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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

Tags: Flat Earth News, journalism education, Nick Davies

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.

Tags: climate change, democracy