inaugural lecture at the University of Groningen. He accepted the position of professor Journalism, especially the news gathering, - selection and -presentation. His inaugural lecture was about new journalism and new citizenship.

Marc Chavannes studied law in Leiden and journalism at Columbia University in New York. He joined NRC Handelsblad and held positions as political editor and assistant editor-in-chief. He was correspondent for the newspaper in London, Paris and Washington. He wrote books about France and the USA and was awarded Journalism awards, amongst others for the American elections for president in 2004. Chavannes writes a weekly political column for NRC Handelsblad.

I met Marc when he was a correspondent for the NRC Handelsblad in London. I was stationed in London for VNU. I launched in 1984 for VNU a daily electronic newsletter for the computer industry, IDB Online, the Industry Daily Bulletin Online. It was the first daily newsletter in Europe. Shortly after the European launch, we were able to link the daily newsletter through the gateway of NewsNet. Marc and I had a lunch and talked about the newsletter; later on he wrote an article using the metaphor of the Worldmagazine.

I am pretty sure that Marc at that time was not online and sent his articles to the newspaper by fax. It is interesting to see, that he is now involved in the new reality of iMedia as a professor. In his inaugural lecture he indicated that traditional media are loosing their grip on the audience. Radio and television are loosing audiences gradually. Newspapers feel the competition of internet in news and advertisements. Journalists will have to get used to exercise their trade on a virtual market square. The media will have to speed up in order to keep up their appearance.

The new form of journalism is the weblog. They serve the need speed, associative directness, sometimes even passion, which gets smothered in the routine of the form of printed newspapers. But Marc poses in his inaugural lecture the question whether democracy gets the better part of this? Since the beginning of the nineties the worldwide web would free the citizen. Everyone can know everything; everyone can continuously vote about public policies. Yet reality is more unmanageable.

However from research it is clear that European citizens, who get politically active, use internet more. Especially when they get involved with elections and actions in the field of social policies, embrace e-democracy. iMedia become indispensable in this process. Journalism and citizenship will get closer to each other in the internet era.

I wish Marc success in teaching journalism at the University of Groningen.

Blog Posting Number: 657

Tags: e-democracy, journalism

Journalism and blogging

Last night I attended a session of the Dutch Journalists Association NVJ in Utrecht. Subject of the meeting was the public debate in blogs. The subject was introduced by Marc Chavannes (to the right on the photograph), professor journalism at Groningen University and former correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC in Paris, London and Washington. The discussion was chaired by Peter Olsthoorn (left)

The subject was formally about the public debate and blogs, but in the background the attention directed itself to the question what do blogs do to journalism and do journalists and newspapers take blogs seriously. And all this related to The Netherlands.

Marc Chavannes started out to tell about his experience as a foreign correspondent in Washington and how he used blogs as barometers to see political questions growing. He indicated that blog about the public debate often gave him material to write about questions before they erupted or never did erupt at all as blogs demonstrated the inconsistencies of the political proposals. He showed it with examples from blogs like Talking Point Memo and Kos.

He compared bloggers of the public debate to mice that with their small teeth nibble away the information and shred evidence to pieces. He used the example of the action of Bush after re-election. Having won the elections, scaring the hell for terrorists out of the Americans, Bush thought that he could privatise social pension schemes and let banks and insurance companies handle these services. It would save the government a lot of money and bureaucracy. But the bloggers showed that this solution would not be for the better of the citizens. One year after, the proposal was silently moved off the agenda, while even parliament had not spent time on it.

In The Netherlands we have thousands of blogs; so one would suppose that there is a long tail with top blogs and special blogs; but there are only a few public debate blogs such as Geen Stijl and Geen Commentaar (mind you two blog titles with a negative!). Yet Geen Stijl is more a shock blog, while Geen commentaar is still in a starting up phase. There are no public debate blogs which bring on questions of politics or social issues; nor take bloggers politicians or leading figures to task. Neither is there a collective blog in the public debate in which bloggers can enter their contribution on public question.

The question was obviously why does this not happen in the Netherlands? Is the population too small? Do we follow the US, but much later? Or do we have another debating culture. So far blogs have not been taken seriously in The Netherlands by journalists; besides some bloggers want to impress their mum and dad, so it is an inferior kind of journalism, the mum-and-dad journalism. Besides most blogs in The Netherlands can be categorised as autistic; the bloggers talk to themselves. However, fine blogs are ideosyncratic.

What have blogs done to newspapers? Not much so far. In the US papers like the NYT and the Washington Post have bought blogs for their traffic and in the second place for their opinion. The same has happened in the Netherlands. The Telegraaf has a participation of 40 percent in Geen Stijl; the blog regularly takes care for contribution in the newspapers. De Volkskrant has started its own blogosphere with blog software, with which new bloggers can set up their blog; but so far de Volkskrant has not harvested these blogs for news.

