Crime doesn’t pay (but honesty will get you mocked)

The naughty tickets

The conductor on the train back from London today didn’t come round to check tickets until just before Hove. Two stops before home. As the train pulled into Hove station, I was still fumbling in my coat pockets trying to find my ticket – always a suspicious sign to an experienced conductor I’m sure.

As he went off to open the doors, the conductor promised to return. And the sideways stare he kept on me as he backed off to the control box was a clear “I’ve  got my eye on you, sonny”. As an example of Great British Officialdom, if he’d pulled off his mask to reveal the round face of the  late, great Arthur Lowe I wouldn’t have been shocked.

Chance would, of course, make a mildly awkward  situation into an all out embarrassment when he returned. My tickets were proudly on display before me, but now I was on the phone – believe it or not because Tamsin had called in a panic to tell me her brakes had just failed pickling Tabitha up from her gym class. Not meeting conductor’s eye, pretending to be involved in a serious conversation… I must have appeared as  cunning as  The Artful Fare Dodger.

I describe the set up because, naturally, there was a problem with my tickets. I’d booked them for the wrong day. A  slip of the mouse on the Southern Rail website booked me a standard class single on the 16.17 from Victoria to Shoreham for Wendes hte 22nd September, not today.

However genuine my “oh my goodness, you must be joking. What a silly mistake’-like response was, of course, the comedy shock expression on my face only confirmed the conductor’s belief that I was a hardened criminal try to ride the £5 fare for free. My pleas of a geniune mistake (true) and “I haven’t got any means of paying for another fare” (false) fell on deaf ears. I even had the difference between a return fare and an advance single less than patiently explained to me.

Fortunately, the train was now fast approaching Shoreham, and there were a lot more tickets to check.

“I’m going to trust you to do this, but when you get to Shoreham, go to the ticket office and sort out paying the full fare”.

Right. Obviously I was going to do that. Once let off the train I’d be out of the station and back to my – rather upset by the brakes failing – wife just as fast as I could without arousing the attention of the railway police. Right?

I’m sure that’s what the conductor thought, and had resigned himslef to letting one get away. But I called his bluff. As much because I was genuinely curious as to what their reaction would be to someone handing themselves in as because I had a guilty conscience about it (and figured that I’ll almost  certainly see that conductor next time I get  on a train).

I did go to the ticket  office. I did the Right Thing. I told the staff there.

I can still hear them laughing from here.

OECD calls for more free trade in Africa

A little light reading matter

The OECD & UN have published their joint 2010 Mutual Review of African Development Effectiveness today, to coincide with the big summit on the MDGs which is taking place in New York. The 88 page report is a mere 4MB download and I’ve had a quick skim, ready to look through properly later.It’s mostly predictable stuff – highlighting successes in Africa and the problems of the economic downturn – but the significance it gives to climate change is perhaps important. One of its calls to action is “To reach agreement on ambitious and binding targets for the reduction of carbon emissions, which is essential to achieving sustainable development in Africa”, which seems fairly unequivocal for an organisation as conservative as the OECD. There’s a call for cash to help Africa deal with the effects of climate change too.

Less surprising is the consistent message throughout the report that African countries need to free up their markets even further. For the OECD, of course, protectionism is a dirty word which must never be spoken of and the free market is all. I quote:

“Trade is already contributing to recovery and is an essential element of sustained growth and development. Continuing to resist protectionist measures is necessary, but it is also insuf cient.
Further market opening is also needed. Africa’s partners need to inject political will and momentum in order to reach an early, ambitious and balanced outcome to the WTO Doha Development Round”

As that quote suggests, African countries may be starting to think for themselves on this one. In Zambia, there’s a big debate about nationalisation in the mining sector (not entirely unlike the nationalisation of some banks in those OECD countries which bang the gong for free trade) following the discovery that many foreign (read Chinese) firms which came in under free trade rules imposed by the IMF/WHO not only fail to invest beyond the basic infrastructure for getting raw materials out of the country, but are actually net negative contributors to the tax coffers. In other words, they don’t employ as many people as they say they will, ship the raw materials like copper overseas to process it and ‘add value’ back home, import Chinese workers to actually do the infrastructure work (like building roads) rather than paying locals to do the same job (and learn the skills) and, on top of all that, claim a tax refund from the Zambian government for doing so.

The free marketeers are laughing all the way to the bank on this one, and it’s not just Zambian money that’s being given away. 27.3% of Zambia’s GDP comes from international aid.

Goodbye Katine

Shots from the Guardian site, as I forgot my camera last night...

Last night I went to a seminar organised by Sound Delivery and Third Sector PR about the end of the Guardian’s Katine project.

For those who don’t know, Katine was the first attempt by a major media organisation (that I’m aware of) to answer critics who say foreign correspondents never do follow ups. Over three years a veritable army of some of the UK’s best global affairs  reporters descended at intervals upon a small Ugandan village called Katine.

The plan was to detail the progress of a major investment by Amref and give some genuine insight into the lives of the people living there. Community stories would be told, and readers would gain some understanding of the process and impact of international development through NGOs. By the end of the project, they had two talented African journalists living in or near Katine full time, and were posting up to 10 stories a week from the community.

