Albany Blog

Having just read the twitter guide from the UK Government, I’m reminded of how frustrated teenagers feel when their parents adopt something they feel is their domain.

So twitter has been embraced by the establishment stretching an explanation of how to use twitter to 20 pages (!); is this not a little irritating? (..no less than 2 and no more than 10 tweets per day..unless you’re re-tweeting..) Certainly, many commercial companies now incorporate micro blogging into their publicity and marketing campaigns, perhaps they also have produced reams of guidelines for their staff on ‘how to use’, but surely common sense takes over with Sun Microsystems simple but effective approach of ‘don’t do anything stupid’?

But that Twitter has been deconstructed so carefully for use by government departments suggests that it is now (finally) okay to tweet. Once the preserve of celebrities stuck in lifts, it’s now an acceptable tool of communication in the execution of ‘Public Diplomacy’; twitter has truly come of age! Although a survey on LinkedIn recently concluded that in the US, ‘advertisers believe much more highly in the importance of Twitter than the average consumer, of the 2,025 U.S. adults surveyed, 69% said they didn’t know enough about Twitter to comment on the service.’ Contrast this with Congress near obsession with it!

But surely when the UN Secretary General, the US President and organisations such as the UK Cabinet Office and the FCO ‘tweet’, Public Diplomacy 2.0 has definitely arrived. Yes, it’s a daft name for a micro blog and yes I still feel slightly awkward ‘tweeting’, (I wonder if Ban and Barak still do?) but like a lot of digital diplomacy, it’s very simple and highly effective. To have to engage in no more than 140 characters is a test in itself. Users are faced with the daily challenge of having to compress their thoughts into a tight sentence that both articulates their point but also reflects their character. Because, never forget that one of the unspoken rules of tweeting is to ‘be human’. How do you achieve that in Digital Diplomacy? The “twitterati”, that self appointed soul of this communications medium, fiercely oppose the notion of their medium being hijacked by the Corporate and ‘them’: the system. In their eyes, to de-humanise twitter is to turn it into another corporate toy or a public service information platform; something to avoided!

So how will the establishment cope, how can digital diplomacy be effective in so few words? Could it be the reach and speed of the message, and not so much the content itself? Is it the fact that it’s participating in the conversation, trying to fill that informational space that was once the preserve of the media? It may not be the right message – or even the one we want to hear – but at least it is participating and targeting a demographic of society that is furiously communicating on-line.

Whatever the results of the Government’s guidelines, it can’t be faulted for not trying at digital diplomacy. Be it a domestic or international audience, politics is about communications and all politics is local, it now happens to be 140 characters and on-line..!

Paul Gibbins is Albany’s Senior Project Manager. 

Nic Gowing, veteran BBC journalist with an active academic interest in his profession, presenting ‘Skyful of Lies’ at the Albany Associates London conference[1], is quite right in pointing out the rate with which the ‘new media’ are having such a considerable effect on the structures of power. He noted the ”new capacity for scrutiny and accountability way beyond the assumed power and influence of the traditional media,” unveiling the ’3Fs’ of the new media environment that an organisation (whether media, corporate or governmental) should be concerned about – ‘fast, first and flawed?’

Nik Gowing, Reuters Institute, speaking Albany's Communications Conference

Despite these rapid and undeniable changes, some things remain the same, though appearances may flatter to deceive. More should be done to reconcile ourselves to the limitations of the new media; it is not a brave new world as such, more an extension of the same old environment, but freshly sprinkled with convincing jargon.

This blog will focus on the traditional media, because as Gowing suggests, the new media’s ”influence will be via the mainstream traditional media outlets” (although he also notes ”the vast and growing proliferation of usually unmediated content platforms.”) 

The concern is threefold: firstly, that too much focus on the ‘new media’ serves to valorise excessively their importance. After all, whether the media are new or traditional, the same old truism applies: news is where the journalists are, not the other way round. Stories have always occurred where journalists (and now ‘citizen’ journalists) are not, and will continue to do so. A more representative picture is not a given.  

There was plenty of user-generated content (UGC) from Iran recently during the unrest following the election. However, while common, it is not right to suggest that literally everyone is uploading material, for it is still a privileged action that requires an interest and an ability which is not standard among a population. Thus, the viewer was provided with a pretty clear snapshot of what was happening in North Tehran, the most affluent and technologically savvy part of Iran. 

