Left blogging and the Left press
This evening is the second meeting of the interested (and available) parties to the Left New Media Forum, in Portcullis House at 7.30pm. I’ll be attending, and in that vein, I thought I would like to pick up where the blogosphere seems to have left off the discussion about the nature of Left blogs, their relationship with a Left press and what we need to do in order to wring some successes out of them.
Phil at AVPS picked up the chain from Dave Osler’s critique of a failing print media and the ramifications this has for the Left. Bloggers, Dave says, cannot replace the print media. We don’t have the time and the resources. In that he is absolutely correct. What we can do, however, is increase the effectiveness of the reporting that is available to us, and build a network to increase that availability through sympathizers.
An interesting addendum is added by Phil on the subject of the websites of the major Left parties in the UK. He suspects (and I would agree) that they are not being used to their full effect. Whether we’re talking about the CWI hub or the SWP British site, I think that the major websites fall prey to the same instincts as their print media equivalents, which succeed based of street sales, at protests and so forth.
They’re boring. They use a whole lot of words to say very little. For example, to compare the CWI site and a popular socialist blog, consider the CWI review of Peter Taafe’s new book “Left Unity” and then consider the review of the same book over at the Socialist Unity website. The SU review is written by Andy Newman, who was part of Respect. The SU review is remarkable for its attempt to be even-handed.
On the other hand, the CWI review trots out the same disclaimers about how the SP criticizing the SWP is not about point scoring and how it’s very important for the two sides to work together blah blah blah. In effect, the CWI review isn’t a review at all, it’s an announcement and a semi-apology that makes no attempt to get to grips with the material in the book itself. I’d have thought such an attempt was central to book reviewing.
If the CWI review had provided a list of chapter headings, it may well have proved as effective as a page long description written in excessively general terms.
This is a criticism I have frequently had of the Socialist Party and the other groups: even when commenting on fairly concrete issues, such as a pay dispute, they feel the need to be really general. I think this weakens the quality and especially the credibility of the writing in the newspaper, and it gets a little ridiculous when you can spot exactly which quotes have come from an SP full timer simply because normal people don’t talk like that.
To the average reader, an SP article is disjointed by its frequent attempts to jump between concrete, empirical discussion and abstract fight-the-capitalist-order exhortations. Though I haven’t bought it in a while, Socialism Today, their journal, used to be awful at that. I say this despite agreeing with vast chunks of the SP platform and writing a blog that contains a great deal of theoretical discussions.
How do we get past that? The truth is, I’ve no idea. The Socialist Party has some talented writers – such as Phil at AVPS – and the SWP was the party of Paul Foot. Why those people aren’t utilised to help writer the paper, the journal or the website is beyond me.
As unity becomes a more immediate concern, I suspect that some sort of journalistic co-ordination is necessary, and that will almost certainly have to involve bloggers, who often form the most readable arm of any body politic. The democratic relationship of paper and journal to party limits what can be achieved whilst there are multiple parties, but at the very least there should be lines of information sharing.
This is what the Left New Media Forum has been trying to create for left-bloggers. To have the major battalions of the Left print media added to that would be a big victory – and it would work to the benefit of bloggers and print media both. Sympathizers could write short articles or simply pass along information to the papers, and the papers could pass along first hand information such as interviews to the blogosphere, to increase awareness generally and the reliability of blogs specifically.
Hopefully this will come up in discussion tonight; at any rate I’ll be posting a report tomorrow.
I agree wholeheartedly that the ‘too general’ is not going to attract the generalist reader -
I read your blog because I happen to be interested in the theory, having done a fair apprentceship on the practice. You know your readership and intended readersiph, so your ouptut is calculated accordingly, and that’s fine; but I assume the leftwing print press are trying to reach a wider audience, in which case they do need to tie it closer to the practicalities of what’s happening where this week or month.
In terms of what we do? Well, we have no chance currently of taking on the Sun or other bits of the Mainstream Media. We DO though have a chance, if we do it right, of taking on the embeddedly rightwing media at local level, which is where lots and lots of people get their views (e.g. the Echo in Liverpool is bigger in its opinion forming than any of the national press.
Start local, roll out local by local, in any strategies the Forum comes up with – that’s my view, which I’ve already set out at very tedious length on my blog.
Well, I’ve got some encouraging news to report, which shall be blogged about tomorrow. The first plan of attack is not going to be theory-heavy, at least in terms of output. However it will be matching that paradox of globalisation which is its boundless internationalism and its obsession with local particularism.