Meanwhile, my lovely former employer The Guardian has launched an Arabic section of its site with articles on politics and current events in the Middle East as well as a series on football. The project to convert the large Guardian reading US audience into a more sustainable relationship is also making progress – last year my former MediaGuardian boss Steve Busfield packed his things to sport-blog from New York, from where the editor-in-chief of GuardianUS, Janine Gibson, subtly steers the digital US dinghy off to pastures new with a team of 10 editors. Which is a good thing: if journalism expands from foreign correspondent to flagship stores, the quality of journalism gains indeed as you always learn more on the ground.

The Huffington Post, on the other hand, goes the other way round with launching a British and now a French edition. Only it wouldn’t be the Huffington Post if they were not taking things even further, would it. Yesterday they announced a new thing: they will bring you Internet-TV with the Huffington Post Streaming Network. Sending live 12h daily from summer on, they plan to try something like “social media breaking news”, i.e. their journalists will pick up what is discussed on social media, and one third of the screen will display comments of Twitter and Facebook. That they take this project bloody serious tell the numbers: 100 journalists will be devoted to this.

Picture via TV Exchanger

Expansion is the new strategy but really, this seems a bit odd. Remember that last year we spend under the banner of the paywall? And anyhow, can expanding be an international trend? After all, it is tied to the English language, isn’t it? Indeed, in Germany, Spiegel Online just launched its own app for Spiegel Online International but it is doubtful that other media outlets follow that example. Smaller newspapers have to figure out their own way. Still, there are ways to grow, for example when expanding into new topics or – as the Huffington Post – new media. Thank you, internet, looks like 2012 will be an interesting year.

- The Guardian in America
- The Guardian in Arabic
- Daily Mail US
- Daily Mail India
- NYTimes India Ink
- WSJ India Frontpage & Blog India Realtime
- Spiegel Online International

Daughters will grow up even in the most careful families, and it is essential for grown up daughters to dance. 418

Happy 2012.

5.9 billion is the estimated number of mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
13% is the smartphone share of all mobile handsets in use worldwide.

This means, we are talking worldwide about 767 million smartphones opposed to nearly 6 billion mobile phones, and according to the post 75 million of them are Apple iPhones. Far less, for example, than the estimated 850 million users of Facebook. So here is my question: Are we making too much of a fuzz about it? Have we already ended up in a personalized bubble, when we assume everyone has an iPhone, Blackberry or Android device? Or will get one, just because most executives use them?

As you can see in this picture, my personalized bubble consists of no-smartphone users who bugged me a bit with being very proud of it, but then there was the Provence

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t doubt that the web is about to move from the computer to other devices, and digital information will soon be everywhere. However, I have two objections.

1: This takes a bit of time – we are not there yet, but we pretend to. Is the reason for this sheer marketing? Like everyone should feel in need of a new product? Read, for example, this sentence taken from a study of IBM : “Additionally, mobile sales grew dramatically, reaching 6.6%”. Is this number of 6.6% really one where we should use the word ‘dramatically’? Or is ‘dramatically’ used to suggest: ‘My dear, don’t miss this?’

On top, the tablet hype. We can count nearly 7 billion humans in the world, and among them we have 10.3 million tablet users in 2010 with an estimated 82.1 million tablet users expected in 2015. Well. Facebook is a country, but even in the Western world 10.3 million tablets are not even really a mega city yet. It’s clearly a device for an elite. Which takes us to objection two.

2: There is no doubt that the internet is on its way to leave the computer, but I am not sure if mobile usage will become the new norm anytime soon. It might be that often we just stress the use of these devices as normal, because we fight for the digital public to be acknowledged in the traditional public sphere. However, taking apps as well as tablets or smartphones as naturally given despite the actual numbers is about to become a problem. When we focus on them as if they are mainstream, we simply show that the digital divide is already there: it is happening in our heads, and we set ourselves as the new norm.

File under: #digitaldilemma or am I just a victim of a London underground which has no reception? You tell me.

