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“Look for brilliance - and then transfer it” - interview with the BBC’s Manager for Online & Informal Learning

What’s the BBC’s approach to training for online journalism? I spoke to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager for Online & Informal Learning and lead behind the BBC College of Journalism. (This post first appeared on Paul Bradshaw’s onlinejournalismblog.com.)

What is it you do, and what’s the BBC’s approach to multimedia training, development and learning? More »

Embedding environment in higher education

I’ve just been responding to a survey for a forthcoming book, Embedding Sustainability across the Higher Education Curriculum, being put together by a researcher from Brighton University. It looks like a great project and a thoroughly needed piece of research.

These were my very brief responses to my experiences so far, but something I’ll be thinking about more as term starts up again and teaching begins. It’s something we also thought about during the training last week in the Certificate in Higher Education Teaching and Learning that I and colleagues took part in, which was a fantastic, inspiring eye-opener into the different theories and applications of teaching styles that puts the teacher-learner relationship back to its rightful place, as the focus of what we do. Everything this page says about Caroline Walker Gleaves (”one of the best in the country”) is true!

More to come on this subject of embedding environmental sustainability into the journalism curriculum, but here were my answers to the researcher: More »

Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News and education

Last Friday I heard Nick Davies present at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference in Sheffield. My piece for Journalism.co.uk is over here, looking at Nick Davies’ 11th hour call to journalism educators to be the guardians of the skills needed to “find out the truth”. This was the essence of Nick’s message:

“If we don’t teach the skills, journalism dies, and then we’re really in trouble, politically and democratically.”

A little taster from the piece:

So can we educators be the guardians of skills that the industry, and often students, see no use for? Davies, jetlagged from his recent flight from Australia promoting his book, was not optimistic.

To research the unwritten chapter he put in Freedom of Information requests to journalism schools for the student feedback they had received. The resistance, he said, was shocking: one university claimed the documentation was ‘Commercial in Confidence’ on the basis that the comments were so bad they would damage its business if they came out.

Along with my colleague Philip Young, I also presented. I’m going to post up the paper later this week–on the representation of climate change across new media.

Read the full article

Lomborg on half-baked climate ideas

On the Guardian this morning, Bjorn Lomborg argues that politicians using the line that the cost of action on climate change “is low compared to the high price of inaction” are, in fact using an “almost fraudulent” argument. Lomborg believes politicians are getting away with this because “we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true.” He asks:

Why, then, should we tolerate such fallacious arguments when debating the costliest public policy decision in the history of mankind?

The problem with this argument is that CO2 emissions reductions programmes are are the only ones with a very long-term solution in mind, and one that is equitable for the planet. As Nicholas Stern’s 2006 and 2008 reports show, most of the 8bn of the 9bn people on the planet by 2050 will have contributed little to climate change, but suffer most of the effects. More »

Greenpeace success shows Ofcom’s weakness

I’ve just listened to Ben Stewart from Greenpeace on the Radio 4 Today programme discussing Greenpeace’s successful defence of their actions: climbing up the Kingsnorth Coal Plant tower to paint ‘Gordon Bin it’ down the site.

Coal Tower (c) Will Rose/Greenpeace

How Greenpeace got it right
This from the Greenpeace website: “The defence was that they had ‘lawful excuse’ - because they were acting to protect property around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of climate change, caused in part by burning coal.”

For example, protecting both the lowlying islands of Tuvalu, as well as the Kent coastline. NASA’s James Hansen testified that Kingsnorth could directly result in the extinction of 400 species due to climate change. The jurors were convinced, and acquitted all six campaigners. Some more background and analysis on lawful excuse. The story has been covered across the media, including:

• the Guardian: the chaos of climate change is now a ‘legal defence’
• front page splash on the Independent

Interesting, from a journalistic point of view, these two stories are from John Vidal and Michael McCarthy, the environment writers for these papers, rather than any court/political specialists. As these papers both make clear, these moments in court turn on the fact that moral conscience and scientific fact can combine into a sound-in-law legal defence. One nice thing, I can’t help feeling slightly smug as to just how wrong Brendan O’Neill got it earlier this week. More »

Ten things I’ve learnt about blogging

To celebrate 100 posts, I’m taking a leaf out of Paul Bradshaw’s blogbook (1000 things he’s learnt about blogging) and reflecting on what I’ve learnt over the last nine months. A small thanks to Paul, as he’s certainly one of my top five blogs I check every day, and from whom I have learnt a fair bit about the task.

