Journalist and blogger Linda Jones has tagged me in her meme about writing. I really rate Linda’s writing as well as her business acumen so I’m responding to the challenge (and it’s the perfect excuse to kickstart this sadly neglected blog, too).

Which words do you use too much in your writing?

I probably swear too much, certainly when blogging, tweeting or posting in forums. I try and keep commissioned pieces clean, though! I’m probably more guilty of writing over-long sentences, scattered liberally with commas to break them up. And I definitely overuse the ellipsis…

Which words do you consider overused in stuff you read?

Most tabloidese. The word “star” seems to be applied to anyone who’s come within sniffing distance of a TV studio and is guaranteed to get my back up.

What’s your favourite piece of writing by you?

I covered the trial of Paul Touvier when he was in the dock for crimes against humanity, as I was living in France at the time. I was the only foreign freelance journalist to get a press pass (and they were very scarce). My feature’s not available online but I’ll dig it out one day, scan it and post it on my website.

What blog post do you wish you’d written?

Lots! I follow so many fantastic blogs that are brimming with great writing, I’m not sure I could choose. I’m a massive fan of Benefit Scrounging Scum – her posts always resonate with me because she writes about the realities of living with a disability in such an accessible way. I wish I could laugh about my own, comparatively minor, disability in the same way she does about hers even while letting you know the seriousness of her situation.

Regrets, do you have a few? Is there anything you wish you hadn’t written?

I wish I’d never written for Fabulous (the magazine of News of the World). It was a very unhappy experience for me and I’ll never sell out for a high word rate again. I felt grubby afterwards and I learned the lesson that selling my personal experience for shekels is not worth it when the subs distort everything you wrote. Otherwise I try not to regret things. I’d rather learn from my mistakes and move on than dwell on them.

How has your writing made a difference? What do you consider your most important piece of writing?

Most of the stuff I’ve done over the years is not that important in the great scheme of things. I started out as a music journalist and I’ve also done a fair bit of TV reviewing. There have been ranty columns galore, too – amusing to read but hardly world-changing.

I’m really pleased with the stuff I’ve done on disability benefits as I know I’ve helped people directly by exposing some of the system’s anomalies. Around 20 years ago, I wrote regularly for foreign magazines on the rise of the far right in a post-Communist Europe – I’m a little bit proud that I helped expose a small bit of that to a wider audience. And, of course, my Touvier piece is the one that I consider my most important (see above).

Name three favourite words

Yikes! Wordsmith. Brandy.

…And three words you’re not so keen on

British National Party.

Do you have a writing mentor, role model or inspiration?

I’ve never had a mentor but thanks are due to my old friend Fritz, who first published me in his fanzine, Wrong Image, when I was a 15-year-old punk in the mid-1970s. I’d already decided I wanted to be a journalist but seeing my first articles sealed the deal for me. A huge nod also goes to Mel Young, who gave me my first proper break in 1978 at Edinburgh City Lynx.

I’m inspired by many, many writers – every journalist I admire is a far better writer than I could ever hope to be.

I did want Julie Burchill’s job when she was at the NME, though. And her subsequent salary. But I never actually wanted to be her.

What’s your writing ambition?

I’ve never been terribly ambitious, which is probably why I never replaced Burchill at the NME. I’m fairly sure I had the talent but I lacked the drive and still do. So as long as I can somehow keep making a reasonable living as a wordsmith, that’ll do me nicely. I may even sling another book together at some point…

Plug alert!  List any work you would like to tell your readers about:

I published my first book, Epilepsy The Essential Guide, in May 2009. I’ve had epilepsy myself since 1996 and I basically wrote the book I wanted to read when I was diagnosed but it wasn’t available. It’s selling well, has had good reviews and I know it’s already helped a few people, which is what I wanted to achieve with it.

In spring 2009, I collaborated with Linda Jones on TwitterTitters, which we did to raise money for Comic Relief while seeing if it was possible to a) create a book through Twitter and b) do it from scratch within a month. It was, but it gave me extra grey hairs. And sod it, I’d do it again!