Nonetheless, it has been a feature of the coverage that Tehran was taken to be representative of Iran in general. Even before Western journalists were confined to their hotels, none ventured outside the capital to take the country’s temperature, preferring instead to arrive a few days before the election. Thus, developing a clear picture of Iran is difficult based on immobile correspondents and clips from a narrow geographical area – more footage does not necessarily mean more knowledge or understanding. Iran is an example in which the most ‘broadcastable’ voice (ie pre-packaged, not gathered) triumphed over a more representative one (which, it must be said, was not gathered either).   

That arguably the citizen journalists or ‘information doers’ could cover more territory, thus bringing more valid stories to attention, is tempered by the second concern: that the ‘information transparency’ the new media bring is too often taken at face value. Whether in new or traditional media, accuracy and substantiation is exactly the same concept, although wading through the mass of user-generated content is an unenviable and time-consuming task.  

Despite well-established editorial processes, things can slip the net: in the last week, Agence France Presse, the Daily Mirror, the Times, Sky, the Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian all reported British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s ‘tweet’ eulogising Michael Jackson – when in fact it was a hoax that Miliband had nothing to do with.  

Thirdly, although mobile phones and cheap cameras are very common, there are plenty of people with important stories but without such tools whose voices could be drowned out in the absence of digitized pictures. It is unthinkable to receive round-the-clock Twitter updates from an internally displaced persons camp in South Darfur, yet it is a harsh call to judge that their story has less media value to anywhere else that is enhanced by digital pictures.
 

Credibility 

Such is the importance of the reputation and credibility of a media organisation that the 3Fs may as well be one: ‘flawed?’, with the question mark bearing all responsibility. This remains the governing principle: can the media outlet still broadcast or publish a particular source or story while still being able to support the source 100% if questioned? The stakes are the same for work provided by their paid employees or for any user-generated content (USG): the professional integrity of the media outlet. A broadcaster may have a hundred clips of USG, but if they cannot be verified to an exacting standard, then the mainstream has no use for them.  

In traditional media, editing is (still) a two-way process in which the correspondent can be asked to check something questionable that caught the sub’s eye, if the sub chooses not to simply omit it instead.  

The principles behind the new media are the same as the old, although ethics behind the editorial process are not as stringent as before, despite assurances that ‘verification’ is a plural and through process. The new media are part of an unfamiliar environment where editorial processes are weaker than with the traditional media staffed by paid employees; there is no asking an amateur, essentially a stranger, to verify content. Unsurprisingly, an organisation’s own vouched-for material from paid employees will be preferred to USG.
 

Accountability  

New media material transmitted via traditional media is considered the same as any material, insofar as people who decide to broadcast it can be held to account for editorial decisions. So far, this does not really seem to have happened in a controversial way, but one day a case will arise where a broadcaster will cease to be lucky in its enemy. Take for example the Mohammed al-Durra case, involving the shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy by Israeli forces in 2000. Nine years and various court cases later, there is no absolute certainty as to the authenticity of the footage, despite it being edited and broadcast on France 2, an experienced, professional and credible broadcaster.

The onslaught that professionals can face in sticking to their story is enough to make the amateurs crumble in no time, and the weakened editorial process that originally verified their stories is testament to shakier ground. An organisation would hate to go to court for material that was not even theirs to start with, and so prevention, not cure, is the guiding principle. This in practice involves rejecting a huge amount of USG, and unfortunately there are no figures available to depict the proportion of material that is used compared to the material that is rejected.  

However, material usually designated USG does make it on to flagship news programmes, which is testament to its usefulness, even if uncommon, and also that it is the kind of material that traditional crews could not get. People do behave differently when they know camera crews are around, and some excellent footage has been obtained by ordinary citizens and handheld cameras that do not arouse the suspicions of authorities not wishing to be filmed.  

Commonly cited in this regard is B’Tselem’s ”Shooting Back” initiative (although a legal claim from the US has now obliged the name to be changed to ”B’Tselem camera distribution project”), footage from which has been broadcast on many mainstream flagship vehicles.  

The crucial difference between this and other UGC is that this is a professionally managed project that is fully aware of the media ethics involved with broadcasting. B’Tselem provides the verification and contextualization necessary for a broadcaster to trust the content, making reporters and editors secure enough to use the material. This is a procedure, a ‘brand’ that can be (and is) exported to other conflict zones to enhance credibility of material shot by amateurs. Note that it is not the material so much as its credibility that convinces a broadcaster, and B’Tselem can claim credibility that your average uploader cannot. Professional ethics such as these stand B’Tselem material apart from more general USG, and identify it more closely with the traditional media, as it understands and tries to adhere to their editorial requirements.  