Television will be even more beautiful after it has fallen out of the sky like Cupid’s arrow from Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in San Francisco

Television sets have been saved a bit by their slow replacement cycle. As analysts Spencer Wang of Credit Suisse said, people only buy a new television set every 7 years while they get a new smartphone every 2 years. However, 2012 will be the year that television will say hello to digitalisation. More and more channels and TV brands have now started to embrace it. They have woken up. Up till now most of them thought of the internet as nothing but a marketing place to promote their TV content. Now we are about to enter a new era and it becomes a distribution channel, too. Welcome to the post-cannibalisation-era!

Yet old media looks a bit nibbled off, and at least partly this is their own fault: they’ve waited to long. Here television has been in a lucky position. Its industry had the possibility to learn from the mistakes of others, mainly the unhappy music industry. Being worried about illegal copying, they denied to enter digital distribution and tried to lock themselves up in the fortress of DRMed CDs. Instead pushing themselves on the new medium with a generous gesture forward, Apple and Steve Jobs did their job. They did it very well, and also took away their control. Afraid of getting iApple-ed, the television industry has learnt their lesson: the safe bet against illegal copying is to make your content widely available, provide it with a realistic price and set up a very easy way to pay for; better even several ways.

Under attack by television-to-go

But as vertical expansion has been stuck in the head of executives, for TV the problems are already beside distribution. On the internet, finding content is the key. So who will be the television guide to find content online? Who will become Google for television? Besides clicker.com, several other companies try to give an answer, among them the social approach of the Berlin based Tweet.tv. In a world of information overload, the TV guide will be the meta-channel users need. Conceptually half portal, half search engine with social add-ons delivering an overview across all brands, friends and followers sounds quite perfect for a key position. Consequently, CBS made a clever move when they bought clicker.com earlier this year unlike television portals which simply dump all their content on their homepage. They just prove that they don’t understand the new medium – zapping already sucked in the real world, and on the internet more is everywhere, so less is more.

Finally there is television-to-go: the iPad and the Kindle Fire tablet have become something like the walkman of television, and Amazon as well as Apple’s iTunes is their content provider. And there is go-to-television: Google has developed the GoogleTV browser that will soon find its place on Sony’s, LG’s and Samsung’s sets. Plus Google’s YouTube has invested 100 million dollars in content production for its channels with Disney among the producers. Apple also approaches the TV set by making use of their creative perspective: Its patents show that they plan to develop a television you can shout and gesticulate at in order to make video editing easier and seamlessly sync all your devices, er, all your Apple devices, of course.

In short, when YouTube reinvents itself “as Internet’s answer to cable TV”as my colleague Janko Roettgers has put it, when digital companies start to produce tablet television devices, when TV sets come with a browser in order to display internet content, then the vertical integration of TV has started to push and shove. As the president of VPRT Doetz demonstrated at the event, an open discussion among private television has not only started started but is thought of as necessary. Surely some scepticism remains, but 2012 will be a decisive year for television. I might even buy one.

Christopher Williams, Bläsing G 2000, 2010

We all enjoy living in a society that is characterised by division of labour. As social beings, we might be worried that the gap between rich and poor widens, but we also believe that the difference in wages are not simply unjust. They are based on skills each individual offers to society.

Well, maybe not.

For when I understood the excerpt of Daniel Kahneman’s book chapter published today in the Observer correctly, that might not be the case. In it the Israeli-American psychologist analyses the illusion of skills and how results that deeply question our cultural routine and rules, are simply ignored by all of us. The example he uses is that of society’s best paid men, the financial traders and their predictions.

Some years ago I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of financial skill up close. I had been invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarising the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for each of eight consecutive years. (…)

It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance in each year and to determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among them and whether the same advisers consistently achieved better returns for their clients year after year.

And the outcome?

The consistent correlations that would indicate differences in skill were not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.

The news that their well rewarded skills were an illusion, their success was due mostly to chance, and algorithms would have done a better job, only shocked the self-esteem of these men briefly. Something set in Kahneman calls “cognitive illusion”. And if Kahneman is right, this is what we are all living in. File under #ideology2011. So who would you choose, bankers or algorithms?

Daniel Kahneman: When confidence blinds us to reason. From: Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking fast and slow, Penguin 2011

It is true, at first sight it doesn’t seem as if the list is a complex thing. In the past they have told us that there was just one position important on the list, and that is to be number one. Lists were there for ranking. Or even more simple, to register something. A shopping list. For sure, a list isn’t seen as a complex or even poetic technique. That might be a mistake.