The conclusion of the meeting was that Dutch journalists should study the phenomenon of bloggers more carefully. For Dutch newspapers there is still an opportunity to start up citizens’ journalism in the public debate.

Posting"s of blogs on this subject in Dutch:
- Peter Olsthoorn (Planet Multimedia): 'Te weinig relevant debat in Nederlandse blogs'
- Roy (Geencommentaar.nl): Kwaliteit en invloed van weblogs in Nederland
- Maarten Reijnders (De Nieuwe Reporter): Waarom doen Nederlandse blogs het slechter dan Amerikaanse?

Blog Posting Number: 727

Tags: journalism, blogging, citizens journalism

Do blogs have a history?

This week I started my blog. I had attempted blogs before with some friends, but it did not feel comfortable. So I decided to go solo and report on my professional life. Funny enough you start to realise that even an international personal professional blog has its limitations. You can for example not expound on local Dutch feuds with ministries and other institutes, as these are too specifically Dutch. For foreigners this all would sound Double Dutch. So I guess every blog has limitations and I am going to make the best of Buziaulane.

Another thought crossed my mind. Blogging might be fashionable at present, but do blogs have a history? In fact I think they do. I will have to go back into my personal history. I started blogging in 1981, but nothing is left of the material, except for a cryptic reference. In 1980 I started to work for VNU. You will not believe it, but at that time the multinational VNU was a national publishing company, which was just buying its first foreign company outside The Netherlands and Belgium. But they did their homework and started up a greenhouse for electronic publishing with the fancy name VNU Database Publishing International (abbreviated VNU DPI). I was appointed content manager, but that is projecting back. At DPI I learned the benefits of e-mail, except that there were not many people to have an e-mail exchange with.

But as I like to write, I got in touch with the Online Inc. company in the States, which started to publish my articles about the European online scene. In 1981 the editor-in-chief Jean-Paul Emard thought up the Online Chronicle, the first electronic news journal for the Online Industry, which were published fortnightly. The Online Chronicle served as an in-between publication for the magazines Online and Database (which are now incorporated in Information Today, a subsidiary of VNU Inc.!). Every two weeks I sent an article to Jean-Paul and later to June Thompson. They checked my English, formatted the article and loaded it on the host Dialog, which was a spin off of airplane manufacturer Lockheed. These days you would load it on the server and Dialog is these days a subsidiary of the Canadian publishing company Thomson. I guess that these writing would qualify as blogs these days. However nothing is left of this electronic publication. The Online Chronicle was removed from the host after five years. And the only cryptic reference by Reva Basch that I could find with the help of Google was on a site of Information Today, saying “1981 Online, Inc.'s Online Chronicle Goes Public With Dialog Information Services...First Electronic News Journal for the Online Industry.” I guess this is the fate of all blogs in the future.

I had learned a trick in electronic publishing, which I could use some years later. In 1983, when I was still working for VNU, I was seconded with VNU BPL in London as a project manager for electronic publishing. VNU BPL had just bought a software directory and wanted to apply database publishing in order capitalise on the investment. It became a project, which was very hard to manage as some people found out. One of the other products of VNU BPL was IDB, the Industry Daily Bulletin, a newsletter of two yellowish A4s which, as the title says, was published daily and intended for the computer industry. Just a publication, an outsider would say. It told the industry what kind of deals were made in the UK and Europe (80 pct UK news and 20 pct European news). But IDB was a critical product. At that time the Royal Mail was more on strike than delivering letters. This meant that in the UK the newsletters were not delivered and in the States the newsletters arrived a month after publication. So I suggested to turn the printed version into a daily electronic newsletter. But the management was weary of the idea. The managers published magazines and books about the computer industry, but did not touch a computer, not even with a barge pole. So I thought up a trick to convince management. Together with my French friend Sotires Eleftheriou we put together an international project of electronic newsletters: a daily newsletter on the computer industry and a daily newsletter on the new media industry. This we handed in with the European Commission for a grant. And we got it in the framework of the DOCDEL programme. With some 60.000 ECUs as the euro was called at that time, we split the money and started to work out the project. During the Online Conference in 1984 VNU IDB Online was launched as the first European daily newsletter on Telecom Gold, a BT Business service, run by Robin Oliphant. The electronic newsletter was an item of three minutes in the BBC computer programme in February 1985. Jack Scofield of The Guardian devoted an article to it as did the Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad through their London based correspondent Marc Chavannes. Half a year later the newsletter was also available on the American host Newsnet, a syndicator of newsletters, which made it into the Internet era, but it sadly did not have enough financial stamina to survive. In the first year there was no hiccup in the delivery. For VNU it was its first experience with a daily electronic newsletter. I guess by now it has become a routine for this publishing company turned into an information company.

Looking back, I think that The Online Chronicle and IDB Online were attempts on blogging avant la letter. So I consider myself back into familiar business and hope that I can keep up the daily routine of commenting on the news and other events.