My Life As A Political Blogger – Iain Dale

Iain Dale, who founded London’s Politicos bookshop, is one of Britain’s leading political commentators, appearing regularly on TV and radio. Iain Dale is best known for his political blog, Iain Dale’s Diary and football blog, West Ham Till I Die. He is a contributing editor and columnist for GQ Magazine, writes for the Daily Telegraph and a fortnightly diary for the Eastern Daily Press. On a visit to Australia sponsored by Microsoft, Iain Dale addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 30 May 2011, after which he joined Peter van Onselen, columnist for The Australian and presenter for Sky News Agenda, in an exchange of views.

MY LIFE AS A POLITICAL BLOGGER

IAIN DALE

The last time I was here was 20 years ago, which makes me feel quite old. I was advising the Liberal Party on waterfront reform. When we arrived in Australia, one of our Liberal Party hosts said, “You do realise that if the unions know that you’re here, your lives will be under threat.” Well I’m glad that it’s in slightly more tranquil circumstances that I’m here today.

So, my life as a blogger. The conventional wisdom used to be that bloggers are rather sad, narcissistic people who have nothing better to do than spend their time dressed in stripy pyjamas, sit in their bedrooms typing furiously away at keyboards to audiences of half a dozen. Journalists treated bloggers with utter contempt. But that was then. Now, not only has the mainstream media woken up to positives of blogging, they’ve actually embraced the medium.

For the uninitiated, a blog is a kind of diary, short for “web log”, and it’s always on the internet. Every day, I would write four or five stories and post them on my blog for the world to read. About 150,000 people a month would read my witterings. It started back in 2002 when I was visiting a friend in Washington. He showed me his blog. I instantly understood what I could do with this. Within ten minutes my friend set one up for me. And the beauty of blogging is that it doesn’t cost anything to do. You can set it up for free, and it’s hosted for free.

Since then, my blog has undergone various incarnations. First of all, it was more a personal diary than anything else. Then, when I became a candidate in 2003, I used it to tell my electors what I was doing and I used it in my election campaign. In 2005, when David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party, there was a leadership contest. I was chief of staff to his main opponent, David Davis. I decided that I’d better stop blogging  because I’d probably write something that Davis might be embarrassed by. I stopped for six months.

At the end of 2005, I started it up again. Readership was instant because Charles Kennedy, who was then the leader of the Liberal Democrats was having problems with his MPs who wanted to oust him. I heard that a caucus that had been called to do just that. Having the story ahead of the lobby journalists in Westminster, I put it on my blog. This gave me a readership of several thousand over night. And, over the next few months, the readership doubled every month.

My blog took off, significantly, when then UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s adulterous affair was revealed by the Mail on Sunday. A few days after that I got a call from a journalist on the Daily Mail asking if I’d like to publish the bits that they couldn’t publish, because, after all, they are a family newspaper. Without going into the gory details, this story concerned Mr. Prescott’s use of Viagra. And, I put it on the blog. Within half an hour, The Sun was on the phone asking if I had any more details.

I explained that I’d printed everything that I had. I didn’t think any more of it until the next morning when, emblazoned on page 7 of The Sun over a whole page, was a glaring headline: “Two-inch! Size of Pres’ Manhood Revealed”. This came with a juicy quote from me which I don’t remember giving. On that day, and this is the point of me telling you this rather horrible story, my readers increased to 100,000. Basically, I didn’t look back. Although, I did decide I wasn’t going to write that kind of story again.

So, on the back of the blog I became a political pundit. And I was invited to write a fortnightly column for the Daily Telegraph. I now have my own radio talk show, and I get invited to speak at events like this.

Bloggers all over the world have challenged the supremacy of the main-stream media. They’ve broken stories and they aren’t afraid of offering opinion. In some ways, bloggers now compete with the mainstream media for comment and opinion. And, what’s more, they’re holding the mainstream media to account.

In Britain, broadsheet newspapers have gone from being newspapers to comment papers. If you look at The Independent, nowadays, it’s not a newspaper. it’s a giant editorial. Indeed, they’re so proud of it, they now call themselves a “viewspaper”. Even the Daily Telegraph is going in that direction. I don’t know about you, but I buy newspapers to read the news, not what a journalist thinks about the news. I don’t want an interpretation of the news pages;  that’s for the comment pages.

And, the broadcast media thinks that we can only cope with 30 seconds of an interview before we lose interest. This is nonsense. But listen to many of the most popular news programs and count how many times the presenter says to an interviewee, “I’m sorry, that’s all we’ve got time for.” Well, why is that?

If an interview is interesting, why curtail it after two minutes? When a politician knows an interview is going to only last two minutes, they will go in with a prepared answer. And whatever the interviewer asks, the politician will give the same answer, come what may.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in the Blair Government, told me an anecdote which illustrates what an absurd world we live in. He was rung up by the breakfast television channel, and the reporter asked if he would do a quick piece to camera for the program the next day. But it could only last twelve seconds. Well, being an accomplished media performer, Robin Cook did just that. And he was rather proud of himself for doing it in only twelve seconds. So, as politicians do, he tuned in the next morning to watch the reporter conclude the report by saying, “That was Robin Cook indulging in a typical bit of sound-bite politics.” That’s what a lot of politicians are up against.

