Posts from June 2006

The power of going alone

June 25, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

Ad Age covers the departures of Robert Scoble, Om Malik, and Thomas Hawk to smaller ventures that will end up being bigger for them:

In the last two weeks, Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Thomas Hawk quit their jobs in favor of pioneering careers. Big deal. So did probably hundreds of other Americans, right? But unlike the former three, the latter hundreds didn’t find their opportunities by first becoming household brand names online.

Messrs. Scoble, Malik and Hawk-respectively, a Microsoft technologist, a Business 2.0 magazine writer and an investment-adviser-turned-photographer-may be relatively unknown names in the general populace. But they are among the elite in the blog world.

Advertisers: You’re next

June 25, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m seeing a lot of avoidance of the elephant that isn’t quite in the room yet but is banging at the door:

Advertising is the next big industry to suffer huge upheaval thanks to the internet. They may think they’re already there, but they’re not, not by a long shot. In fact, it is the ad industry that is holding up the progress of other industries — newspapers, TV, radio, cable — that are already getting tromped on by that elephant. Advertisers can get away with moving slowly — for now — because they are the ones with the money. Funny how that works. But this won’t last for long, as one client and then one agency discovers that the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers. Once that tipping point comes, dollars will start flowing to the upstarts online — not as many dollars concentrated in a few places as before, but spread out far and wide. As Bob Garfield pointed out in Ad Age and on On the Media, the upstarts aren’t quite ready for it, but once they see money sitting on the table, they’ll get ready fast (see my Ad Age piece on an open-source ad infrastructure for the distributed world). The day of reckoning nears.

There happen to be lots of links to stories that are avoiding that elephant from the last few days. Start with Richard Sikos’ New York Times piece about waiting for money to come online:

But one could make a case that the amount of focus on — and hype about — Internet activities at media companies has some kind of inverse relationship to the amount of near-term revenue they represent for these companies.

We’re still in the early innings, but given how much the Internet has already transformed the media and society, it’s surprising how little money traditional media companies make directly from it.

Don’t take my word for it. Flip through the financial statements of some of the biggest names to see what they say about their Web sales and profits. . . .

The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits. Thanks to aggregators, file sharers, pirates and other disruptors, more value will leak away or be stolen than will be gained by these companies.

This is not to say that online will never be an important — if not central — financial contributor to media businesses of all kinds. For some companies, though, it could serve increasingly as a promotional or marketing outlet, or as a cut-rate but widely distributed version of what consumers can buy in conventional formats.

It’s a good piece, but I’ll nudge on a few points.

First: Of course, there’s no saying that these new activities will lead to “more revenue or fatter profits.” They won’t. Period. That’s because there is now no scarcity of competitors for those dollars and ways to spend them more efficiently in more places. The amount spent on advertising likely won’t change, but the revenue will be spread thin.

Now this usually makes the proprietors and executives at those legacy recipients of ad dollars moan and gnash their dentures about where they are going to get the money to support what they do now. As Jimmy Wales once famously said to a famous news executive: That’s not my problem. The auto industry didn’t start worrying about how to make as much money as horse breeders and hay farms made; they started something new and the new industry grew to what the market will bear. That will be the same in media. There’s no saying that the old players will be as big as they were; the biggest growth in media, I’ll content, will come in the line called “others.”

That inevitability is being delayed, again, because the ad agencies and advertisers continue to play safe — or at least they think it’s safe — by giving more money to the old players, even if they are shrinking, and relying on the old means of measurement, even though there are now new and better things to measure.

So I’d ask friend Siklos to do the exact same story from the other end of the pipe. Follow the money. Look at why the ad agencies and clients are slow to change. Investigate their growing inefficiency. Expose their chickenheartenedness and make them scared (eventually, you did get fired for buying IBM and you will get fired for buying upfront TV). Look into how the media buying structure of most agencies is not built for this new world. Compare the cost of buying targeted attention in big, old media vs. in new media. Calculate the cost of irrelevance in advertising. Predict what the flow of money will look like in one, five, and 10 years. Somebody is losing $40,000-a-week marketshare to Rocketboom today; where did that money come from and where will the next $40k go next? I can’t wait.

