Peter Bale - curated media, journalism, and related technology news - Issue #5
Combining a media company with a phone company didn’t work. Maybe merging two media companies will.
The great unraveling of a gormless foray into media by a telecoms giant begins. I feel that with a friend of mine with a much more successful newsletter, Ben Evans, we have seen this movie before. Vodafone, Verizon, Telefonica, BT, and others all tried to add media to their pipes. They are much better at pipes than media but they never learn.
It can seem self-serving to focus on when the media gets caught up in something like the Israeli attacks on Gaza but there are accepted standards in conflict and destroying a building housing media offices is dangerous and counter-productive. In my experience people like the AP reporter who wrote this story, or it could have been the Reuters reporter or the Al-Jazeera reporter, are there to bear witness and do their job.
This is an old story that dates from the last conflict over Gaza. I am not sure I agree with it all but it does raise some interesting questions. Normally, I tend to think that much media -- particularly American groups and the UK -- have a slavish support for Israel that fails to ask difficult questions. This person is saying the people on the ground do the opposite. In my experience, Reuters people are the best-informed and least biased you can find in any given hot spot -- often to their detriment.
Not a media or tech story as such but it is one of the most cogent explanations I have seen of Iran's role as one of the few allies of Hamas. It is an analysis I could do with more of from other sources to add understanding to who benefits from the Israel/Palestine crisis.
This may seem obscure outside NZ but it ranks eighth for press freedom globally and yet prosecutors are pursuing a tiny news organisation for allegedly breaching rules over identifying children in a legal case, that's despite the news group shielding their identities, and that in a related case an official body urged ministers to watch groundbreaking video from the group. This feels to me like a huge legal overreach.
I didn't know John Kay but I read regularly in Private Eye about this case of him having killed his wife. I have been thinking lately about redemption in other cases and what it might mean or how it might be achieved, but to airbrush out that crime or tragedy from his life in an obituary is crazy.
There's a small irony in me posting a Substack blog about their latest acquisition as I did think of doing this newsletter on Substack. I admire them all very much and respect what the team is trying to achieve. I don't entirely understand what People & Co does but I am sure it is clever.