Forthcoming this autumn, I’m one co-author (of around 250) of QFinance The Ultimate Resource, which is an encyclopedia on one of my specialist subjects – finance. It’s not dull, honest!

Tag time. Some colleagues I hope will also do the meme:

Dave Lee

Allie Dickinson

Sarah Hartley

Alison Gow

BendyGirl

The rules: If you have time to do this meme, then please link to my original, then link to three to five other bloggers and pass it on, asking them to answer your questions and link to you. You can add, remove or change one question as you go. You absolutely do not have to be what you may think of as a “published” or “successful” writer to respond to this meme, I hope people can take the time to reflect on what their blogging has brought them and how it has been useful to others.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

National treasure Stephen Fry has waded into the debate about MPs’ expenses, claiming that MPs are not really doing anything much wrong, and stating very bluntly that journalists are far worse when it comes to fiddling expenses.

I have news for Stephen. The expenses culture for journalists ended a long time ago – at least 10 years ago – when the accountants moved in and put an end to it. The scandal at the Houses of Parliament, however, has been going on a long time – only MPs can vote on their expense allowances and they just keep voting to continue. The broadsheets, especially the Telegraph – have done a fantastic job of uncovering just how much MPs are ripping off the tax-payers – to the average tune of £200,000 a year.

Compare that to journalists. Freelances cannot claim any expenses from a publication at all, unless approved in advance by the commissioning editor. If I go to a meeting with an editor in a café, I can’t claim even the cost of two cups of coffee – under Inland Revenue rules, that counts as “entertainment” and I’m not permitted to put it through my books as a tax-deductible expense. I can’t even claim for a solo sandwich unless I’m away overnight, and only then is it permissible as “subsistence”.

Staff journalists find it incredibly difficult to claim anything these days. Buy a beer for a contact who’s giving you a possible story? Probably – if you get a receipt from the pub. Anything beyond such petty claims is vetoed by a paper’s management now. So for Stephen Fry to call us “venal and disgusting” is a bit much.

Stephen Fry served a prison sentence for credit card fraud as a teenager. I’m not judging him for that – I did things as a teenager that broke the law (although not quite as badly as that). He’s done his time and moved on, as is right.

But he of all people should understand that taking other people’s money is wrong. And taking the piss in these straitened times – when we’ve just saddled ourselves with trillions of debt that will take until our grandchildren are adults before it’s paid off – is even worse.

Remember that most journalists are on low salaries that haven’t really changed much in 20 years or longer (average salary for a mid-level reporter on a regional paper is £18k). It’s almost understandable that, until the mid-90s, hacks would fiddle their claims to stretch their wages. MPs, on the other hand, earn a basic salary of £64,766. Plus allowances. A canny politician can easily rake in £250,000 a year or more simply by using the system “in good faith”.

Fry has got it badly wrong this time.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I took part in the second JEEcamp in Birmingham yesterday. Last year, it was very much an experiment to see what might happen if you stuck 50 journalists in a room and let them unconference for a day about how to create a new journalism for the future. I’d been mapping plans for an online journalism venture in my head for a couple of years – JEEcamp was inspiring and I came away enthused and keen to put my plans into action. Unfortunately, a change in my personal circumstances put paid to my ideas.

Twelve months on and the journalism universe looks very different now. A year ago, we were just seeing the start of the recessionary effects on our industry – job cuts, papers closing, freelance budgets being slashed. Since then, literally thousands of jobs have gone and the changes are not over yet. Give it another 12 months and the landscape will look different again. None of us knows what it might look like, but it will be radically different to the traditional model of print media funded by advertising. The online revolution has already meant massive changes in how we work – in the future, online is almost certainly where pretty much everything will be happening, whether it’s the tools we use or the content we publish. Journalists are going to have be enterprising and create their own opportunities to take advantage of irrevocable changes.

The keynote presentation at JEEcamp 2009 came from Kyle Macrae, who gave a really interesting account of his attempt to set up a picture agency (Scoopt.com) trading in citizen journalists’ photos and what happened when it all went horribly wrong after partnering with Getty Images. The Q&A that followed was also enlightening, with lots of questions about venture-capital funding, business models and exit strategies.