: Next see Rob Hof covering SuperNova for his Business Week blog, noting how two giants of mass-market advertising — GM and P&G — are starting to sing in a different key:

Two of the biggest marketers in the world showed up at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today and sounded more like Web 2.0 zealots than brand giants. Michael Wiley, director of new media, GM Communications, at General Motors, who’s responsible for GM blogs, sounded the most radical: “The existing advertising paradigm sucks,” he said. “It’s woefully inefficient. We give consumers virtually no information.”

He and colleague Curt Hecht, executive VP and chief digital officer at GM, have been meeting with social networking and media companies in the area the last couple of days, and Wiley sounds like a fan: “We see the new social media space as a place we can become engaged,” he said.

Likewise, Stan Joosten, Procter & Gamble’s innovation manager for holistic customer communication (how’s that for a title?), said P&G needs to experiment more with social media–carefully. “We have to stay out of some places” where people don’t want to see ads, he noted. But he says P&G wants to engage with customers wherever they are online.

I’ll be eager to see them put their money — big money — where their mouths are. And remember: It’s not just about finding new big media to take your big bucks: MySpace v. NBC. It’s about entirely new ways to place advertising and entirely new ways to think of what advertising should do.

The greatest challenge for advertising today is relevance.

: Now see Peter Preston in Sunday’s Observer with more reaction to Sir Martin Ice Age Sorrell’s blowing against the wind of the future.

Here’s the imminent end of everything, a mist of yellow doomfulness that suddenly affects the conventional media world, and newspaper journalism in particular. But keeping your balance also means keeping calm – for the wisdom of Sorrell wanders around many mansions. Five years ago he told a Yale audience that ‘the world is being Americanised’. But that was before he saw India. And, three weeks ago, he said that new media would ‘almost certainly’ not supplant existing ones.

Now, of course, gurus are allowed to change their minds or adjust their perceptions. And Sorrell, CEO of an umbrella holding company with 70 separate operators, 65,000 people and 950 offices in 92 companies, is allowed to correct course whenever he likes. Nevertheless, there’s an important countervailing thought here.

For aren’t J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather, historic names from the WPP collection, legacy businesses, too? And what precisely are advertising agencies and their great media-buying adjuncts for any longer? The legacy newspaper distribution business, under OFT pressure, is currently being asked whether driving diesel-fuming lorries along motorways in the middle of the night is the best way of getting millions of surplus copies to recycling dumps 24 hours later. You could ask much the same question about advertising agencies.

: Now see Liz Hoggard, also in the Observer, reporting from the adfest at Cannes, where the star of the West Wing, the creator of Sex and the City, and the queen of HuffingtonPost came to talk about what’s compelling in media today.

What both shows also had in spades was authenticity. . .

And JWT want to learn from that. Because the days of the 30-second TV spot are numbered. . . .

This means a new bar has been set for advertising, says Davis. Not only must their output be fresher, cleverer, edgier, but ads must become an art form in their own right, or at least move closer to the entertainment space. ‘The challenge to us is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in,’ he says – or ‘make coitus interruptus the real intercourse,’ as Huffington puts it bluntly. That means goodbye to internet pop-ups, which drive the consumer mad, and more investment in ’360-degree’ communication strategies – emails, text messages, flyers, chatrooms and podcasts which the consumer chooses to view. Customers are now co-authors of a brand’s ‘story’. . . .

Consumers will happily spend time with branded communications but only on their own terms – and only if the content is engaging. It’s a brutal, Darwinian market out there, as veteran ad man Maurice Saatchi observed in his keynote speech, ‘The Strange Death of Modern Advertising’, given at Cannes last week. Only strong brands will survive, he insists. ‘The intellectual rigour of advertising – paring and editing down to a brutally simple thought – has never been more in demand.’

‘It used to be the company that owned the brand; now the consumer owns the brand,’ adds [Guardian Unlimited head of commercial development, Adam] Freeman. ‘They can either kill it or love it. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing channel.’ . . .

The big message from Cannes is that advertising must respect the intelligence of its audience – if it does not prompt consumers to think smart, it will be instantly dismissed. Advertisers want your brain as well as your wallet.

And there’s the other great for advertising today: respect. That means you can’t talk to us like dummies anymore. you have to talk to us human-to-human.

