Gary Andrews

Sometimes you get a shocking event that reminds you there’s more to life than football. When news first started filtering through of the attack, I felt sick. 2010 should be a celebration of African football. Instead, it turned the focus back onto the continent.

And through all this, there’s been some absolutely shocking reporting and opinion pieces from people who should know better online, on Twitter, on air and in print.

Chief among this is the idea that what happens in a war-torn enclave belonging to Angola is somehow directly linked to the World Cup in South Africa. It’s like saying the Balkans War raised questions about World Cup ’98. At best it’s ridiculous, at worst it’s lazy, irresponsible and patronising.

South Africa has its crime and security problems. But one thing it isn’t doing is hosting a game in an area which has known armed separatist rebels active. It’s a difference many writers might care to check.

So, anyway, I did an article for Soccerlens on this, attempting to piece it all together and provide a bit of context. I don’t pretend to be an expert on African history and politics, but it quite quickly becomes apparent there have been some monumentally stupid decisions taken, and questions need to be asked of the organisers. That should be the main story. Not the World Cup security.

And if you want some excellent, in-depth writing on the topic, I’d advise you to have a read of Just Football, who were straight onto this from the start, and Pitch Invasion.

In the meantime, thoughts and prayers are with those injured or killed and their friends and family.

written by Gary \\ tags: African Cup of Nations, Angola, Cabinda, Togo, World Cup 2010

Ever since Murdoch brought paywalls back into fashion like bad mullets in indie videos, I’ve been wrestling with assorted pros and cons (having heard from both sides), so I thought I’d put them down here.

So, lets take this hypothetical. David Conn is one of my favourite football writers, and somebody I would be happy to pay to read his articles.

I also enjoy reading Gabriele Marcotti’s pieces and while I’ll make a point of reading them, I probably don’t like them enough to pay for them.

Let’s imagine, hypothetically, the Guardian put a paywall around Conn’s work. I’d happily pay for it as, I suspect, would other fans of Conn’s work. But his potential audience would be diminished.

Now, Conn is one of the few writers who consistently picks up on issues not covered elsewhere. His are articles that deserve the widest possible audience because of the content he covers and the financial implications for football.

But if you put Conn behind a paywall, these important stories reach a much smaller audience. Important issues that get casual readers thinking may be missed. He will, if you like, be preaching mostly to the converted.

But on the other hand the money generated from the paywall will most likely easily pay for Conn to carry on his excellent work, leaving the consumers (or Conn-sumers, if you like) satisfied.

Meanwhile, Marcotti is unaffected as he remains free to everybody, and may well pick up extra readers as a result of Conn and his colleagues vanishing behind a paywall.

Now reverse that. Conn is free and available to read for all, but Gabriele Marcotti’s articles go behind a paywall.

Marcotti is an excellent writer and provides quality analysis on the Premier League, a topic all too readily filled with hyperbolic dross that panders to the masses.

But by restricting access to his articles, it encourages readers to look elsewhere. For while there are plenty of people who write about the Premier League, both in other papers and on blogs, there are very few who cover the topics Conn does, with his investigative journalism.

So Marcotti will attract his devotees and subscribers but those, like me, who enjoy his work but want to save money, will look elsewhere. There are more likely to be other insightful Premier League writers than investigative football journalists available.

Marcotti, again, may manage to pay for himself through the paywall, but, again, we lose insightful analysis. As with the loss of Conn behind a paywall, it is readers who lose out, unless they want to pay. But he may well pick up less subscribers.

But then, in this hypothetical world, if Conn’s employers can’t fund all his work, that could also lead to a drop in quality or number of articles from Conn. But those that are written will reach the maximum possible audience.

It’s a really tough argument with many pros and cons here. Do you want to ensure your favourite writer can afford to keep writing? But what about the lac of impact a genuinely hard-hitting piece could have.