I missed most of the breakout sessions, using the time to network instead with some people I wanted to talk to. There were a couple of really good panel discussions, to wrap it all up, about the future of journalism, particularly about paid-for content models (Rupert Murdoch had just annnounced his own thoughts on this), the problems with council-funded newspapers and the kinds of enterprises journalists might want to engage in.

Andy Dickinson, who teaches journalism at UCLAN, was bang on the nail when he said we can’t exist in isolation. For all we network on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, there’s no substitute for getting together face to face to exchange ideas and find new ways of working. Next year’s JEEcamp should be charting progress in that direction.

Me, I have no plans yet to develop a new online enterprise, after abandoning the last one. I’m still settling down after all the upheaval of the last 12 months in my personal life. One thing’s certain, though, I will be starting something online at some point. I just need to figure out what it might be..

Thanks to Paul Bradshaw again for organising such a creative and useful event.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Did you know that one in six people in the UK has a disability of some sort? No? Neither did I until quite recently. It’s a shocking statistic, not so much because of the figure of 17%, but because disability is so underreported that when it does make the press people’s life stories become stereotyped and distorted. For example, we’re used to reading stories about soldiers returning from the frontline of duty, minus limbs. We rarely read of people who lost limbs for other reasons. Disability reporting tends to focus on a couple of quite narrow aspects – benefit cheats and the “brave”.

The benefits issue is particularly distressing. Most people with a disability rely on benefits as their sole means of income, meaning they struggle to get by and are forced to live below the poverty line. The few non-disabled who milk the system to claim money they are not entitled to are the ones used by the tabloids to splash “benefit cheats” headlines and used by the government as an excuse to tighten the rules further each time it wants to make savings. The reality is that around 80% of those claiming Disability Living Allowance will be refused on initial application even though they fit all the criteria for a claim.

As for “bravery”, it’s just part of the often patronising, often ignorant language used by the press, as well as the public at large. Just this week, someone described me as “suffering from” epilepsy while someone said my latest seizure must have been “traumatic” – neither of these terms are particularly accurate for the vast majority of people with epilepsy. Language is so often used carelessly to describe the disabled, with little thought given to how the disabled might prefer to be described. I’m not talking just about PC language, although quite the daftest thing I ever heard some years ago was about a memo circulating at a local council instructing workers to use the term “thought shower” instead of “brainstorm” for fear of offending those with epilepsy. The origins of this PC term may well be apocryphal, but it did spread far and wide into common usage. You know what’s really offensive? No one actually asked the 450,000 people in the UK who have epilepsy if they were offended by the term brainstorm. And you know what? We’re not. Probably because we’re too busy fighting for access to decent neurological services.

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day – I invite you to click on the link and read what hundreds of disabled bloggers have to say about the reality of living with a disability. Read, and listen. And remember, you might know one of the one in six, or live next door to one of us.

I’m also really proud that Blogging Against Disablism Day coincides with the publication of my book, Epilepsy: The Essential Guide. If you’re very quick, you can hear me live on BBC Radio Manchester this morning at 11am, talking about epilepsy and living with a disability. It’s live-streamed on the internet.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

When Wilmington announced yesterday that it was closing Press Gazette permanently, quite a few of my colleagues blogged about how sad they felt at its demise. Dave Lee, Alison Gow, Kristine Lowe and even Roy Greenslade all wrote at length about what PG had meant to them and why it would be missed.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say I’m not that bothered. Yes, PG’s passing is a reflection on the parlous state of the media right now. With papers and magazines closing down in increasing numbers and those still going slashing their staff, it’s no great surprise that Press Gazette has gone the same way. With fewer journalists around, that means fewer readers.

But Wilmington must have been mad to think last summer that turning PG from a weekly to a monthly would help it survive. The huge mistakes it made included firstly, withdrawing newsstand availability and turning it into a subscription-only publication, at a stroke making it less easy for those in the industry to pick up a copy, and secondly, not adjusting the subscription level. As a weekly, PG cost around £115 a year, working out at around £2.70 a copy (I’m doing these figures off the top of my head so they are very rough). It was pretty good value at that price – lots of news, some great features (especially The Knowledge section, aimed at freelances), plus industry gossip.