: Now hear lines from Saatchi at Cannes on the state of the ad industry:

“At the tender age of 50 it was struck down in its prime,” he says. “Mourners at its grave side are now embarrassed to admit they knew the deceased.” . . .

He quotes from the Gospel of St John – “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.”

“No copywriter could put it better. The word is the brands’ protector, guide and saviour. The word comes first, for a brand, before all actions in all media at all times. The word is the saviour because in each category in global business it is only possible for one brand to own one word. Take great care before you pick your word because it will be the god of your brand.”

He cites an Interbrand study that strong brands need few words. And that top brands need just one word. The question is how do you find that word, afterall there are 750,000 words in English.

Research by M&C Saatchi showed that 80% of marketing directors agree strongest brands can be described in one word. But only 10% of the marketing directors could describe their brands in one word.

Nowadays only brutally simply ideas get through. Reducing the complex to the simple requires the painful necessity of thought. The ruthless paring down of paragraph to sentence and sentence to word.

“It is said that Charles Dickens was paid by the word. Times change. Now marketing directors’ pay should be inversely proportional to the number of words in their strategy statemment.”

Less is more. . . .

The same applies to the world’s great revolutions. Marxist socialism.

In a paragraph read the communist manifesto. In a sentence read the lines on Karl Marx’s tomb. In a word – “justice”. . . .

: LATER: I just watched Sorrell’s speech at Cannes. It’s positively wacky. The man has nothing to say of the slightest relevance or value. A classic case of fiddling-while-the-biz-burns.

: THIS JUST IN: The real tipping point will be the decline of TV’s upfront. Ad Age says tomorrow:

For a decade the marketing world has been wondering when the digital revolution would finally cut into networks’ upfront payday. The smart money says this is shaping up to be the year, and TV’s take could be down as much as $600 million.

Although sales chiefs are still dickering, agency executives and analysts forecast the market to wind up anywhere between $8.5 billion and $9 billion. Either way, that represents a correction from last year’s $9.1 billion haul, itself down from the $9.3 billion raked in for the 2004-2005 season.

Newspaper as open-source focus group

June 24, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Some intriguing comments on my column about the Guardian’s web-first move. Start with MrPikeBishop, aka Frank Fisher, proposing a means to augment the still-measly revenue of online news with online think tanks and reviewers:

It’s money though isn’t it? That’s the big fat fly in the ointment. . . . And that’s probably causing quivering sphincters at every paper in the developed world. Sure, the optimists will say expanded online advertising will take up the slack, and that punters may even spring for micropayments – they might, in the end. But in the interm…. wooooohooooh. . . .

Personally I don’t think the media have quite grasped that as well as presenting a different way of delivering the story, the web is also TWO WAY. You give to the punters, but the punters, as we see here, also give back. Don’t think that advertising, or pay for news, is the only revenue stream possible. I’ve already been conjuring with ideas of using intelligent web communities as on-demand think tanks, for project or idea review, or for brainstorming purposes, but there are more readily obvious opportunities to hand.

Take film, music – what’s the best way to get a new movie or album to break in a big way? What gets punters through the turnstiles faster than anything else? Word o’ mouth. Who’s reviews do people trust most? NME? Time Out? Or their buddy’s? A lot of people on this site [Comment is Free, that is] love film, a lot love music – Guardian, take that. Use it. Create an intelligent and articulate panel, and SELL that service. How do you know who you can trust on ebay? Feedback ratings. Millions now accept and use this rating system – why think it would only work for items on ebay? Why won’t it work for biscuits? Pensions? Coffee shops? Throw select readers a little bone, and sell their expertise and their valued opinion. Aggregate opinons, ratings, sell the service. Sure, the punters won’t do this for nothing, but if they get streamed new movies to review, or music, or vouchers for a new bar etc etc etc. The brightest underachievers in the world hang out at GU, that’s a resource.

