Tag Archives: Pat Kane

Huff Po bloggers take legal action for back pay

1 Reply

The Guardian today reports a group of unpaid bloggers for the Huffington Post, unhappy with the money being made from the $315 million sale of the site to AOL, have filed a $105 million lawsuit for back pay.

According to the Guardian the action is being led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, quoted as complaining that “people who create content … have to be compensated” for their efforts.

Discussing the action with Journalism.co.uk’s senior reporter Rachel McAthy at #media140 today was Pat Kane, who also blogs on the Huffington Post. Speaking following his keynote speech at the event he said he was “very skeptical” about the action.

I never regarded the Huffington Post space as a commercial space.

I think what’s more interesting is the extent to which the blog community keeps an eye on the Huffington Post and sees that its leveraging its investment in the right way.

Is it becoming an even stronger platform for citizen involvement, for raising voices, for providing an alternative to the mainstream media or is it becoming absorbed by the mainstream media, are there subjects that it just won’t cover now?

So to me the question is more about monitoring them as an enabling enterprise … And the extent to which they fail or trip up on that is the extent to which you don’t participate.

One of the things about the internet is the exodus and not participating is often some of the most effective action that could possibly happen. The sense that something has lost its bloom on the internet … is a real caution to people.

But as I say if one hears stories of the editorial breadth and integrity of the operation being constrained then that’s the point at which I wouldn’t write for it.

I’d rather test it out and practice than actually go down a route that says I’m doing this because I expect a return.

You participate in these things because you want to be part of a community and you want the freedom to express and then you also want to be part of a big conversation you weren’t part of before.

The extent to which you make an earning part of your portfolio is a different question, I’m not as anxious about that.

#media140 – Pat Kane keynote speech: Back to basics for journalism industry

2 Replies

Writer, musician and activist Pat Kane opened the #media140 conference today, with a keynote speech focusing on the relationship between traditional news organisations and new media, on both an editorial and business level.

He told the audience that journalists and news organisations are having to decide between the model of the open web, or “move back” to a closed, paid-for network. Or he added, find ways to mix the two.

Newspapers are trying to figure out basic problems of economic survival. There seem to be two pathways opening up, two models to pursue for journalism to survive. One is the move started by Rupert Murdoch initially, with the Times and Sunday Times. He has decided that the age of the free lunch, or free information lunch, for news and the web is over, and wants to try and claim back some of the revenue which has been lost.

On the other side is the Guardian – their attitude is embrace the new open free sharing web, they said let’s use that as a resource for the paper rather than an enemy of the paper.

… At the very least we can say in the current climate and relationship between new media and journalism that there are two quite distinct paths. It is an open question as to what is going to be the best.

He said the open web nature of many news outlets today is “economically troubling, but culturally fantastic”.

Kane, who helped start up the Sunday Herald newspaper in 1999, also discussed the challenges facing traditional news outlets on an editorial basis, such as that in part it “returns journalism back to a sense of its basic ethics”, why are we doing journalism, he asked. Or as he later concludes, new media gives journalists “a boot up the arse”.

Journalism isn’t marginal, it becomes central to the health of an information society. It becomes what you do to keep the society healthy. The problem is for professional journalists, is it becomes a general function of dynamic engaged citizenship. It becomes a new requirement of citizenship, rather than a job paid for by classified ads and about recycling press releases.

Illustrating his point early on with videos filmed by civilians on the ground in countries such as Bahrain, capturing for example protestors being shot as it occurred – “it’s not journalism, its anthropology”, he said.

It could only have been recorded by someone participating in that moment. But what’s interesting is that I found them on a blog on the NewYorker.com. Traditional organisations can still provide a frame for the image and a context for the text.

Quoting social media consultant Joanne Jacobs, he said: “In a world of players and publishers, the only remaining scarcity is referees and editors”, and this, he said, is the strength of an institution, to bring such footage and news to the attention of a busy professional who wants to go to the right place to find the right information. This is the role for journalism, conceived in a new media world, he added.

And if editing and curation is scarce, we should be able to make money out of it, he added, returning to the ongoing question of the business of traditional media in the new media environment. Responding to a question asking if the journalism industry is going “back to square one” in terms of editorial control, he said on he contrary, the internet has brought down many of the barriers to becoming an ‘editor’ in the first place.

Yes the internet is anarchic, and rightly so, but there’s also a concept called heterarchy, which means a lot of structures – as well as chaos. Editorial need to think of itself more ambitiously and not get hung up on normal organisational forms.

The full presentation is available here.

Media140: Pat Kane on using social media and journalism

Leave a reply

“Reading a newspaper on a street corner might be seen as banal. What’s becoming just as banal is producing news on that street corner,” Pat Kane, co-founder of the Sunday Herald and author of ‘The Play ethic’, said in his opener at today’s Media140 conference.

The growth of social media and online publishing is showing ‘just how quotidian and everyday the practice of journalism becomes in this everyday environment’, he added.

Speaking at the microblogging and journalism event, Kane said there are some key reasons/benefits for journalists using social media tools:

  • Beat reporting
  • Early warning system– communities decide what’s the news. “Twitter’s the canary in the coal mine – Overlap with trad journalism
  • Real-time content
  • Traceable sources/interviewees/leads – “How much better can journalism practice be in a civic space?” asked Kane. Social media can be ‘an enrichment of a classic journalistic process’.
  • Can you help? – asking readers for tips, feedback etc
  • As a promotional tool
  • An expertise archive – “Used to be called desk research, now it’s handheld device responsiveness.”

But asks Kane:

“How distributive and collaborative are journalists prepared to be?”

“To what extent might the Darwinian acid that new media is throwing onto organisations transform them?