As a monthly, it became too expensive – the subscription remained the same, so the cover price suddenly became nearly £10. Granted there were more pages, but the two copies I saw were not special enough to justify the price. Why Wilmington failed to offer more subscription options I’ll never understand. Most journalists, especially those on consumer magazines and regional/local papers, are on low salaries and forking out £115 in one go was probably beyond most of them. Offering a 3 or 6-month subscription and cutting the price might have attracted more readers.

Me, I decided to cut my losses. I cancelled my subscription almost immediately after the announcement that PG would go monthly. (And I was mighty pissed off that it took me nearly 12 weeks to get my money back from Wilmington, but that’s another story.) I’ve never regretted it – I kept up with PG’s news feed on RSS and Twitter, but my honest view is that much of PG’s breaking news was also available on the Media Guardian, Journalism.co.uk and Hold the Front Page websites and feeds.

Press Gazette became a publication that no longer had much to distinguish it from the competition, and that’s why I can’t shed a tear at its loss.

I’m sorry the staff are going to lose their jobs, of course I am. And I still believe there is room for a dedicated industry publication in print format. But it was never going to be PG in the form it’s had since last September. I’ll be interested to see what, if anything, happens next – will someone buy it? Will a new publication launch to fill the gap? Or will Media Guardian and co expand their existing coverage to include more features, particularly on freelancing?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Anyone who pays any attention to the news cannot have failed to hear of the swingeing cuts in staff being made at newspapers and magazines up and down the UK. Thousands of journalists jobs have disappeared over the last year. Some papers and magazines have been closed down. Over the last couple of weeks, people have suddenly started to realise that when reporters are shed from the local press, local news and thus local democracy is threatened. One example – if no journalist is available to sit in on a council meeting, how do constituents know what their councillors are doing?

Just over 2 weeks ago, it was announced that 150 jobs are to be slashed at Manchester Evening News and the 22 weeklies in and around Greater Manchester, that are all owned Guardian Media Group. Of those job losses, 78 will be journalists – 39 journalists at MEN will lose their jobs (that’s half the journalists there), the remaining 39 cuts will be spread across the 22 local titles. Some local weeklies will see their premises shut and staff transferred to MEN in central Manchester. So this really does mean that much local scrutiny will no longer happen. The reporters from the Accrington Observer, for example, will need an hour to get to Accrington from the MEN office and an hour back again to write up their stories. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that many meetings of Accrington Council will simply not be covered. And people living in Accrington won’t know from reading their paper just what their elected representatives may or may not be doing.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is an unhealthy situation, or to work out that local communities will lose a lot of their history as it will no longer be preserved in the local newspaper archives.

I’m not going to blog here about national job losses or the future of newspapers. Others have already done it very eloquently elsewhere in the national newspapers and on media blogs.

I spent two hours this evening at an NUJ meeting called to discuss the cuts and see what can be done to try and save these jobs. More than 100 people crammed into an overheated room at Manchester Town Hall – people were sat on the floor and side tables when the chairs ran out, and at least 20 were forced to stand. We had a round of speeches from various local and national union reps, chapel heads from outside the region fighting similar cuts and some stirring support from Manchester City Council’s deputy leader. Then the floor was opened.

This is where it got very interesting. Most of the union speeches were not the usual hot air but basic setting out of the facts of what’s happening. So it was really gratifying to discover that many on the floor were local councillors from across Greater Manchester, local community activists doing great things in their neighbourhoods, ordinary locals who just really care that they might no longer have a local newspaper covering their area. Even the Tory prospective parliamentary candidate for Cheadle turned up to stand shoulder to shoulder with self-declared union Marxists because he recognised the importance of having a local paper. Sure, there were quite a few journalists crammed into the room, but I suspect they were outnumbered by the ordinary public.