There’s a lot lurking in that. It’s about capturing and giving value to the wisdom of your crowd. It’s about acting as a moderator for sharing their experience and opinions. It’s about networks of trust. It’s about beating the hell out of random focus groups with detailed and valuable research. It’s about sharing your stuff with the public and getting value in return. The discussion continues as gawain says:

I’ve never been called a bright underachiever before! Sounds good!…..sort of. Anyhow -good post MrPB -a tried and trusted central idea. It’s why reality TV is so popular now. But as far as creating intelligent and articulate panels, they can’t be set up like CiF right? I mean you’ve got the likes of me and the Stan-thing roaring and bellowing every few days. It got to be elitist to stay classy right?

MrPikeBishop responds with some gems (my emphases):

“It got to be elitist to stay classy right” Stan’s elite too y’know. C’mon, you can tell he’s a bright feller – dripping with intelligently crafted lunacy.

CiF looks like a lunatic asylum because that’s what people become online – that’s one reason why they’re so valuable: people open up. And the diversity here – nutters ‘n all – is of value too. You take the film industry; run by accountants who would rather remake the same film every 20 years because they can’t imagine what will grab people next. But the remakes are made, and then vanish – you look at films like 12 Monkeys, or Donnie Darko: those films are made by and for people who are outside the mainstream, and they are not just watched, but *loved*. They make a bit of money in the box office, and then they make film every day from that day on, in merchendise, tie-ins and DVDs – cult successes never die. Make a movie, and one day you’ll need to make another. Make a cult, and you can retire. . . . That’s one tiny aspect – what I’m talking about is utilising specialist knowledge and opinion to enhance business or service propositions – an open-source focus group, really. Wiki-reviews, kinda.

Everyman6 chimes in on the notion of open-source focus groups:

Utopian, but unlikely to save The Guardian. You can’t persuade punters to pay for other punters’ reviews, because they’re used to getting them for free. No added value. And online “focus groups” have to be vetted and weighted, because your random sampling of online nutcases isn’t representative of the wider public. Which gets you back to square one. How about a Farringdon Road Bring & Buy Sale, anyone? Georgina could bake a cake.

[Translation: How about a Guardian rummage sale? CiF editor Georgina Henry could bake a cake.]

He makes a good point but isn’t that potentially the real value of The Guardian in the end: vetting and weighing and making the internet not so random?

cktirumalai adds (making me jealous that my commenters here don’t quote James Joyce):

James Joyce, who had some personal experience of newspapers, wrote with ironic humour in “Ulysses”, “Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof”. Apparently that should now be amended to “Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper which has been shaped with the active assistance of bloggers”. And bloggers can indeed help, pouncing on factual and other errors and providing unusual perspectives. If newspapers chronicle today’s history–or yesterday’s– the journalist can indeed profit from the views of alert contemporaries. But I cannot somehow imagine a historian of the 1850s posting it on a website for interactive comment: he would want a more select audience. For myself, I turn to blogs as a supplement; the newspaper, on which I grew up, is my staple.

Once more: I think that networks of trust will form. Links lead to a meritocracy and your or the Guardian can chose their links carefully. This will matter in advertising and in information as well as discussion.

Back to the focus of my column — news stories going online first — Ulla adds an interesting question:

The good thing about the web is that you can update and change articles pretty easily afterwards and continously. So for most of the people publishing on the web as soon as possible is not a big deal. What I find quite interesting is that yet there does not seem to be any difference yet in “writing for web” and “writing for print publication”. This will hopefully change longterm – that the advantages and disadvantages of web and print will be used to best advantage for the issues and as a news outlet. At the moment it still feels like when tv first came along and the programmes and news were presented as if it was radio.

I think that’s right and it’s part of what I’ll be grappling with when I teach at CUNY’s j-school: We’ve spent too much time in online journalism talking about it as a new means of story-telling (read: lecuturing). The real question is how you present a constantly growing and changing story in a sane structure that lets you take advantage of constant contributions and updates and allows you to link to more details from those contributors without turning it all into a muddled mess that makes you wish for USA Today.

: See also Georgina Henry on the finish of the Big Blogger contest and a question about what’s next. An unnamed commenter — sounds like MrPikeBisho — suggests a refinement of what’s above:

One suggestion – and I don’t know how practical it is – but you have a great resource there: the punters. What an educated, articulate and, by definition, under-occupied bunch – that’s a hell of a thinktank sitting there, waiting to be tapped. I can imagine one thread a week that sets a task: come up with a slogan for this product, figure out why customers aren’t using a particular service, tell us what you really want from a gym, develop an effective youth crime policy…. Put the resource up for auction – “get the best brains in the world working on your business in their idle hours” – kind of a human equivalent of the SETI distributed processing project. You’ll end up with a new slogan from Heinz: “buy our fucking soup!”

