Puffbox

Blair’s speech on British media culture was brave, perceptive and brilliant. But so far, I haven’t seen the media reports quote (what for me is) the key passage of the speech:

Newspapers fight for a share of a shrinking market. Many are now read on-line, not the next day. Internet advertising has overtaken newspaper ads. There are roughly 70 million blogs in existence, with around 120,000 being created every day. In particular, younger people will, less and less, get their news from traditional outlets.

But, in addition, the forms of communication are merging and interchanging. The BBC website is crucial to the modern BBC. Papers have Podcasts and written material on the web. News is becoming increasingly a free good, provided online without charge. Realistically, these trends won’t do anything other than intensify.

These changes are obvious. But less obvious is their effect. The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there. They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary.

Speaking as someone who has worked in precisely this arena through the Blair years, swapping between media and government roles, the effect was actually very obvious to me. If newspapers are to serve any continuing purpose, it has to be either (a) creating news or (b) commenting on it. Simply reporting the facts after the event is pointless, when the TV channels probably broadcast it all live, the news websites summarised it, and video clips have probably hit YouTube within hours. Ask the sports reporters – they arrived at this point several years ago. Read the next day’s press coverage of any big football match, and you’re unlikely to find much detail about the actual match. And why should you? – we probably all saw it on Sky anyway.

It’s naive to turn this into a ‘New Labour’ issue. Blair’s dozen years in the limelight – from his election as Labour leader to his departure in a matter of days – have coincided with a decade of revolution in communication and journalism. Neither Blair nor Alastair Campbell caused this; nor indeed could they have prevented it.

Blair’s words today are clearly those of a man who no longer has to worry about political survival. The response in tomorrow morning’s leader columns will be vicious – because the newspapers’ survival remains very much a live issue.

Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo’s report on The Power Of Information was finally published this morning (press release, PDF) – and it’s proposing a major shift in the mindset of the typical Whitehall ministry, and the typical civil servant:

The report recommends a strategy in which government welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives; (and) supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens.

Although you always knew what it was likely to come up with, a few specific things jump out from its fifteen recommendations. Further rationalisation of government websites, based this time on what’s available in the private sector, not just the public sector. The formation of a ‘data mashing laboratory’. A ‘suggestion box’ for information people to request the information they actually want. Effectively allowing civil servants to participate in online forums in an official capacity. But potentially most radical of all:

‘an independent review of the costs and benefits of the current trading fund charging model for the re-use of public sector information, including the role of the five largest trading funds (Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, the UK Hydrographic Office, HM Land Registry and Companies House), the balance of direct versus downstream economic revenue, and the impact on the quality of public sector information.’

Whilst I haven’t had time to digest it fully, the report seems more of a philosophical case for better information exchange, than a list of specific actions. It lists things that people need to think about, and proposes timetables and frameworks for doing that thinking. But there aren’t many direct statements that ‘government should do X’.

The key statements, in my first reading, are those right at the end, in paras 141-143. There is a need for government to be more open. There will typically be short-term costs, but there will often be long-term benefits. And we’ll need an arse-kicker-in-chief to make the change happen. I couldn’t agree more.

A couple of extra thoughts spring immediately to mind. There are several references early in the report to the power of postcodes, and I expected to see a conclusion endorsing them as a national information asset. The argument you always hear from geographers is that postcodes can’t be trusted 100%: in my view, they are now the de facto standard, so we’d better find a way to make them 100% trustworthy (and that may mean liberating them from Royal Mail ownership). There’s actually a wider point about geography to be made at some point, but not here.

The other is the impact of web services, which only get a single passing mention (presumably to stop it becoming too techy). I met Tom a week or two back, and we talked about the example of diplomatic staff not being permitted to engage on travel website discussion forums. Tom correctly raised the matter of Foreign Office travel advice notices, which the FCO refuses to let other sites carry (under explicit threat of prosecution). I was probably the person who made that decision, back in 1995 – a very different context. We couldn’t let other websites ‘copy and paste’ the text off our website, in case they missed an important update. There’s no reason now why the text couldn’t be pulled into travel agents’ sites via web service, on the fly, guaranteeing its up-to-date-ness.

Web services didn’t exist then, but they do now. And I increasingly believe that web services are the key to all this. I can almost imagine a policy which says ‘scrap government websites, just build web services.’

A new Directgov survey reveals what people say they want from online government services. A few of them seem sensible, and more importantly, do-able: it would be a huge boost for Directgov’s credibility if they were to make substantial progress on some of these, in double-quick time. (Text-messaging parents if their kids don’t show up at school ought to be a doddle, surely?)

Others, frankly, are sci-fi… making me wonder whether this was a ‘serious’ survey, or a cheap ‘get some news coverage’ PR stunt. But most disturbing of all, some are already available online – I’m specifically thinking of the #1 desire for motorists ‘in the future’, the ability to renew car tax online. Here’s a hint: try searching Google for ‘renew car tax online’. There’s even a ‘sponsored link’ at the top of the page, telling you where to go. And guess which bright orange government website it points you to.

Well, this would be interesting. One of the proposals in the Ken Clarke’s Conservative Democracy Task Force report (PDF) is to guarantee a debate in Parliament (well, Westminster Hall anyway) if enough people sign a petition. It’s a proposal which has won immediate favour with David Cameron:

Promising to examine the proposals in detail before deciding which will be included in the Party’s election manifesto, he commented: “I would like to see a system whereby, if enough people sign an online petition in favour of a particular motion, then a debate is held in Parliament, followed by a vote – so that the public know what their elected representatives actually think about the issues that matter to them.”

There’s also a reference to ‘full-blooded entry into on-line activities’, in the context of radio and TV coverage. Perhaps with that in mind, half an hour’s video from the report’s launch is available on YouTube.

I don’t entirely buy into their notion of ”interspersing clips from speeches in the Chamber or from Select Committees with round-table discussion and a suitably monitored chatroom’; for me, a better ‘on demand’ video function for Select Committees would be a great start. So much great stuff from great people, generally much more enlightening than any confrontational Commons debate, and we never even know it’s there, never mind getting round to hunting it down.