Congo Echo
Just discovered a very interesting blog on the website of the Berlin newspaper Taz. It’s called ‘Kongo Echo‘ and is written by the paper’s longtime Africa correspondent Dominic Johnson. If you read German, I highly recommend adding it to your bookmarks.
Flying solo in Switzerland
There’s been little time to blog lately and there’ll be even less over the next few weeks: the office is short-staffed and from tomorrow I have the whole of Switzerland (except sports, of course) to myself. Should be an interesting few weeks. Wish me well and send me news tips via the ‘About’ page.
Computer journalism
There’s this idea floating around that journalists can soon be replaced by computers capable of understanding numbers sufficiently well to write coherent stories, particular on sports and business matters. Here’s why this idea won’t fly, at least not for quite some time:
_ Computers can only deal with what’s expected. And there are plenty of times when a sports game can’t be explained by the stats alone, or the figures obscure what really happened. Human beings can adapt to this because they know how other human being think. Computers can’t, because they can only follow fixed patterns they’ve been programmed to follow.
_ In business, computer journalists would be suckers for exploitation. Companies would quickly figure out how to dupe the algorithm into thinking they’ve had a good year when in actual fact it’s been a disaster. They’d bury the juicy and embarrassing bits in places the computer wouldn’t immediately find. Of course this happens to human journalists all the time. But at least they collective effort of several journalists can’t dissect a complex company report in sufficiently different ways to allow for a complete picture of what has really happened to emerge (another reason to always read more than one account of an event)
_ This brings me to perhaps the best use of computer journalists: as aides to reporters increasingly overwhelmed by the flood of PR-generated news. Let the computer write a first draft and hope the journalist won’t be too lazy to go over it thoroughly, make amendments and turn it into the product of a human being, for other human beings. Computers themselves will only ever write well enough for other computers.
German milblog ‘Augen Geradeaus!’ reborn
I just noticed that journalist Thomas Wiegold’s blog “Augen Geradeaus!”, which focuses on the German military and security issues, is back and looking better than ever at its new home. There’s an English section here.
Wiegold knows what he’s writing about having covered that ground for almost two decades – around the time Germany started taking part in foreign military operations for the first time since the end of World War II.
Formerly a staff writer for weekly news magazine Focus, Wiegold is now flying solo. I wish him the best of luck!
About the UN rights council’s flotilla probe
The president of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Sihasak Phuangketkeow, defends the Geneva-based body’s investigation into the May 31 incident raid by Israeli forces into a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Swiss papers react to team’s World Cup exit
“We’re out and we deserved nothing else,” ran the headline in Switzerland’s biggest selling newspaper Blick on Saturday.
Reactions to the Swiss team’s early exit from the World Cup after a 0-0 draw against Honduras were nothing if not sober, despite high hopes the ‘Nati’ would make it to the knock-out round like in 2006.
The consensus Saturday was that the team which beat European Champion Spain 1-0 in its opening match had proved unable to follow through, displaying much talent but little finishing finesse.
Switzerland’s only goal of the tournament came from Cape Verde-born Gelson Fernandes.
“It’s over,” titled French-language daily Le Matin, beneath a picture of downcast Swiss players hugging at the end of the match in Bloemfontein on Friday.
Few repeated earlier complaints that the referee in Switzerland’s 1-0 defeat to Chile on Monday had cost them the match by sending off Valon Behrami after 30 minutes.
Instead, pundits admitted that the Swiss simply hadn’t played well enough.
The team’s failure, “stands for the inability to properly manage the three points earned in the first group game against Spain,” wrote Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger, employing a term normally used in banking, not football.
“What the team lacked was mainly the decisive bit of class and quality, players with creativity and athletic ability,” the paper wrote.
Even the serious Neue Zuercher Zeitung found fit to mention the team’s fate on its front page, praising keeper Diego Benaglio _ who let in only one goal during the tournament _ as the only player to meet the high demands expected of a World Cup.
“The dream of a round of 16 match against Brazil is over,” NZZ wrote. “Maybe it’s better that way too.”
Blick reminded readers that the tournament should be remembered for the unexpected win against Spain, which it called “probably the biggest achievement in 105 years.”
“Now let’s get England on Sept. 7,” the paper wrote. “Our first opponent in qualifying for the European Championship.”
Journalists: Don’t forget non-US readers
Sunday’s story about an escaped elephant rumbling through Zurich was interesting from a journalistic point of view for two reasons.
First, it was amazing to see how many errors some publications were able to insert when they nicked my story.
Second, looking at the bit.ly metrics I noticed that while Yahoo News readers clicked on the video link 3,550 times, some 3,030 clicks came from Finnish tabloid Ilta Sanomat. That’s Finland, a country with 1/60th the population of the United States.
Lesson for journalists: don’t think all of your readers are going to come from the US.
Rights to the end
I spent quite some time in the Human Rights Council today looking for a priest. I was hoping for a confession – from him – as to why the Vatican has failed for 13 years to submit a key report on child rights to the UN. I didn’t find him.