1. Links, commenting, networking is everything. As Paul says, writing is a bonus. I’ve learnt a lot from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger about the occupation of blogging. But it’s also critically important not to fall into what Geert Lovink, in his book Zero Comments, terms the ‘nihilst impulse’ of the blogging in-crowd. Keep extending.

2. Saying serious things requires serious time, e.g. don’t confuse Ofcom regulation over representing scientific fact, with ideas of censorship

3. Posts need to be either provocative or, preferably, useful.

4. Blogging under your own name can have serious consequences for your online reputation - both ways. Think about your URL and whether or not you really want to promote your name.

5. It’s easy to forget that other people aren’t as immersed in both the medium and your subject area. Neil Gavin from the University of Liverpool has written a book chapter, to be published next year, which argues convincingly that there aren’t that many people seriously looking for climate change information or environmental journalism online. Sobering, but realistic, and important for always pulling back every now and then, thinking about the first time user.

6. I need to learn to do short.

7. Don’t get hooked up on the stats rollercoaster. Again, ProBlogger was good on this. Blogging is what you do, not who you are, but do prepare for a blogging emotional rollercoaster.

8. Your RSS reader(s) are the other half of blogging. It’s where you stay up-to-date and relevant.

9. As Adam Curtis says, bloggers can be bullies. But then that’s not because they’re bloggers. And Geert Lovink again: ‘the web is not a place apart’.

10.The most important thing you can be online is unfailingly polite.

11. There is a lot to learn about yourself and your profession through writing a blog.

(And always overdeliver.)

Tomorrow I’m going to look at the things I’ve learnt about blogging about climate change.

New Hockey Stick 1, Accra Climate Talks 0

The original authors of the famous hockey stick graph have taken another look at the reconstruction of temperatures over the past thousand years. The best summary of the new findings (and how they relate to both the old paper and the controversy) is at Real Climate. More links at the end of this post.

One journalist who didn’t connect the HS with its history was (thanks to the Knight Science Tracker) Louise Gray, the environment correspondent of the Telegraph. In many ways it’s, for whatever reasons the history is omitted, refreshing to read a story of this reconstruction that is not mired in a stifling debate.

Gray does quote Michael Mann on the tree ring controversy:

“Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study,” said Michael Mann, who led the research team at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. “Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record.”

But there’s no mention of the previous paper or the McIntyre criticisms and the papers that it spawned. Why not? More »

They Work For You… supposedly

Theyworkforyou.com is a superb project, and is a useful tool for journalists and political commentators alike. I’ve been using it to track climate change and global warming mentions in parliament for a few years now. This just dropped into my email, a typical exchange from Scottish parliamentarians George Foulkes and Richard Lochhead, and of no major use other than to promote the tool as a means of tracking what politicians are saying on our behalf:

George Foulkes (Labour) says:

Is the cabinet secretary aware that the average person’s carbon emission is 5.5 tonnes per year? I have used the National Energy Foundation’s carbon calculator to do some calculations on the First Minister’s carbon footprint. On travel alone—without taking account of any of his household emissions—his footprint is over six times that amount. Since he became First Minister, Alex Salmond has travelled by train only once and takes regular trips by limousine from Bute house to Holyrood. Should he not also set an example or, as is usual with the First Minister, is it another example of, “Do as I say and not as I do”?

Riveting stuff. But there’s been more important words captured by the project. The site is part of mysociety.org, which also runs Whatdotheyknow.com for Freedom of Information requests, and a number of other projects using new media to make democracy more transparent and inclusive.

Shell undermine protection for endangered whale

In a 48-hours where the ideas of geo-engineering gain prominence, it was a story in this weekend’s Observer Business and Media section that caught my eye for good environmental journalism. Oil giant Shell is accused of influencing–editing–an environmental report on the impact of the Sakhalin II oil project, which threatens the habitat of the western grey whale.

What’s good about the journalism in this story is that, while offering a balanced report and quoting perspectives from both sides, the journalist, Nick Mathiason, makes the editorial decisions to provide fundamental facts of the story that place the project in a larger context. For example, he informs the reader that the Sakhalin project will “also release 1.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, three times the UK’s annual carbon footprint.” Identifying the wider impacts of Shell’s activities in this way is an important contribution to revealing the externalised/hidden costs (generally environmental ones) in the production of consumable resources. More »