Unfortunately, I’m a slow, long-winded writer, so I haven’t found time to write a coherent post. Instead – rather than a mammoth post sitting unpublished in my drafts folder for the next two years – over the next few days, I’ll just be publishing out-of-context snippets from my broader argument. These will, by their nature, be odd and a bit shit and acontextual.

The two things that prompted this were Alan Rudbridger’s talk on “Why Journalism Matters” for the Media Standards Trust on Wednesday night – part of an ongoing series – and the much discussed Columbia Journalism Review article by creator of The Wire and former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, in which he grumpily calls on the New York Times and the Washington Post to collude with each other, withhold their journalism from the non-paying public, introduce paywalls, and blackmail every other American newspaper and news agency to join them.

Part 1: On the most bollocksy thing David Simon said –

(Assuming that I’ve already pointed you to Shane Richmond’s post detailing how many others have said that Simon is totally up the wall on this.)

- The most weirdly inconsistent part of Simon’s argument is his simultaneous assertion that there are virtually no new media outlets offering quality local reporting, and that the local papers are being killed by the internet. He actually explicitly says that the newspaper industry has not lost out to a “new, better product”, but “to the vague suggestion of one”. A nice, pithy phrase… and one that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever if you consider the actual behaviour of real-life consumers. People didn’t stop buying newspapers because they woke up one day dreaming of a future where blogs were magically better, any more than men will stop buying four-bladed razors because they can imagine what a hypothetical, mythical seventeen-bladed one might look like.

The widespread collapse of local newspaper readership and advertising revenue in both the UK and the US certainly needs explaining, and the internet may well play a part in that (less interest in local affairs when the internet offers wider horizons? The rise of online shopping squeezing the local retailers who used to be advertising mainstays, and Craigslist et al destroying the classified ads market?) but blaming non-existent competitors isn’t an explanation, and won’t help anybody find a solution.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.

Eventually – too late, frankly, once the internet had been busy stewing for several days – Boing Boing issued a statement, which sort-of explained things, but sort-of didn’t explain others. Prior to this, they’d been busy deleting any comment that even hinted at the affair, starting a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with their readers. Regardless of how justified one may think their original actions may have been (currently, I don’t think we know enough to say one way or the other, but I incline towards the idea that it was unwise) Boing Boing’s reputation has undoubtedly been harmed by this, and their ability to be a clear voice in favour of openness and broad-brush free-speech has been degraded.

But in all the debate about it, I thought the most interesting issues it raised were often overlooked amidst dumb debates about the precise definitions of “censorship”, “free speech” and so on – most of which were irrelevant. Indeed, it was one specific repeated bit of point-missing that struck me in particular.

Personal problems
There was a lot of very heated discussion about whether Boing Boing was a “personal site”, or whether it should be held to the standards you’d expect of (say) a newspaper. But surely this ignores one of the cornerstones of the new publishing world that BB helped usher in – that such distinctions are now so fuzzy as to be practically meaningless.

Certainly, Boing Boing is a personal site, in that it’s still editorially controlled by its founders, that the writers are the only people who decide what should be published, and so on. But it is also part of a for-profit company, and its contributors make (apparently) healthy incomes from it. Furthermore, it has a readership that many newspapers would be (are) envious of, is a major source of information for many people, and has very deliberately inserted itself into the public discourse on a number of important subjects – information openness being a major one of them. It is simultaneously personal, professional, private and public.

And it was really weird to see so many people (notably in the first thread at Making Light), who I imagine would normally would be quite happily suggesting that such distinctions are now increasingly irrelevant, spending so many words arguing over which category Boing Boing fits in.

Of course there’s a world of difference between one person’s LiveJournal with two subscribers and the New York Times, but anywhere you try to draw a line, you’ll find a myriad of edge cases that defy simple classification. Surely rather than starting with the assumption that there are many discrete categories of content publisher, and trying to retrospectively fit whatever you’re discussing into one of them, it’s better to start with the assumption that publishing is publishing is publishing – and to work out what best practice is across the entire field, and what needs to be assessed on a case by case basis.

At the very least, it should be pretty clear that if you want to spend a fair portion of your time decrying the state of the mainstream media and pointing out how much better blogs do reportage, analysis and comment (which I agree with to an significant extent), to then jump back to the position of “but it’s just a blog!” when people hold you to account over something will require – at the very least – some rather dainty footwork.

Xeni Jardin acknowledges this, and tacitly admits that it’s still an area of some confusion for the Boingers themselves, when she says:

This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now… We realize that we’re now bigger and more complex, and we’d probably handle something like this differently now that we’ve grown… This hasn’t happened before.

It must be weird, realising that the widespread public perception of what you do is significantly different to your own view of it, and that it’s been changing right under your feet. But the BB team should have been able to see that these problems would confront them sooner or later – and it’s strange and disappointing to see them be so tone-deaf to the issue.