These are the people who will go home to spread the word about why local papers matter. What they may achieve is likely to be far more important than the forthcoming ballot on strike action at MEN. Because they will be the ones writing to the letters page of their local paper asking awkward questions about cuts and closures, among other things. The next few weeks will be crucial for local journalism in Greater Manchester and that grassroots support for these 23 papers may be a tipping point. We’ll see. I’m usually quite cynical about union meetings but I left tonight’s feeling a little more hopeful that all may not be lost. The only downside was the pair of Socialist Workers trying to flog their own paper outside before the meeting, who then had the cheek to come in and sit through it for 2 hours without saying a word before a second attempt to sell the party rag as people left. Parasites.

* This will be the first in a series of sporadic posts about Manchester media. Despite the shockwave across the city when the MEN cuts were annnounced, Manchester is the UK’s biggest media hub outside London and new publications are still launching here. Only lack of time has stopped me blogging sooner about some of these initiatives, but watch this space…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Or how we exploited social media to change the world…

Less than a month ago, fellow journalist Linda Jones asked me to join her on a project to raise money for Comic Relief using the medium of Twitter. What a rollercoaster it has been!

By harnessing Twitter, we somehow managed to create an entire book from scratch in less than four weeks. Our first, tentative tweets were picked up by friends and followers and spread far and wide across the Twitterverse. Through Twitter, we invited bloggers and writers to send us their comedy writing. We assembled a panel of esteemed and experienced judges.We found a blogger, a web maestro, a production coordinator and a cover designer. PR officers offered us their services to boost media attention, and wire services distributed our press releases without charge. And so on.

We set up a blog as a focal point, and our own special Twitterfeed, @tweehee, plus we used the #twittertitters hashtag to make it easy for anyone searching Twitter to see what was going on across the whole of Twitter for the project. There is also a Facebook group.

Almost everything that unfolded was directly through Twitter. Some stuff happened indirectly, such as comic scriptwriters and stand-up comedians Dave Spikey (co-creator of Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights) and Nat Coombs (writer of internet TV sitcom Chelsey: OMG!), who got involved because their “people” were on Twitter. All well and good, because the point (apart from raising lots of money) was to see how quickly and how far Twitter could be exploited to put the word out in order to do some good. And it certainly could be done.

We received more than 70 submissions by our deadline – blog posts, short stories, poems, monologues, scripts… Our judges had just a week to read through everything and whittle them down into a shortlist before the final selection was made. It was very hard for them as the standard of the writing we received was phenomenally high. With 12 winning entries selected, the next job was to edit the book and I had just a weekend in which to do it – not just the tidying up of typos and punctuation and so on, but the very tough task of deciding the running order of the content. So many different styles of humour and of writing – it all had to flow smoothly. Creating the book template was fraught with problems, as was uploading everything onto Lulu, as our production coordinator discovered. Throughout this whole process, we all tweeted regularly every day to keep the momentum going and inform the Twitterverse of our progress. And Linda beavered away behind the scenes to generate wider interest.

The book went live on Tuesday afternoon and you can buy it here. Every penny of the profits goes directly to Comic Relief. We were chuffed to bits to discover we sold 35 copies in the first three hours.

But it’s not over yet. We still have nine days until Red Nose Day. Nine days in which to keep tweeting to sell the book. Even after that, we’ll still be tweeting to remind people that there’s a book available full of hilarious writing that could help save people’s lives.

I’ve barely touched on a lot of what we actually did. But I’m proud that we made a book in less than a month and did it almost entirely through harnessing the power of social networking platforms. We missed a few tricks – a little more time at the start to plan a bit would have meant thinking of other platforms we could use, such as Digg and Stumble Upon, although supporters of the project are using them now.

The real measure of our success will be counted in how many books we sell and how much money we raise for Comic Relief. That’ll take a while to tot up.

In the meantime, please buy TwitterTitters – we promise you will not be disappointed and it will put a smile on your face. Follow us on Twitter and read the blog for all the dirty details of what we’re up to.

And, if you don’t mind, I’m off for a sleep now, before the next round of tweeting begins…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Yesterday, when there was a fatal plane crash in Amsterdam and several British soldiers were killed on duty in Afghanistan, one other story dominated UK headlines – the death of six-year-old Ivan Cameron.

Normally, I’d consider it inappropriate for such a private tragedy to be given priority over other news that is arguably far more important, particularly when it involves the child of a serving politician as I don’t generally consider their children any more deserving of column inches than the children of the not-famous.