Certainly, with football content, I’ll be surprised if paywalls will ever be the answer, given how much coverage is out there. I’d happily pay for David Conn or Tim Vickery’s work, but I wouldn’t miss the Sun or even the Times’ coverage (although may pay for an occasional piece by Marcotti if recommended to me).

And therein is the crux. Conn and Vickery are popular writers on niche content. There are very few other journalists who cover the financial implications of football or South American football as well as these two.

They are more likely to succeed behind a paywall because there are very few other places you can go for similar writing. But this is a great loss to those who are yet to discover and enjoy the writings of Conn or Vickery.

Meanwhile Gabriele Marcotti, while one of the best writers around (in my view), writes on standard topics that generate thousands of column inches and opinion pieces. He would initially be missed, but there is more likely to be somebody out there who can fill the void.

Tough, isn’t it. I’d rather not have them.

written by Gary \\ tags: David Conn, football journalism, Gabriele Marcotti, paywalls, Tim Vickery

Yes, I’m still on a sabbatical, but wanted a quick mention of Google Wave, which I finally got round to signing up after having the invite sit in my inbox for a week.

First impressions… yes, well.

On one hand, I like it. There’s a lot of potential there. In term of work collaboration it could be very useful indeed – kind of inbetween a wiki and email. Certainly for small group based projects with plenty of distance between them there’s a lot a potential. I think Chris and I can both see it working with the twofootedtackle podcast as well.

On the other hand: what the hell do you actually do with it. About 75% of my Waves are currently conversations with other people as we try to figure it all out. I’m also not a fan of the lack of an ‘undo delete’ option (unless I’ve just not found one).

At this stage it’s a bit pointless jumping on the naysayers bandwagon or the sliced bread enthusiasts bandwagon. With the fanfare of the announcement and launch, it was always going to be a tad underwhelming (especially as it can’t actually slice bread). But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless or rubbish. We just probably haven’t found the best usage for it.

Not that I necessarily think it’ll have the same impact as Twitter, but there were similar comments around Twitter when that first started to enter the public consciousness (although it’s worth noting that Twitter is one hell of a lot easier to master than Wave). Twitter, and indeed Facebook, are now quite different beasts from when they first started out.

Wave, I suspect, will be the same. There’s probably some incredibly clever usage of Wave that will be developed a year or so down the line that will make users wonder how they ever lived without it. Or it may die on its arse. But the former’s probably more likely.

Interestingly, there’s a couple of people in my Wave contacts who have very little to do with social media. The industries they work in (mostly the financial sector) may just find more of a use for it. Just because the early adopter / social media sector have  jumped on it, doesn’t mean it’s the sector to get the best usage out of it.

Me, the best thing I can see with it so far is sharing and altering recipes and food pictures. That’s been kind of fun. Live Wave cookalong anybody?

Anyway, if any readers of this blog (all 7.5 of you) want to add me on Wave I can be found at garyllewellynandrews [at] googlewave [dot] com.

Right, back to the silence.

written by Gary \\ tags: Google Wave, sharing, social media

In newspapers, Rupert Murdoch still very much matters. In the internet, his influence may not be as keenly felt, but when he speaks, people still listen, especially when what he says hints at blocking search engines from his news sites.

How likely is this to happen, and is this a Murdoch misstep or will he surprise us yet again?

It’s worth just quickly starting with paid:content’s report. Murdoch didn’t exactly say that his publications would block search engines, as he seems to be unsure of how his own publication, the Wall Street Journal, currently handles search.

The consensus on Twitter seems to be that Murdoch would be shooting himself in the foot by withdrawing from Google and Google News. As Charles Arthur notes, Google are unlikely to be troubled by this.

More than that, if Techcrunch are to be believed the WSJ gets around twenty-five per cent of its traffic from Google and Google News.

Even if this is some plan to get more people buying into the content he’s locked down behind a paywall, it still doesn’t totally make sense. People still have to find the content somehow (although I suspect The Times, Sun, WSJ et al would only need a fraction of their current users to pay in order to make a decent amount of cash).