At the moment Taryn Simon turns this prejudice upside down in her excellent art work ‘A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters I-XVIII’, which should be looked at in the Tate Modern (or in the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin in September). I am still impressed with her multilayered approach of photography. She is reporting in a very journalistic way what this thing is, ‘life’, and what we do to each other while living – Simon has worked for the New York Times magazine before becoming an artist.

An artist she is. There are lists everywhere but the lists aren’t behaving. The stories her lists tell are grouped around families, orphans, concerned persons, political issues, individual cases and rabbits. Nepal girls that are thought to be the living goddess Kumari until they menstruate and become a normal person again. Two Brazilian feuding families. A huge Kenyan polygamy family. Ukraine orphans that are forced to leave the sheltered orphanage with 16 with the high probability of then being trafficked.

Simon tells all these stories by creating lists. She proves that lists are a much more complex format than we ever thought; for example, when suddenly in the middle of one list another story evolves – like the absent pictures of three children of a Kenyan doctor for fear of being kidnapped by the father.

Will lists ever become a highly regarded cultural technique? How are media changing the way we tell stories and narrations? And will I ever be able to escape the algorithms?

Sorry, but I have to ask myself that question for today I made an exception, and exchanged my extended living room, the British Library, with the Tate Modern. Usually, I am quite concentrated on my manuscript these days hiding from social contacts like a mole. I ended up noticing something which is very much about my book topic on how algorithms are changing our society. Obviously, I went outside but the mole came along. Well, I suppose we will both go and watch Barcelona vs. ManU then.

… we can steadily increase our real control over these (public) acts by insisting that all of them shall be plainly recorded and that their results should objectively measured. I should say, perhaps, that we can progressively hope to insist. For the working out of such standards and of such audits has only begun.

[Walter Lippmann 1922, Public Opinion, London, George Allen & Unwin, 314]

Listen to the following cut copy news paste: The Americans had launched Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from a Trafalgar Class submarine and Stormshadow missiles from Tornado GR4s. The fast jets flew 3,000 miles from RAF Marham and back making this the longest range bombing mission conducted by the RAF since the Falklands conflict. The operation was supported by VC10 and Tristar air-to-air refuelling aircraft as well as E3D Sentry and Sentinel surveillance aircraft. One large airbase alone is reported to have been hit with 40 bombs from an American stealth bomber. Maybe we are also at a sports competition.

Is it a Jeff Wall picture, or the war? – The New York Times isn’t sure.

What is reporting the war turning into being part of the war? When are we close, when are we too detailled? When does reporting turn into propaganda? The matériel battle that unfolded in front of my eyes made me feel uncomfortable. Angry. I turned to Twitter, and was relieved to find several people expressing the same worries.

Cameron said what we are doing is necessary, right and legal, and that the soldiers were the bravest of the brave. A retired general said that Lybia should be afraid. We are telling people in our news they should be afraid of us. The BBC broadcasted it. No, they didn’t comment.

Of course, Libya had pushed the horrible disasters in Japan from the top spot. And it pushed it away, because there is so much at stake. After… No. Besides Afghanistan and Irak, we are at yet another war. There is an UN solution. Gaddafi is fighting his own people. Are we hunting down a bad leader? Mohammad Nabbous, the face of Libyan citizen journalism, was killed in a firefight the night before.

Can there be a just war? Can bombs bring democracy? I debated with my friend A later on what is going on, before we went out. While I had the feeling, that we engage here for other reasons than civilians in danger, she is supportive for it. She said that we need to learn to take responsibility, and that this is a step. She answered my question, why Libya and not Syria or Jemen. This is a start, she said. We both agreed, however, this is no reason for this kind of reporting.

There is a difference between reporting the war, and being at war. Thank god, there have been reflective voices, the nice considerate live drawing of Patrick Blower at the Guardian, the excellent opinion piece of Andrew Rawnsly from The Observer, or this slide show of the NYTimes also showing the wounded. But in general, our reporting way to close. It propagates the war. It hurts.

When is a picture to good? Shall we make war look like a fantastic action thriller? Reporting the matériel battle is scrupulously precise. We need to be careful not to become too live, and too detailed. When does transparency turn into blind fascination? As journalists we are part of the war, and will always be. But this is awful.