You don’t control the context
Which (sort of) leads on to my second, connected point. One of the major issues that confronts publishers or all sorts – personal, professional, whatever – is how to deal with challenges directed to them about what they’ve published. That questioning will often come from people who have little understanding of the context of the published pieces – the internet being a magnificent device for stripping work of its original context – and who were never the target audience for the work. The very fact of being linked to changes who you are and how you’re perceived. Something you wrote for your regular audience of four friends looks very different once it’s linked to from a major site with a degree of authority. A lighthearted pop-science story for a general audience looks shoddy as hell once the Bad Science crew get hold of it. That dark joke at the end of your TV column? People who’ve never read you before might think you’re actually advocating the assassination of a world leader.

In this world of shifting context, there’s a range of approaches you can take towards challenges to your content and editorial decisions: a “my house, my rules, if you don’t like it then start your own blog/zine/major newspaper conglomerate” approach; a formal, behind-closed doors procedure for assessing your own practices; or simply an ad-hoc, case-by-case, depends-what-mood-I’m-in attitude. All of these can be valid and justified in some circumstances. But it seems to me that there’s little doubt that – in a situation where you don’t fully control the context of your own work, and the expectations readers have when coming to your site can change dramatically without you ever realising it – transparency isn’t just an ethically appropriate approach, but (and I’m going to write this in bold) transparency is the option that scales best. From LiveJournal to major newspaper conglomerate, from personal comment to investigative reporting, you can apply the same basic principles, and they work – and it doesn’t matter if your audience and their expectations are suddenly completely different one day to the next.

Ironically, the best summation of this approach comes from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, under a year ago, on Making Light:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
…

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.
…

Teresa (who I have a lot of respect for) is currently the moderator/community manager for Boing Boing. If they’d followed her guidelines more closely, a lot of this could have been avoided.

Post slightly edited for clarity and coherence at 8.27am, July 2.

After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

16. Southland Tales
Astounding.

15. Impending sense of doom
It was a great year for the looming feeling that everything was about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Also on the up in 2007: despairing impotence in the face of the inevitability of decay.

14. Spooks
Just keeps getting better and better. Although, to be fair, it tailed off a little at the end, the season-long story arc thing mostly worked beautifully. Also, they got rid of Ros, the sour-faced harridan. Hurrah! R&B Single of 2007.

13. In A Nutshell by Pelle Carlberg
Narrowly beating out Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala as the best indie-pop album released in 2007 by a Swedish male solo artist featuring excellent, wryly humorous lyrics and an intuitive grasp of blissfully catchy melodies – and this despite the fact that Lekman’s name is amusingly close to that of out-of-favour Arsenal shot-stopper Jens Lehman. This mainly because In A Nutshell has awesome tracks like ‘I Love You, You Imbecile’, ‘Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls’, and a ballad about stalking Mike Joyce from The Smiths called ‘I Touched You At The Soundcheck’.

12. Feel The Beat And Do It Anyway by Sparky’s Magic Piano
Excellent collection of twee electro-pop songs that capture a sweet-spot somewhere on the path from St. Etienne to Belle & Sebastian. More importantly, they’re my mates, and it’s always nice when you can honestly tell your friends that you really enjoyed something they’ve done, rather than just frantically nodding in a polite manner.

11. The fact that there weren’t actually any major elections taking place in America in 2007
Christ, it’s going to be a long ten months.

10. The ending of Life On Mars
Well, and all the rest of series two of Life On Mars, frankly. But the finale, with its heartwarming “everybody commit suicide to escape to a nostalgic fantasy world because modern life is unbearable” message, was fantastic stuff.

9. The films I haven’t seen yet
It was a rubbish year for movies, with virtually all the big summer films sucking harder than the Dyson R&D department, but then it got really good at then end. Except it didn’t if a) most of those movies won’t come out in the UK for another month, and b) I didn’t even manage to see the ones that have come out. Of the top twenty best reviewed films of 2007 on Metacritic, I’ve seen precisely one. Which was The Bourne Ultimatum.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum
Which was pretty damn good, I’ll admit. Although I more eagerly await the director’s cut, in which Paddy Considine’s mild-mannered Guardian journalist doesn’t get shot, but instead snaps when confronted with the injustice and cruelty of the world and goes on a Dead Man’s Shoes-style rampage of bloody vengeance. Best Fusion Cuisine Newcomer of the Year.