Is this a case of a big beast of the old media not really getting the internet? Some would point to MySpace as another example, but I’m not so sure. At the time it was probably a decent buy (not any more, though) and it’s not like Murdoch is the only person from traditional media to make a less-than-stellar purchase of a popular online company. Hell, enough online companies make the same mistake.

Murdoch clearly thinks he’s onto something and it would be more beneficial to him to be out of Google’s directories than in it. Personally, I think he’s mad in this regard – SEO is hugely important for newspapers -but there’s always the nagging sense that he might be working on a masterplan that will have us all in awe.

And it’s also worth remembering that if he somehow convinces a new Conservative government to break up the BBC’s online news offering (not beyond the realms of possibility) then suddenly Murdoch will be in a lot stronger position. Albeit still without SEO or Google ranking.

My own feeling is that Murdoch thinks he can take on Google in a straight fight, much as he took on the UK newspaper market and won. But he may not have realised that the game has changed slightly.

Google isn’t in competition with Murdoch’s empire – at least not directly, and not where journalism is concerned. Google also probably won’t be too fussed if Murdoch’s publications remove themselves from the directory. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other news sites out there.

Murdoch strikes me as one of those from the old school who seems Google and others as being parasitic. But the trouble with parasites is that unless you find a way to manage them, they will eventually kill their host Murdoch would do well to keep this in mind.

written by Gary \\ tags: Google, Google News, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal

Just a quick(ish) addition to the post I wrote at the start of the week about the Sunday Express’ “Jab as deadly as the cancer” article about the cervical cancer jab.

Ben Goldacre has covered the story in his Bad Science column, and it’s quite damning, especially his conversation with the expert, Dr Diane Harper. I’ll repost a paragraph from his article, which speaks for itself.

“…I contacted Professor Harper. For avoidance of doubt, so that there can be no question of me misrepresenting her views, unlike the Express, I will explain Professor Harper’s position on this issue in her own words. They are unambiguous.

“I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix was controversial, I stated that Cervarix is not a ‘controversial drug’. I did not ‘hit out’ – I was contacted by the press for facts. And this was not an exclusive interview.”

Journalists are fallible. We do make mistakes. Occasionally we get the wrong end of the stick. But there’s getting something wrong that you haven’t understood properly and bending the facts to a state where they can do longer be called facts any longer.

It depressed me, it really does. In an industry that’s going through upheaval and can be subject to greater scrutiny than ever from anybody with a computer – and that has serious trust issues – articles like this just serve to undermine the public’s trust in journalists even further.

As was highlighted in the Royal Institution debate, the Express can produce good, accurate journalism. And it’s always worth asking questions on health issues.

But not like this. This isn’t good journalism. It barely even passes as a form of journalism. It’s irresponsible writing that has the potential to lead to women needlessly developing cervical cancer.

Did the Sunday Express really think this was an acceptable trade-off for a headline-selling front page?

Like I say, thoroughly depressing.

written by Gary \\ tags: bad journalism, Ben Goldacre, cervical cancer jab, misreporting. Dr Diane Harper

Water is, I think we’re all in general agreement, a good thing for our bodies. You don’t drink it and you become dehydrated, which leads to a variety of problems. It helps rehydrate and, without getting too technical, helps keep our bodies ticking over. Given that we’re largely made of water, drinking a decent amount of water every day is largely considered A Good Thing.

There are many things I use water for. Losing weight isn’t one of them.

But then I don’t drink Skinny Water.

Given that there’s not a lot to choose between different bottles of water, other than packaging and price, it’s not surprising that the brand marketing people are looking for new angles to sell their water, and we shouldn’t begrudge them that. It’s their job. But this one really is really something special.

Right now there’s somebody, somewhere, laughing all the way to the bank because they’ve essentially sold ice cubes to a bunch of Eskimos: the idea that you can lose weight by drinking a specific brand of water.

Skinny Water describes itself as “a low-calorie water”. Which is impressive as water doesn’t actually have any calories. Water’s good for many things, but calories aren’t one of them.

