What are you going to write about?

What are you going to write about?

The last few days I kept telling everybody: “I got a blog!!!” And everybody answered: “Cool, but what are you going to write about?” So, dear everybody, here you go.

Three things I will try to do with this blog. Two are for you, the reader and one is for me, the writer.

1. News (reader)

2. Stories (reader)

3. Memories (writer)

1. News

Today Ill try to cover the first, so let me start with what happened yesterday.

Yesterday, I was watching the late night edition of Austria’s major TV news program (ZIB3, ORF). They had decided to cover the war in Gaza / Israel with a 2 minutes contribution while covering a discussion over the pros and cons of a law, making wearing helmets compulsory on Austrians ski-slopes, with a full five-minute feature. Guess what; I happened to disagree with the ORF´s weighting of what is important information and what is not.

An oligopoly is a market form, where a multitude of consumers meets a selected number of producers (think about the telecommunication market). What we are all used to, is an oligopolistic market for news. In a majority of countries and regions a handful of newspapers, tv -stations and press agencies get to decide on what is important news. So in the end they have control over information. Now “control” sounds a bit harsh. What I am trying to say is that, while there may be more papers and tv-stations around, there is only a handful with that actually choses over what makes it into the news and what doesnt. All the other media merely reproduces. What chance do human rights violations in some remote part of the world have to get to the attention of the American public when the major news networks decide that covering it won’t bring any financial benefits in terms of ratings. So here, just like in an oligopolistic market for goods, where a minority has control (market power) over the price, a minority controls information.

I could go on being worried about the structure of traditional news media, but there is something that can be done about it. Hope is at the horizon. The old players are on the retreat , and new media is taking over,. Online newspapers, blogs and even social networking tools such as twitter are core determinants of the 2009+ news landscape. Print media is gradually fading out as these new concepts are gaining in both audience as well as contributors. While all this is being discussed elsewhere with greater inside, I would like to draw attention to the responsibilities that arise from these structural changes.

Only a week ago, I was at a lecture of David Henderson at the Changing Times Conference. Quoting one of his “clients”, he compared the blogosphere to “a thousand lights” (not an exact quotation here). This is, in my opinion, a great analogy with respect to what we were saying above. Imagine a government wants to block news reports about how they treat minorities of getting into their country. Without much effort they can just block a few major sources writing about it, and by that cut away a huge chunk coverage. The very same holds true  in the other direction. Totalitarian regimes see it as one of their key businesse  not letting anti-regime reports get out of the country. Their power over information is at the very core of their survival at the helm.

The rest is trivial. It is easy to turn out one light, but not so much a thousand. One of the things I want to reach with my blogs is to be one of these lights, how flickering it may be.