Interestingly, the long, searching, half-hour, three-quarters of an hour interview has all but disappeared. Even the BBC flagship current affairs program Panorama no longer carries set-piece interviews, not even with the Prime Minister. Part of the reason blogging has taken off in such a big way is because of an innate dissatisfaction with the way the mainstream media operates. It’s also why internet TV and radio, although in their infancy, are also about to take off.

It was only when journalists understood or, in some cases, were made to understand by their editors, what the benefits of blogging could be, that the penny dropped. A large number of journalists in all different fields have joined the ranks of the blogosphere. Why? Because it gives them the chance to write something that they would never get into their newspapers, or be able to say on screen.

The BBC sports editor, for example, is lucky if he gets two minutes on a news bulletin to tell a story. Even with a 24-hour news cycle, he’ll still have to wait his turn in the queue to get on screen. His blog allows him to do two things: to write what he wants, and to write at length, either to break a story or to explain one.

So, blogging has now gone mainstream. Some bloggers, the fundamentalists, hate this – they feel threatened. Their anarchic, little world is being infested by people who think they are bloggers  but in fact are nothing of the sort. I don’t agree with that There’s actually room for everything. And let’s throw a little controversy into the pot.

All newspapers and broadcast organisations are putting money into their “new media” operations as though it’s going out of fashion. Why? I wish I could tell you, because new media is a bottomless pit into which hundreds of millions of pounds are being wasted because no one knows what the end game is.

When I write a business plan for my business, I generally have an idea where I want to end up, where the profit is, and how we’re going to make it. But, the driving force behind new media investment is being made on the cynical basis of everyone else doing it. The Guardian was the first newspaper to recognise which way the wind was blowing and had a fully functioning website before any other newspaper had even thought of having one. The Independent made a valiant attempt at challenging for a subscription, as did The Spectator and New Statesman magazines, but they gave up.

People expect content on the internet to be free. The Economist is one of the few to have had any success with the subscription model. Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are now trying in too, but with limited success. The Times, probably the best known paper in the world, went onto subscription on the internet about a year ago. They’ve only got 80,000 subscribers. It has made the operation vaguely profitable, but they had over 500,000 looking at their website before that.

All the newspapers have now piled in and spent millions on something they have only vague ideas about. But, everyone else is doing it, so must they. But where’s the revenue coming from? Online advertising? Yes, up to a point. But there isn’t a single newspaper website that makes a profit, and I don’t see that changing for a very long time. The Telegraph had pulled millions into making an internet TV platform, and was very good it is too. But they learned some very critical lessons along the way.

Internet TV’s day will come. Just as blogging has given millions of writers the potential to air their work, internet TV gives the same opportunity to those with a visual viewpoint. In some ways, it’s both democratising people and liberating them. Twenty years ago, Mrs Windsor of 32 Acacia Avenue could only vent her spleen through the letters pages of the Groomsby Bugle, today she could start a blog, at no cost to herself, and even an internet TV station. If I had my laptop here, I could broadcast what we’re doing now through my laptop right around the world. Probably no-one would watch, but there we go.

Why does all this matter? Isn’t the new media just a cacophony where the loudest voice wins? Where argument is conducted through a megaphone and professional standards go out of the window? It can be that, but that doesn’t make it all bad. Newspaper columnists like to think of themselves as a bit of an elite, where their opinions influence things, and therefore need to be taken seriously. But is Paul Kelly’s opinion, or Andrew Bolt’s opinion any more important than yours or mine, or even Mrs Windsor? True, they have a mass audience for their columns, but a big audience does not mean that a writer is any better than the amateur.

If I write a book which sells 20 copies (and I have), it doesn’t make it a bad book. It may mean that the marketing has been terrible. Very few forms of new media have reached the masses, but blogs do. And there are four blogs in the UK with high levels of readership. Guido Fawkes, which is a fairly political scandal blog, is the most popular. Political betting – that’s what it says on the tin. Conservative Home, which is a site for Conservative news and analysis. And my own blog. I can get up to 150,000 people a month reading my blog. When you bear in mind the circulation of The Spectator magazine is 70,000, the New Statesman is 25,000, you can see that I reached quite an audience.

I’m a one-man-band – not financed by anyone. Yet I’ve got more readers than the Daily Telegraph blogs all put together. I don’t say that to boast, I say it to show that it is possible to build a good online audience without millions of pounds being wasted. I’ve been approached by three mainstream media outlets; The Times, Telegraph and Spectator wanting me to put my blog on their website. I said no, because I think it would inhibit me. And it would mean that I couldn’t be totally independent.