In the same way that the advent of the internet has not brought an objective truth any closer, nor has the advent of UGC and its platforms. There is just more to sift out.  

In fact, there is neither a ‘skyful of lies’ nor a ‘skyful of truths,’ but a combination of both – the question for the editor and consumer of the media remains, no matter how critical the accumulating mass of the new media becomes, where does the balance between the two lie?

(Guy Gabriel is a journalist and adviser to Arab Media Watch)

Hi there. My name’s Daniel Bennett. I write a blog for the Frontline Club on new media and conflict and I’ve been invited to temporarily take over this blogging space to crosspost a few thoughts on the key points coming out of Albany’s Strategic Communications conference.

We’re under the Chatham House Rule so the observations will be general rather than specific.

This morning we’ve been hearing about how the new media landscape has profound implications for the area of strategic communications. ‘Citizen journalists’ can produce and distribute information with a speed that cannot be matched by the lumbering bureaucracies of complex organisations.

Most recently, graphic images of the crisis in Iran have found their way to millions of viewers across the world despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to control information.

The new speed and flexibility of communication networks also have implications for Western democratic governments and institutions. Organisations are struggling to find the right balance between the time pressures of filling the information space and the sometimes painstakingly slow task of verifying the facts on the ground.  

Difficulties are compounded in areas where public policy is being carried out by a variety of departments, countries or international organisations. ‘Turf wars’, egos, and departmental independence hinder effective communication. It was noted that in the UK there is no coherent national communications strategy, while in Afghanistan countless parties are responsible for distributing messages about the conflict and reconstruction efforts. 

Military, international and non-governmental organisations acknowledged that they have plenty to learn from communications failures in the past and as participants in a media arena that is undergoing profound change.

But it’s perhaps straightforward to identify the problems in theory, far more difficult to implement them in practice. Especially when it seems that what is required is a wholesale change in the communications culture within, and across, sprawling hierarchical and bureaucratic organisations.

Albany believes in the right to freedom of expression.  However, balancing the right of freedom of expression with regulation has always been a delicate operation. The media is a very powerful force in society shaping peoples’ perceptions and often determining the course of events, for good or bad. In the countries where Albany has worked on media regulation – such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq and the UAE – it has taken a practical and effective approach to both introducing and strengthening media regulation. Albany determines the real and legal conditions under which the media operates, always mindful that while it is important to aspire to international best practice a ‘one size fits all’ approach must be avoided. The cultural, economic and political situation of each unique environment must also be taken into consideration.

Whether for broadcast or print media, answering the question of how to create good regulation is far from easy. Explaining the difference between censorship and legitimate regulation is something that Albany is very experienced in. A great deal of time and energy is devoted to discussing this difference with stakeholders long before Albany starts designing a regulatory regime. The media can also play a negative role in the reconstruction of post-conflict societies or in a democratisation process. For instance, the media may, through incitement to hatred and violence create or prolong a conflict, as happened in the Balkans. In addition, concentration of ownership and control or the activities of an inaccurate and tendentious media can also complicate reconstruction efforts. It is not just media legislation and regulation as such that is of relevance. Many related issues play a role, including for example, defamation legislation and competition rules or restrictions on the work of journalists. Rules for the use of telecommunications as a means to access and spread information can also have an impact. Albany has a unique understanding and proven experience in tackling all these issues in an effective manner, to bring about a sustainable, fair and effective regulatory environment.

Mindful of the future, Albany know that there is an ongoing revolution in the area of communications and media regulation. Many countries are moving towards the convergence of technologies, adding to the issues that governments and regulators are faced with. Albany Associates has dealt with these issues in some of the world’s most demanding settings, designing regulatory systems that successfully meet the communications challenges of the twenty-first century.

When does data become information, information become power, and power become wisdom? Communications technology today allows for such a quick exchange of data that our own traditional understanding of this process finds hard to grasp. Albany Associates aims to make sense of this new, seemingly chaotic, environment by demonstrating the benefits of a strategic approach to communication.