However, flavoured water does contain calories, and most likely sugar. Skinny Water’s website says it has a hint of pomegranate in it, so it’s a good bet that there’s a bit of sugar and flavourings in here. These may compare well to other flavoured waters on the market but not as well as standard water. Because standard, non-flavoured water has no calories.

It’s highly dubious that drinking water, or Skinny Water, will actually make you slimmer. It’s not going to hurt to keep yourself well hydrated and to swap your Coca-Cola for a jug of tap water. But just drinking water alone won’t change a great deal.

Drinking water, regular exercise and eating a healthy diet are probably your best bets if you want to lose weight. Running’s a good start. You can refresh yourself with tap water. And that’ll be just as good for you AND will cost less than a bottle of Skinny Water.

But then normal water doesn’t have special science behind it, namely a special blend of chromium and L-Carnitine, which Skinny Water has. According to the blurb on the website these “assists natural fat burning and helps reduce sugar cravings”.

If Skinny Water contains sugar (and I can’t find a list of ingredients on their website) then it’s hardly surprising if it reduces sugar cravings.

The fat burning issue is slightly more complex, and sounds impressive but that’s about all it is, really. If you click on the Now Magazine coverage in their press section, you’ll see that the ‘expert view’ says Chromium Deficiency can cause poor glucose tolerance, which in turn can lead to obesity.

Except chromium deficiency is incredibly rare. There have been three clear cases (PDF) in hospital patients who were fed a very specific diet over a period of time. Other than that, it’s highly unlikely the average person would develop deficiency, although it’s possible it may help with type two diabetes and that’s still under debate. It does appear as a trace element in the human body and we do need it, although nobody’s exactly sure why.

L-Carnitine is used to transport fatty acids when your body breaks down the fats, so yes, it well help. But if you’re eating a varied diet you’re going to get plenty of it anyway.  Beef, pork, chicken, dairy, and bread all contain L-Carnitine.

But after a certain level of L-Carnitine, it stops being effective and slows down the breakup of fats. So, in basic terms, you’ll probably put on weight if you have it in excess as the fats won’t get broken down as quickly.

It’s also sold as a weight-loss supplement although there’s no conclusive evidence that it has any effect in this regard. There’s been plenty of studies into L-Carnitine’s and athletic performance. Again, there’s nothing conclusive to say it has any effect during exercise.

But then it also stops you feeling hungry. In all honesty, if I drank the ten bottles in recommends, I’d probably feel a bit bloated.

The website says there are plenty of scientific studies around L-Carnitine and chromium, which is true. It doesn’t say what results these studies came up with. It also says they’re FDA approved. Given that neither are going to do you much damage (unless you accidentally take the toxic kind of chromium) that’s hardly surprising either. It doesn’t make it that special.

Like I say, I’ve nothing against the marketing people who sell bottled water. It’s when you start to move into making some rather ridiculous claims about weight loss that I start getting a bit more irritated.

Somewhere out there there’s going to be impressionable teenagers who’ll think that because Jennifer Aniston drinks Skinny Water to keep slim, that drinking water will be the way to stay slim. Or there’ll be some idiot who’ll view it as a way to lose weight.

Yes, if you drink nothing but water, Skinny or otherwise, you’ll lose weight. There’s also a chance you’ll kill yourself.

Water’s good for you, yes. But you can rehydrate a lot easier and cheaper than Skinny Water with tap water and the effects will, I’d wager, be roughly the same.

My favourite bit about Skinny Water is the endorsement from pop singer Fergie, from the Black Eyed Peas:

“At the moment I’m drinking Skinny Water. With a name like that it has to be good, right?”

You really wonder why nobody else has cottoned onto this. Just add Skinny to the name and hey-presto, it’s good for you, especially the McSkinny Big Mac Burger. Still, if Fergie wants to waste her money on this, that’s fine by me.