Yet, for once I was pleased that Ivan’s death pushed everything else off the radar. Ivan was profoundly disabled, diagnosed from birth with Ohtahara’s Syndrome – a rare and extreme form of epilepsy that is virtually untreatable and guarantees an early grave. Disability is seriously underreported because it is not “sexy”. When it does make the papers, the disabled are usually described as “brave” or “plucky” or something else equally patronising. There’s nothing brave or plucky about quietly getting on with living life to the best of your abilities despite what fate has thrown your way, because it’s just normal. More than anything, the disabled long to be seen as normal.

If Ivan Cameron achieved anything in his short life it has been to highlight awareness of disability, the possibility of living a meaningful life even when as severely disabled as he was, and the realities for thousands of parents of being a fulltime carer of a disabled child who needs constant looking after. Even David Cameron, born to privilege and educated at Eton, could not be cushioned from that. Yesterday’s coverage rightly included reports on how Ivan’s disability had changed his father’s views and experience.

Epilepsy is the commonest neurological condition, yet often shrouded in myth and stigma, and much misunderstood. There are 450,000 people in the UK with epilepsy and around 70% will gain good to complete control of their seizures through drug treatment. Sadly, 1,000 will die every year from SUDEP (sudden unexplained death from epilepsy), and 400 of those deaths are preventable. Few new patients, when diagnosed, are ever told of the risk that they can die from a seizure.

Perhaps Ivan’s death will now mean that more funding finds its way into epilepsy research so that better treatments can be developed. Perhaps it will mean that more help will become available for carers. Perhaps it might even lead to those who need to claim disability benefits not being treated as potential fraudsters. And maybe, just maybe, if the Tories return to power, it might mean a little more care being taken of our wonderful NHS, which served the Camerons daily for six whole years.

Sifting through some journalistic comment late last night, it was disappointing to see the predictable complaints about “tabloid hysteria” over Ivan’s death and coverage of the Dutch plane crash and other stories being pushed further down the agenda. Such cynicism makes me want to cry. Journalists should be looking for stories that resonate with readers. Ivan’s was a profoundly human story that will have done just that for millions of families in the UK who deal with disability on a daily basis.

The press should remember that. At a time when the industry is in crisis, it’s not a good idea to alienate the readers who help keep journalists in work.

RIP Ivan.

(Declaration of interest: I have epilepsy and will shortly be publishing a book about it.)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Shortly after 9.30 this morning, I learned – via Twitter – of the plane crash at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. A Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 came down short of the Polderbaan runway, where it promptly broke into three pieces. It was a miracle that it didn’t turn into a fireball and that so many passengers escaped uninjured (at time of writing, there are 10 confirmed dead – including two pilots and four cabin crew – 6 seriously injured and another 70-odd with injuries ranging from moderate to walking wounded, out of 143 on board. Early eyewitness reports suggested the plane had seemed to just fall out of the sky, rumours followed that it had run out of fuel. These are all matters for the crash investigation team.

Apart from the fact that just two months into the year there seems to have been a high number of plane crashes in 2009, I have a personal interest in this crash. I lived in the Netherlands for nine years, mostly just outside the capital, Amsterdam, in a small commuter town within spitting distance of the airport. Schiphol is a big and busy airport in a small and very crowded country (16 million people in an area the size of Switzerland, which has less than half that population). It’s the fifth busiest airport in Europe and has six runways. Compare that to Heathrow, the busiest, which has only two runways.

The hinterland around Schiphol is crowded with commuter towns that have sucked up the overspill from Amsterdam – Badhoevedorp, Hoofddorp, Abbenes, Nieuw Vennep, Zwanenburg… Everyone lives under a flight path and it’s possible to hear aircraft passing overhead approximately every 90 seconds during the day. Everyone lives in fear of a crash in their town – it was only in 1992 that an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into a tower block on the Bijlmermeer housing estate in south-east Amsterdam, killing an estimated 47 people. And still the airport planners want to expand Schiphol. When I left the Netherlands in 2004, there was talk of building an extra runway off the coast, in the North Sea. They are still talking about it today, and still the locals are fighting the expansion plans. Today, the locals had a lucky escape – eyewitness reports suggest the pilots tried hard to land safely, but if the plane had come down even half a kilometre away it would have hit an urbanised area and the fatalities would have been far higher.