Strategic communications is about creating benign enabling environments for the effective implementation of policy, programs, development and reform in supporting security and military operations. It is about attitude, opinion and behaviour and how these can be encouraged, shaped or changed to support and contribute to achieving desired outcomes. It encompasses not just providing information but countering disinformation. It is a comprehensive and holistic process fundamental to an overall strategic plan filtering down to operational and tactical levels. Albany recognises that every contact with any target audience is a conduit and every action has a positive or negative communications impact. It includes the broader concepts of public education, media development and the fostering of freedom of expression as a mechanism for informed open discussion. Albany’s approach has been developed by working with some of the world’s leading academics and professional communications specialists. Albany has developed methodologies to establish dynamic, strategic communications plans that keep pace with a fast moving media environment.  Albany also has considerable experience working in environments, where, due to government control of mass media, technological limitations, or security concerns, communications strategies have required particularly innovative approaches. 

Albany’s practical ability to operate in some of the world’s more difficult environments has helped clients design, implement and maintain appropriate communications conditions. Albany possesses the requisite knowledge of how government and international organisations function and has accumulated unrivalled experience working with civil society and grass roots organisations. With Albany’s assistance, media activity becomes measurable, and clients are able to prioritise important messages, manage their effect and assess their impact. Albany can provide clients with a short-term, targeted consultancy or a large communications team over a number of years. Its global network of experienced associates, and its ability to identify and work with key stakeholders, delivers sustainable and long-term solutions.

The media’s responsibility to inform, educate and entertain is pivotal in a nation emerging from conflict.  This is true also for more stable societies facing challenging transitions.  For example, establishing a functioning and independent print and broadcast media helps to pave the way for free and fair elections, facilitating accountability for both public and private institutions. It provides a forum for individuals to share their opinions and a platform for stories to reflect citizens’ daily lives.  In more stable and developed environments, sustained and continuous attention to the way the media sector is governed is also important, particularly so, given constant advances in communications technology and the convergence of ‘new’ and ‘traditional’ media. The capabilities offered by satellite, terrestrial and digital means through the internet, telecoms and radio are converging at such speed that they are quickly becoming indistinguishable. Laws, regulations and institutions of even the most developed societies must continue to evolve in order to keep pace.

Albany works with governments, intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations, UNESCO and UNDP, media outlets and civil society to develop legal and regulatory frameworks that support independent media. Albany assists in establishing media policy and institutions commensurate with international standards. It also facilitates a society’s transition from state-run radio and television to public service broadcasters and aids in developing self-regulatory regimes for print and other media. Albany has a proven record of success in working with policy makers to overcome challenges and takes advantage of ‘new media’ technologies and concepts.

Albany, its directors and management team, have global experience in media development having worked in Iraq, Jordan, Sudan, Lebanon, Russia, Pakistan, China, the United Arab Emirates and the Balkans. The landscape of media development is ever-changing, driven by many factors. Albany aspires to harmonize the expectations of the multitude of stakeholders with effective technical capabilities to deliver innovative and coherent media development programmes.

Albany Associates is very pleased to welcome you to its foray into ‘new media’ – the Albany Blog. This forum is to provide insight to Albany’s projects, to share its ideology by allowing a greater transparency into its business. The Blog is also to encourage debate; its sectors of business are ever changing and Albany is equally keen to learn of new ideas in the development of countries emerging from violent conflict. Albany plans to populate the blog with comment, thought and opinion from its own consultants and other individuals operating in this difficult sector. The Blog will explore the current issues associated with Strategic Communications, Media Development and Regulation and showcase its numerous Training Courses. Albany Associates is looking forward to being part of the discussion, part of the debate and sharing its experiences in the delivery of its product.

Albany has recently begun a project funded by the UK Government’s Global Opportunities Fund providing technical support to the Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Committee (LPDC) in the areas of Strategic Communications and Human Security.

The project foresees the development of a comprehensive strategic communications plan aimed at supporting and improving the Government of Lebanon’s work with the Palestinian refugee community living in Lebanon, in the context of future conflict prevention. More specifically, it will result in the production of a Security Plan for Nahr el Bared refugee camp (outside Tripoli, north Lebanon), which was destroyed during fighting between the Lebanese Armed Forces and members of terrorist group, Fatah el Islam, in summer 2007.

The development of the plan will be based on a bottom-up approach that takes full account of the needs, wishes and human rights of residents and the surrounding community. If successful, the plan could form the basis for a nationwide strategy to improving living conditions and security in the 12 Palestinian refugee camps around Lebanon.

Albany will also provide advice and support to improve identification of, and communication with, stakeholders to improve policy-making in areas of key importance to the Palestinian community in Lebanon.