If you can’t beat ‘em…

June 24, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Shane Richmond, news editor of Telegraph.co.uk, is writing a most sensible blog where he sometimes beats his newspaper cohorts upside the head about the ways of the future. In this post, he argues that journalists must be seeders, not leaders (echoing Reuters chief Tom Glocer). And here he says to those complaining about Google and aggregators: Deal with it.

Converge

June 24, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Catching up, I see this report on the Washington Post now outfitting correspondents with video cameras to feed the web not just with words but with action.

Just us hacks

June 24, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

Scott Norvell, head of Fox News London, says journalism is no big:

Asked if news companies were over-relying on content from users, Scott Norvell, Fox News London bureau chief, told journalism.co.uk:

“News companies are not doing enough.

“Journalism, with a capital J, needs to get to grips with the idea that what it does is not high art.

“Anyone can do their jobs. It’s not that hard to do.”

Chicken, meet egg

June 23, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Washington Post’s Richard Morin quotes two political scientists who say that Jon Stewart is causing cynicism in politics among the young.

Oh, come on. Cynicism about politics is not Stewart’s fault. It’s politics’ fault. Let’s get our cause and effect straight, Profs.

Could it just be that the mainstream press protects the mainstream political structure and when Jon Stewart calls bullshit on both camps, he’s telling the truth that others dare not tell? And could it just be that he’s not making a joke of politics; politics already is a joke?

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, “The Daily Show,” develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

That’s particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don’t bother to cast ballots.

Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris of East Carolina University said previous research found that nearly half — 48 percent — of this age group watched “The Daily Show” and only 23 percent of show viewers followed “hard news” programs closely.

To test for a “Daily Effect,” Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from “The CBS Evening News” to another group. Then they measured the students’ attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart’s program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers’ article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

“Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls,” they wrote.

Maybe you should test for the MSM effect?

: LATER: Here’s a PDF of the study, thanks to Antonia Zerbisias. I couldn’t find it before but Marty Kaplan at HuffPost did and he says:

It turns out that Stewart fans also trust their own knowledge of politics more than do network watchers. Young Daily Show viewers blame the elites who run the political-media system for the mess we’re in, not themselves. They think they really get what politics is actually all about. And, says the study, here’s an idea worth entertaining: “citizens who understand politics are more likely to participate than those who do not.”

In other words, the cynicism and discontent that the Daily Show breeds could “spawn greater involvement,” say the authors; Stewart watchers could actually “become more active voters.”

Yes, the study also contemplates the other possibility: that cynicism is a voter-turnoff. “Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” say the authors, “we just don’t know.”

Is there a reason that the Washington Post piece dwelt exclusively on the half-empty side of the argument? I suppose that reflecting what the study actually says — on the one hand, on the other hand — just wouldn’t have cut it for a column. And making the half-full case exclusively instead — Jon Stewart, Fighter for Democracy — might not have gone over well in a town whose media and political elites don’t much like being nailed on television as the dickwads and asshats that they are.

Hmmm… The more that young people learn the truth about the political process, the more they get their news from multiple sources, the more gatekeeprs there are for information — the more they just might want to shake things up, throw incumbents out, and make Washington accountable for its hypocrisy, mendacity and incompetence. What a concept!

So half-done msm reports about studies about msm should perhaps make one cynical about msm, in other words.

The world’s bravest reporters

June 23, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Australian Broadcasting’s Media Report radio show/podcast has a spectacular report this week on the brave reporters who are building Afghanistan’s own journalism, free speech, and free society despite very real danger. Listen here; read here.

The host, Gerald Tooth, begins with Tolo TV’s 6:30 Report, an investigative show that has “taken on war-lords, drug-lords, paedophile rings, corruption in the Supreme Court, and the country’s difficult relationship with Pakistan.” The show’s star reporter is only 23 and he is fearless. Masood Qiam is the real Gunga Dan. Some excerpts from the interview:

Qiam: You know, in Afghanistan, in the last four years, media progress is good, but we still have a lot of problems in the law, in media law. And in parliament we often come up against MPs, who despite making the law, don’t understand media law…. For example, when an MP slapped our cameraman in parliament, and when we asked him why, he said, ‘It’s my right to slap a cameraman, as an MP’. And this is an example of an MP that doesn’t know the law, or know how to behave with a journalist. Also there are many journalists who don’t know what their rights are when it comes to media law….

The MPs are already scared of Tolo TV cameramen because previously we broadcast footage of MPs falling asleep in parliament, and of another one picking his nose. So we were already unpopular.

That’s almost funny — imagine Tom DeLay slapping a reporter (I’m sure he has) — but, of course, the enemies of democracy in Afghanistan have worse weapons than fists.

But, of course, it is more serious than that. It’s about the essence of the law being formed in Afghanistan:

Qiam: I was called before the Supreme Court to answer a charge of defamation after we did a story revealing corruption within the court. While I was in court, they threatened me, and said if it’s proved that you have defamed the head of the Supreme Court, Maolari Shinwari, you’ll be jailed for two years, and it shocked me. . . .

Later in the interview, he talked about the efforts at intimidation that came as a result of the Supreme Court investigations, including demonstrations against the station:

Qiam: Because the Supreme Court head is the President of the Islamic Scholars’ Council, and that Council is in every part of Afghanistan, working with the mullahs, and when they saw the report about the corruption in the Supreme Court and the weakness of the head of the court, they’re angry, and they start to demonstrate against Tolo TV. And three or four times now the head of the Supreme Court has asked the President, Hamid Karzai, to stop Tolo TV. He thinks we’re against Islam, or we are against our culture, and that’s wrong.

Tooth: And you covered the demonstration?

Qiam: Yes, it’s a reality, and we have to broadcast the reality of what our people think about us, and whatever the problem, they have to know that.

Now there’s transparency. Qiam spoke more about intimidation and fear:

I’m not afraid of anyone, and I think this is necessary to make our society good, and for the progress of democracy and freedom of speech. . . .

There are two types of people in public life in our new democracy. There are those who are ready to be interviewed by us, and we are not afraid of them because they believe in media, and they believe in freedom of speech and they will never threaten us. Then there are people who are not ready to be interviewed by us, who have their fingers in corruption and drugs, and we’re afraid of those people because they’re very dangerous for the people, and also for the journalists. And they are the ones we worry about attacking us when our backs are turned.

This from a man who, Tooth says, has received death threats for every story he has aired. Says Qiam:

Threats against my life are not such a big issue. For 23 years I grew up here. I was here under the Communists and under the Mujahadeen, with the Taliban. For us, life is always full of risks. The most fearful thing for me is not death threats to us; yes, we are afraid of these people to some extent, but most of all as journalists, we’re afraid of the Parliament. In Parliament there are MPs who will limit our activities by issuing laws that will confine us into four walls and will stop us from asking open questions. And when we ask them about their intentions to bring in harsher media laws, they just give vague and evasive answers. So we’re afraid that they are planning to bring in laws that will completely limit our activities. That’s what hurts me, and I think that’s what’s dangerous for Afghanistan.

Let me explain again that threats like slapping and beating are not a real threat. It’s a threat, but not too serious for us. It’s not a serious threat that can stop us from working. But the most serious and frequent threat is to limit our activities by law.

My other fear is that the government starts to ignore our reports and not react to them. Ignoring our reports is the biggest way they can hurt us. This is the threat, this is dangerous for us, this is painful, when your job is not effective, this is dangerous. I think it’s going to be like American democracy, the media is free to say anything, but the government is deaf to them.

Note that last line well.

Tooth next talks to Malalai Joya, a 28-year-old woman and member of Parliament who stood up and told various of her fellow MPs that they were warlords who should be jailed. This is what led to the shoving match with Qiam’s camera crew, above. And then Tooth interviews Shukria Barakzai, 35, another MP and a journalist who started a weekly women’s magazine. Read or listen to it all and hear the raw nerves of journalism’s birth in a nation.