I’m going to try and make my fortune through a bit of reverse psychology though. I’m calling something Skinny works so well, I’m going to market the Fat Bastard Banana. It’s like a normal banana, except we only sell the biggest bananas we can find. It’ll be sold to far people who hate diets, so they can scoff bananas in the knowledge that it’s sticking one to the system.

(If you’re wondering, there’s no real reason why I’ve decided to post this, other than I saw Sian had blogged about it and it got me a bit irritated)

written by Gary \\ tags: bad science, Skinny water

Earlier today, Mr Justice Eady [1] ruled that the author of the NightJack blog could not stay anonymous. This will probably mean nothing to most people, but could be a significant case law ruling when it coming to blogging and, potentially, whistleblowing.

If you’ve never heard of NightJack, he’s a policeman who blogged anonymously and candidly about his job. It was an eye-opener and a great read that made you emphasise with hiss job. The blog won an Orwell Award for the quality of it’s writing.

That blog is no more and the author has been disciplined after The Times ‘outed’ NightJack. One of their reporters worked out the bloggers identity, the blogger took out an injunction, the Times challenged that injunction and today’s ruling is the end result. Bloggers cannot expect anonymity.

The Times says of the ruling: “Today newspaper lawyers were celebrating one of the rarer Eady rulings in their favour.” I’d beg to differ. It leaves me with a slightly sick feeling in my stomach and a slightly bitter taste in the mouth.

Let’s go, if I may, on a slight tangent before getting back to the case in hand. Generally speaking, for both blogging an the internet, I think moving away from anonymity is a good thing. We’re moving to an era, especially with social media, where identity is more open and the internet is all the better for it. It cuts down on trolling for a start.

I’m also a big fan of openness and accountability. If somebody asked me about starting a blog, I’d suggest they do it under their own name, or at least made it clear who they were. It clears up any misunderstandings from the off – setting out your stall so people know who you are.

Let’s also be clear, when we’re talking about anonymity, we’re not talking about identities created around blogging here. NightJack was very different to the likes of Devil’s Kitchen, Chicken Yoghurt, Doctor Vee, Bloggerheads or many of the other well-known bloggers. They have their online identity which sites alongside their real name. Anybody can find out who they are in a matter of seconds – their pen names are their blogging personas.

Moving onto the judgement, I can see why Mr Justice Eady came to his eventual judgement. It’s still a bit of a mess but can be fitted into the letter of the law, by and large (although, and this is one of the wonders of the vagueries of the English legal system, you could easily have seen him ruling the other way).

But the judgement: the reasoning, the logic and the whole lead-up to this just doesn’t feel right. As Paul Bradshaw says:

“… this is a ruling that has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.

And that last element is the saddest for me.”

Let’s leave aside the judgement itself for a minute (the judge can only really rule what’s in front of him) and look to The Times and their role in unmasking NightJack. This is the part that leaves me uneasiest of all.

Their journalist pieced together who NightJack was and then went to publish. And the question I have is why? [2]

NightJack is a public servant, true, but in the grand scheme of things he really isn’t that important. Certainly, going to all this effort to unmask him seems a little, well, excessive.

He’s a blogger. A well-read blogger, yes, and an award-winning one. But is it really in the public’s interest, as opposed to being merely interesting to the public, to know who he is? If he were a Chief Constable, a high-ranking BBC employee, an MP or a civil servant, I could understand this. But a Detective Constable in Lancashire? It’s hardly a high-level scoop is it? Or, indeed, a high-profile and significant victory for openness, as they portray the judgement.

[The other thing that sits uneasy with me here is The Times have previous in this area when they unmasked Girl With A One Track Mind for no other reason, seemingly, than they could. That, more than NightJack, seemed like a particularly pointless act for the sake of a story].