As the Netherlands mourns the dead, the powers that be must also consider the safety of the population. Schiphol has an extremely good track record in safety but it is unsafe to my mind to even think of further expansion in such a confined space – even when I lived in the shadow of the airport there was a running joke that towns were built inside the airport, rather than vice versa.

Taking a different tack, I logged into the Dutch news feeds as the story rolled out, as well as the #schiphol hashtag on TwitterSearch. It does appear that the story broke first on Twitter and even CNN confirmed it had learned of the crash there. It was quickly apparent, though, that the #schiphol feed was full of noise – wild speculation, “facts” that had no confirmed sources and general chatter as people expressed their shock and condolences. Finding hard news on TwitterSearch was difficult. Turning to the Dutch sources, I found the tabloidy broadsheet de Telegraaf to have the most reliable, and very frequent, updates, while Dutch news service NOS had rolling TV/internet coverage.

My Dutch is somewhat rusty these days (not that it was ever fluent to start with), but in between proofreading a book, I tweeted English translations of the most reliable updates I could find. At one point, I appeared to be scooping BreakingNewsOn, which was seemingly tweeting my updates just minutes behind me. I didn’t mind, except that I’d rather they’d retweeted me. Whatever – it’s not a competition. I was only interested in passing on relevant news, given that most people don’t speak Dutch.

I’ll end by saying my thoughts are very much across the Channel tonight. Whatever caused the crash, I hope the authorities will not increase the chances of another one by continuing to construct yet more runways across what’s left of the Harlemmermeer polder. People will always be more important than planes.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One of today’s top stories has centred on children’s TV presenter, Cerrie Burnell. The Daily Mail ran an insidious, scaremongering feature about how she is supposedly frightening the young kids she presents to on CBeebies. Listening to Cerrie talk on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 today, I was struck by her calm dignity in the face of some extraordinarily nasty remarks by parents. Responses on the Vine Show were also overwhelmingly in support of Burnell and her right to be a talented and empathetic TV presenter who just happens to have a malformed arm.

Last year, I was an enthusiastic viewer of Britain’s Missing Top Model, which set out to prove that disabled women could be models just as easily as their able-bodied counterparts. The contestants had a very diverse range of disabilities but all were depicted as real women who wanted to model and just happened to be disabled. The camera gaze never lingered pornographically on their particular disabilities but it did focus on just how hard these women had to fight to be treated equally in society. It was an inspiring series and the winner, Kelly Knox, was gorgeous, funny and smart. She also happened to have a missing forearm, just like Cerrie Burnell. Kelly was a deserving winner. She not only won a fashion photoshoot in Marie Claire but a leading model agency gave her a contract as they saw no reason why she could not work in what everyone knows is a very competitive and tough industry where you are judged on how you look.

Kelly was depicted as normal on BBC3 and attracted no adverse publicity (undoubtedly because it was a minority programme on a minority channel). Cerrie, likewise, has been depicted as normal by the BBC, which is fulfilling its remit of reflecting the diversity of our population. That remit includes employing the disabled as well as ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians. The children who watch Cerrie doing her job on CBeebies don’t see Cerrie as weird, abnormal or scary. How can they? Children are born without prejudice and accept whatever’s around them. They only learn prejudice from those who teach it to them. Those parents who claim in the Mail that Cerrie will send their kids to bed with nightmares are not talking about how their children really see Cerrie but displaying their own fears and prejudices.

And that’s exactly why we need Cerrie on TV and others like her. We need to see Britain’s diversity reflected back at us on our screens. The alternative is too awful to think about – a return to a medieval past where the different are locked away from sight or euthanised so only perfect humans can exist. It’s only 60 years since the last hideous experiment in deciding who was fit to be part of society was carried out. I’d like to think society has moved on since then and that the prejudiced minority will not be allowed to push this warm, talented women off our screens.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites