Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

There’s a new website that’s been set up which tries to pull together items from a range of verifiable bloggers across the world and create a sort of news feature from them. This kind of thing has been done before, but this is a new initiative in as much as the bloggers have all been sourced and vetted by qualified journalists before they are allowed to submit. The whole thing is backed and hosted by the mighty France24 TV station (the equivalent of BBC News24).

It’s quite serious stuff (the strapline is “Your Eyes On The Globe”) and aims to take contributions from ordinary people who live inside the areas from where the journalism itself can’t always be trusted. For example, there was an interesting piece yesterday from a girl in Cuba, and today from someone in Turkmenistan.

I can see the value in this – serious journalists are currently faced with a dichotomy: the internet has posed a risk to their profession in that more and more people are relying on ‘facts’ they can read there; but the vast majority of this information is often unverified and could just as well be propaganda from unknown sources. At the same time, the general public is losing trust in journalism itself which means that in reality, we have a problem in believing anything we read. This new website seems like a serious attempt to stem this tide – young journalists with integrity and also with international connections have trawled the world for the reliable voices of real people and brought them together under a trusted umbrella. Check it out – the website is http://observers.france24.com/en (this takes you to the English version – the journalists who put it together are all bi-lingual so there is a French version too).

In the meantime, here’s another strange thing: Rarely can the British public be relied on to vote on anything in the right way, but last Sunday’s vote for BBC Sports Personality of the Year seems to have worked for once. Joe Calzaghe won – deservedly, because he has taken on some of the world’s best and emerged better and stronger and still retained his integrity. I was surprised (but pleased) about this because I had fully expected the populist vote to follow the usual press hysteria and vote for Lewis Hamilton (don’t get me wrong, Lewis is a high achiever too, but I so hate foregone conclusions), just as they did a few years ago when they mindlessly voted for that Beckham fella in preference to Ellen McArthur who had shown far more grit and personality battling against the southern oceans than he ever does flouncing around on a football pitch.

Mind you, I can talk. On Sunday I voted for James Toseland, World Superbike Champion, simply because he was the prettiest boy amongst the list and he plays lovely piano too!