It was a brave project, which is evolving into the broader coverage of the new Global Development site. I think was broadly successful. I’m not sure it’s settled the argument about how writers in this field should work though – Liz Ford, who edits the Katine site and is launching Global Development with Madeleine Bunting, gave the talk. Even with the backing of the Guardian and Barclays et al, the key problems she described two problems which will be familiar to all journalists and communications officers who try to get stories about development projects into the news.

I won’t quote extensively, but they boiled down to problems with  getting development stories into the main paper without an additional hook, and getting usable materials back from the field – especially video.

I think the latter especially highlights the fact that  despite the rising power of citizen journalism as a tool for getting information out of poor areas traditionally underserved by the media in the UK, it’s not quite time to retire skilled foreign correspondents just yet. More than ever we need media literate advocates to help get voices heard, and a UK audience has an expectation of presentation which it’s unrealistic to expect someone who doesn’t even own a TV to be able to produce.

Still, Liz did say she’s confident that in the future it could be possible to do something like Katine without sending a single British reporter overseas, by working closely with intermediary charities like Panos (who train overseas media and help set up community newspapers and radio in the developing world).

Hopefully there’ll be some more experiments in reporting along those lines making it onto the new site soon. In the meantime, read this feature there by my current favourite academic.

Calling St Kilda

Barren, remote and inhaibted by a transient population of around 18.

I don’t know why, but this is one of my favourite stories that I’ve written recently. Very simple, absolutely throwaway and straightforward to research and put together – pretty much all I had to do was make a call from my office and then read up on the St Kilda archipelago in the Outer Hebrides. The unusual thing about it being, of course, that there’s no telephone network on St Kilda and the story is about the first public internet/telephone link to the islands.

All the interviewees were especially lovely, especially Susan from the National Trust for Scotland. I’ve never spoken to telecoms folk as relaxed as the Commsworld guys either – something to do with their enforced isolation while working on St Kilda I guess…

Also, it made me want to visit the Outer Hebrides. Maybe next summer.

MSI campaign launches today

Shots from the MWM Flickr siteMarie Stopes International launches a new “Make Women Matter” campaign today, leading on (non-embeddable) vids by some chums at Lambent Productions. Today’s feature follows Brenda, an MSI advisor in South Africa, as she demonstrates the dangers of back street abortions in the townships. Worth watching for the sting in which a particularly abhorrent doctor advises, over the phone, taking two pills for an abortion, one of which is put “in your private parts”. The large amount of blood you’ll see, he says, is perfectly normal.

What do Obama and Andy Coulson have in common?

Not the Obama parody you're looking for. Still my favourite though.

The four tone image of Obama looking like a modern day Che Guevera was a brilliant graphic device upon which to hang his presidential campaign. It was post modern and eye catching, and critically didn’t use the communist red and black so it stood out from all the other Che-pastiches that have cropped up over the years so it felt fresh and new.

There is nothing clever is pastiching the pastiche. Maybe once or twice, a couple of years ago. But I don’t understand how it finds its way into pretty much every story now. I’m so tired of it I won’t even link to the prominent political blog that’s using the Obama’d face of Andy Coulson as a graphic today.

Andy Coulson. Ex-News of the World ed, Conservative spinner-in-chief, back under scrutiny for allegedly authorising journalists to listen in to celebrities’ voice mail. Obviously a political diarist looking to defend Coulson’s reputation is going to comically reference the election of the first black president of the United States. The parallels are immediately clear.

Aren’t they?

Free training course at the cij

I can’t bang on enough about how good the Centre for Investigative Journalism‘s summer school was, and how much it’s helped to focus my own feelings about my career. So it’s rather excellent news that they’re holding a one-off, free class on the evening of October 13th on the subject ‘How to read public accounts’.

I presume this is related to the fact that the same class was cancelled during the summer school because the speaker, Sally Gainsbury of the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times, was off ill. Whatever the reason, it’s an enormously generous gesture and one which I’d urge anyone with a bit of free time to take up. Especially if, like me, you’ve recently been staring at hundreds of spreadsheets of local government finance data and felt a little out of your depth.

Tickets are free, but there’s limited numbers. Sign up at the cij spreadsheet here.

Egretlist for Evernote

I’m a big fan of Evernote. It’s a cloud note app which syncs an infinite number of notebooks across every PC and phone I own, and works on Mac, iPhone, Windows and – importantly – Linux. There are better ways of organising research for journalists, but none that I know of which synch so well across everything.

There are two things I’d do to improve it.

The first is nested notebooks. My tree directory is getting a bit stupidly long now, because the only realistic way to keep things organised is to have a notebook for every story you’re writing. It’d be nice to have a notebook for Stuff, for example, broken up into sub-books for laptop reviews, GPS reviews etc. Or an International Development book broken up by country.

You could probably do this with tags, but I’m hopeless at tagging photos or notes properly. My brain hasn’t evolved properly into the new era of fluid data sorting, and needs some sort of library hierarchy to fall back on.

The other thing I’d do is introduce a decent To-Do list, so I don’t have notes spread across Evernote and Remember the Milk, but can keep everything in one place.

The first improvement I can be patient about. Second I’m hoping will be sorted by Egretlist, which I’m busy installing now.

Egretlist: Attractive, but not the most intuitively designed app ever.