Justin McKeating makes a very good point with regard to The Times’ victory today: that of anonymous sources for journalists. They may not be bloggers, but you can see where Justin’s coming from – the principle is very similar (and apologies for copying a large chunk of his text here, but it helps place his argument in context:

Would I be wrong in thinking that anonymous sources, insiders and friends are conducting the business of democracy in the media with the willing collusion of journalists? If nothing else, it’s in direct contravention of the ‘different type of politics’ promised to us by Gordon Brown – a politics promising a ‘more open and honest dialogue‘.

It would seem to me that some kind of public interest challenge in the courts is in order. Imagine the story in The Times…

Thousands of ’sources’, ‘insiders’ and ‘friends’ churn out opinions daily — secure in the protection afforded to them by the cloak of anonymity lent to them by obsequious journalists.

From today, however, they can no longer be sure that their identity can be kept secret, after a landmark ruling by Mr Justice Eady.

The judge, who is known for establishing case law with his judgments on privacy, has struck a blow in favour of openness, ruling that democracy is “essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

What could be more in the public interest than that?

This comes back to Paul Bradshaw’s earlier point about whistleblowers and ‘on the ground’ bloggers.

When it comes to the majority of bloggers, it probably doesn’t matter too much whether they’re anonymous or not. It’d be nice if we knew who they were, as I said earlier, but, at the end of the day, most of the time it’s not really a huge issue.

But those bloggers who write detailed and informative posts about their profession are much rarer and are worth treasuring. Blogs like NightJack, PC Bloggs, Dr Crippen and The Magistrate’s Blogs are essential reads.

They are candid and often eye-opening and enables you to get a better idea of the problems facing our police force, judiciary and NHS. They lift the lid, often a very small lid, on the inner workings of these professions. If anything, they give the public a remarkable insight into the inner workings. And to my mind, this is largely a good thing, as Tom Reynolds points out:

“What bloggers do is humanise and explain their section of the world – public sector bodies do well to have bloggers writing within them, after all these are the people who careabout what they do, about what improvements should be made and about where the faults come from. They highlight these things in the hopes that, in bringing this information into the public consciousness, they can effect a change that they would otherwise be powerless to bring about.

Anonymity provides a protection against vindictiveness from management who would rather do nothing than repeat the party-line, or lie, that everything is perfect, there is no cause for concern. Having seen management do, essentially illegal things, in order to persecute and victimise staff – anonymity is a way of protecting your mortgage payments.”

You can understand why they are anonymous [3]. The blogs probably contravene the terms of their employment. Yet, in their own small ways, they are important for the public to read, more so than the person writing them (in all honesty, the writer of NightJack could have been any Detective Constable). [4]

There are very few bloggers for whom anonymity is a near-necessity, and if it stops others coming forward to give their insights then the internet will be poorer for it. And for what purpose. One article that doesn’t really amount to much.

Not everybody will agree with this. David MacLean makes some very good points as to why NightJack shouldn’t remain anonymous, although even he calls The Times’ decision to publish “a tough one”.

In the grand scheme of things, The Times’ unmasking story by itself really isn’t overly big. The legacy of if could well be.

[1] A name familiar to anybody who’s studied media law.

[2] Anton Vowl asks the same question.

[3] Not all are. Tom Reynolds from Random Acts of Reality, who has some fairly strong words about this case, and Suzi Brent from Nee Naw are more public examples. But I’d wager they’ve had some awkward conversations with their line managers at some point.

[4] One of The Times’ arguments was NightJack was committing Contempt of Court with his posts, and there is an argument here. Certainly if the blog had collapsed a trial there would be little argument against naming the author. That said, the internet is a hideously grey area when it comes to contempt. A reasonable amount of time on Google would probably produce enough to piece together extra information on any significant trial covered in either the national or local press. You’d probably have to do a fair bit of work to piece together events from a trial and link them back to the blog, and the level of threat the blog posed to a fair trial… possibly minimal. It doesn’t make it right, but I’d be surprised if anything NightJack wrote would have led to a trial being abandoned.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: anonymous blogging, blogging, journalistic sources, NightJacker, public sector blogging, The Times, unmasking bloggers