However I did bump into Britain’s Bob Last, an able diplomat and witty observer of the ins-and-outs of the Council. I recommend you read his blog here: The Last Word
Bankers behind closed doors
There is a persistent myth that the rich and powerful meet in secret to discuss how they are going to organize the world economy.
Of course that’s nonsense. Nobody can organize the world economy: it’s a tangled web of independent actors each with their own _ sometimes opposing _ interests.
And yet there are reasons to ask questions about the decision by the Swiss National Bank and the International Monetary Fund to hold a closed-doors meeting in Zurich last Tuesday at which academics and industry figures got exclusive access to key central bank officials.
SNB boss Philipp Hildrebrand defended the decision to not even publish a participants list, explaining in this clip that the secrecy was necessary to ensure “open and confidential” discussion.
Here is the list of participants, obtained from unofficial sources:
2010 SNB/IMF meeting participants page 1
2010 SNB/IMF meeting participants page 2
NB: Although there were several financial journalists present, they were forced to operate under so-called Chatham House rules, meaning they couldn’t report who said what. Also, the journalists were hand-picked by the SNB.
50 years of EFTA – an unpublished story
Not every story that’s written gets published. Below is one such piece, written at the start of the year with the help of my AP colleague Ian MacDougall in Norway about the 50th anniversary of the European Free Trade Association.
EFTA was once a rival to what has become the European Union, but its significance has dwindled in recent years. So perhaps it’s not surprising that this story wasn’t deemed of sufficient interest.
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Snow is ankle deep in Geneva’s Planpalais market and the vendors say they’ve never heard of EFTA.
Is it a fish, a type of cheese, some ask.
Mention of the European Free Trade Association draws shrugs from other stallholders more concerned whether customers will brave the biting cold to buy their local produce.
“I’ve never heard of it,” says Felicia Mendes, cashier at a nearby supermarket where office workers are buying fruit and sandwiches for their lunchtime snacks.
And that anonymity is just fine by EFTA’s Secretary-General, Kare Bryn.
“It’s not our objective to be known,” he (said) at the organization’s headquarters on the third floor of a discreet Geneva office building.
Bryn insisted that the 50 year-old organization’s sole purpose remains to open up new trade opportunities for its dwindling membership that now includes only Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
With negotiations over a new global trade pact bogged down since 2001 and governments increasingly showing protectionist tendencies, EFTA recently signed free trade deals with Canada, Colombia and Egypt, and is working to conclude talks with India, said Bryn. It also hopes to start negotiations this year with Russia and Indonesia, to be inked by 2013 if all goes well, he said.
Jan Atteslander, head of foreign trade at economiesuisse, an umbrella group of 30,000 Swiss businesses, said EFTA’s small size is one of the reasons it is so successful.
“Nobody needs to be afraid when negotiating with EFTA that we’re going to take over the domestic market,” he said.
But the bloc’s size may also ultimately be its downfall.
Conceived as a trade-only alternative to the more political European Union, EFTA has studiously avoided the grander ambitions that have turned its bigger rival into a 27-nation super bureaucracy with over 40,000 employees, an anthem and the power to interfere in member states’ domestic affairs.
“We are not a political organization,” said Bryn, who oversees 80 staff in Geneva and Brussels. “One of the very reasons why EFTA was created is because our members would not or could not join the European Union.”
Since its founding in 1960, however, most of EFTA’s members have succumbed to the lure of the European Union: Austria, Britain, Denmark, Portugal, Finland and Sweden have switched sides and Iceland _ battered by the recent meltdown of its banking sector _ looks set to jump ship too.
That leaves Norway, Switzerland and tiny Liechtenstein.
“The possible departure of Iceland certainly raises some questions about the future of EFTA,” said Atteslander of economiesuisse.
Bryn acknowledged that “EFTA can only survive as an organization as long as the political feeling in Norway and Switzerland is that it’s not the right time to become members of the Europen Union.”
Both countries’ voters rejected EU membership in the 1990s, but “sooner or later the issue will come up again,” said Bryn. “We can’t plan for 100 years of EFTA.”
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, in an interview Tuesday, said the bloc’s members were pragmatic enough to find ways of keeping the organization going.
“It (EFTA) has been a very flexible organization, which has seen countries leave for the EU while maintaining smooth efficiency for its core operations,” Stoere (said).
Nevertheless, both Norway and Switzerland have in recent years taken steps toward closer partnership with the EU on non-trade issues including passport-free travel, the free movement of labor and financial regulation.
Experts say one way of keeping the organization going _ and cushioning its remaining members against the weight of an increasingly pushy EU _ would be to allow other countries to join.
Ulf Sverdrup, a political scientist at the University of Oslo, said European micro-states such as Andorra have been approached, and even Turkey would be a possibility if it continues to be snubbed by the EU.
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About
Musings of a wire reporter in Geneva. Feel free to contact me with your questions about journalism, Switzerland, or anything else I write about on this blog.