7. Charlie Brooker’s Ten Biggest Cocks and She-Cocks in Advertising

6. Shit terrorists
2007 gave us admirable new levels of terroristic incompetence, as a bunch of muppets tried to drive burning cars into annoying buildings, in the misguided belief that a) this would have some sort of destructive power, and b) anybody would give a shit if Tiger Tiger and Glasgow Airport burned to the ground. Skipping over the pleasing fact that our brave jihadis have clearly been watching too many films where modes of transport blow up for no apparent reason every time they have a slight prang (the helicopter in Cliffhanger being a personal favourite of mine), the rubbish attacks brought much joy. For one thing, they gave us a new breed of hero – the pissed-off Glaswegian baggage handler on his fag break. And for another, I got to do another one of my updated Terror Alert Scales:

5. Endless torrential rain sheeting down from apocalyptically dark skies
I wouldn’t normally say this was one of the best things about 2007, but seeing as it was the only fucking thing there was all year, the rules state that I have to let it in.

4. Hats
Hats were still good in 2007, as they previously were in 2006 and 2005 (and before) as well. Despite the regrettable rise in ubiquity of the twat in a hat – as every style-magazine reading cock and trend-worshipping fleshstain draped a pork-pie or trilby at a rakish angle off their empty, simpering heads – hats remained excellent in the past year. Fedoras offered refuge from the tidal ebb of transient vogue (and from the rain).

3. Blink
Not the book where Malcolm Gladwell talks about, oh, I dunno, stuff, but the episode of Doctor Who about the terrifying statues that only move when you’re not looking, which was considered by pretty much everybody who watched it to be the single best thing that’s ever happened on British television, and that includes the bit on Blue Peter where the elephant made a woopsie on the studio floor. Penned by shining god-like being Stephen Moffat, who looks odds-on to make it three Hugos in a row. Screw you, Battlestar Galactica.

2. Mesalamine
An excellent drug, which makes sick people feel better. Specifically, me. A clear winner of Travel Agent of the Year.

1. ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A.
The highlight of M.I.A’s corking album Kala, in which a former art-college student from London with a Tamil Tiger-linked father and a squeaky voice took the burden of the world’s oppressed upon her shoulders and encouraged them to rise up in self-empowerment and, you know, crime. Here, she steals equally from The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’ and Wreckx-N-Effect’s ‘Rump Shaker’ to produce the most unutterably summery, shimmering piece of pop to ever have gunshot sound effects in the place of a chorus. “All I wanna do is-” BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! “-and-” CLINK! KER-CHING! “-take your money.” The feel morally conflicted hit of the summer.

The 2005 list can be found here. Please feel free to point out any things that I missed off the list, or missed out on in 2007, in the comments.

…Christmas, one and all.

I bring this up only because I’ve noticed another piece of bottle engineering that is, in its own way, equally impressive. The makers of Angostura Bitters have somehow managed to craft a bottle that, no matter how gently you tip it, will always send the first drop shooting several inches beyond whatever you were trying to put the bitters into. That it is able to consistently achieve this, regardless of the size of the receptacle or its distance from the bottle, shows an awareness of its surroundings and an ability to make complex calculations on the fly, strongly implying that some form of advanced AI inhabits the glass. And that it is able to propel a drop of liquid a good distance, regardless of the energy already present in or added to the system, clearly has major implications in the world of physics and engineering; initially in the field of inkjet printer manufacturing, but ultimately for space travel as well.

EDITED TO ADD: Whoa. Did anybody see what happened there? That’s right, in trying out Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plugin, something went a bit wrong, and a new blog post got made from every single thing I’ve ever sent to Twitter. Some of them even had several identical posts made out of them. Eeeek. Watch out for that, if you’re thinking of using the plugin – the “Create a blog post from each of your tweets” option (which I didn’t mean to activate anyway) is retroactive. Aaaargh.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

It’s been a bit quiet round here of late – sorry about that. The usual reasons. Busy at work, uncommon tiredness, an overwhelming sense of sodden ennui at the trivialities of modern life hanging damp and heavy like an autumn fog…

Basically, every time I’ve thought about writing anything, I think about the issue a bit, consider it from all angles, toy with a few choice and witty phrases, then decide that I don’t care about it in the slightest and I wish nothing but misery and pestilence upon all of humanity for having the sheer, tedious, petty-minded fuckwaddery to think it’s important in the first place. The only thing that actually stirred my interest was the idea of abolishing limbo – which struck me as being unaccountably funny – but then the Pope didn’t actually make a decision, leaving both the word, the place and my blog-post about limbo, in, ironically, limbo. The rat bastard.

Anyway, that’s what’s been happening. So there. More writing, I assure you, will happen soon. Probably.

Following this lead, I hereby declare this day, August 29th, Everybody Lie For The Benefit Of Sunderland Day. Every year on this date, now and henceforth, I call on all like-minded individuals to come together and, in the manner most befitting to each person themselves, to lie through their teeth in an attempt to make Sunderland more happy.

I’ll kick off:

“I don’t see how a place that gave the world Bryan Ferry and Lauren Laverne can possibly be described as ‘Britain’s Least Creative City’.“