There is some very good writing on the blogosphere. There’s some brilliant broadcasting on sites like Youtube. The production standards may not be BBC Radio or TV criteria, but so much the better. New media also provides some accountability for the old media. Up till now, newspaper journalists and columnists have got away with blue murder, often in a way which makes politicians look pure as the driven snow. If they make a mistake, misquote someone or tell an outright lie there is now an immediate form of redress. And, journalists hate it.

This new level of accountability is actually going to help increase accuracy in the media and surely that can only be a good thing. There are also three clear differences between old media and new media. In the old media you get paid, in the new media you generally don’t unless you happen to work in the new media for the old media. And, in the old media, if you write something libellous, your employer pays the bill; if I write something libellous, I’m liable. Thirdly, people in the new media tend to work together rather than in competition with each other. If I see a good story running on another blog, I’ll link to it. In a newspaper, it’s anathema to even mention a competitor. Blogs do it all the time.

I’d be lying if I said that I was a new media purist. I earn about £12,000 a year directly from advertising on my blog, almost enough to pay for the parking over the road. But I did not start my blog thinking I would earn a penny from it. Now, everything I do from a career point is indirectly a result of my blog. I wouldn’t appear on the BBC or Sky as regularly as I do if it weren’t for the blog. I certainly wouldn’t have had my Telegraph column or got my radio show.

I fully admit that new media can be unreliable, irrational and unpredictable. Bloggers don’t have sub-editors, a legal team, a team of fact-checkers – they are their own editors. They can be spun just as much as everyone else and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But, their readers know that and they bear all that in mind when deciding which blogs they trust or which blogs they will read every day.

People do read the same blogs every day. And, sometimes several times a day. Forty-four per cent of my readers read my blog more than three times a day, which puts an incredible strain on you as a blogger to write four, five, six stories a day. This was one of the reasons why, in December, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore.

A hundred and twenty years ago, tens of thousands of people were happy to stand for hours and listen to Prime Minister William Gladstone. He would speak with a uniform rhetorical quality, from start to finish. Nowadays, if a politician gets an audience of 100 to make a 20 minute speech, he thinks he’s on a winner. We are rapidly approaching the day when political speeches may be a thing of the past. Candidate selections now concentrate on the candidate’s ability to interview rather than the ability to make a speech.

As members of parliament come to terms with the internet as a means of communicating , the role of the speech in political communication will diminish even further. Because, politicians in the end will seek out their audience. The internet provides a willing audience. Politicians used to turn their noses up at bloggers who got 500 readers a day, but when you ask them how many times they’ve addressed an audience of five hundred, they look at you blankly until suddenly a light goes on above their heads.

Blogging provides us all with a platform to communicate our views, whether we’re politicians, journalists, or just members of the public with an axe to grind. Blogging is not for everyone, and for politicians certainly represents a threat as well as an opportunity. And, to some degree, it’s already being eclipsed by Twitter. But, it still offers a fantastic method of unfiltered communication.

I stopped blogging six months but the great thing about blogging is that it’s an evolving medium.  It’s easy to take a break and then return, and I am about return to it with a group blog called Dale & Co which will launch at the beginning of June. So, my message is this. The old media need to work out what they want to do with their online operations and create proper business plans. If they don’t they will continue to waste huge amounts of money. And, the new media should continue its glorious, diverse self. It should fight regulation, encourage diversity and promote conversation. And, above all, provide the accountability that for so long much of the old media has lacked.

IAIN DALE WITH PETER VAN ONSELEN

PETER VAN OLSELEN: We’ll put you on uncomfortable terrain and go from there.

IAIN DALE: Ann Widdecombe, former conservative Shadow Home Secretary, she and I do a theatre show called “A night with Ann Whitaker”. She goes around provincial theatres and I interview her and if ever I ask her a question that she doesn’t want to answer she will say “Well what lies underneath your question Peter …” But actually, I don’t know what lies underneath your question so let’s move on.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Okay, next question. I’m interested in your view of the new media versus the old media. I’m someone who’s in my mid 30s who has never tweeted and never blogged but have only gone through the traditional media. I’m interested because I hear what you’re saying about the move in the traditional media toward more opinion rather than news reporting but I would suggest that the internet has been one of the drivers for that, and the traditional media have been trying to find what they have, versus the instantaneous nature of online new media – to be able to provide reporting before newspapers can come up with it. So what’s your view on that?

IAIN DALE: I can see why you think that but there are newspapers in different countries that, the Irish Times being a good one, I had a copy of the Irish Times last week, they were covering the Queen’s visit to Ireland. And their front page story was literally just full of facts. There was no opinion, there was no commentary, it was just saying “The Queen visited so-and-so today, this is what she said, this is what the President said”. I thought how refreshing to read a newspaper that’s actually reporting news as fact.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Well what about the really important analysis piece as front with the little headshot of the person and you know?

IAIN DALE: Why do we need to see a headshot of the person? I mean The Economist still doesn’t even name the journalist that has written the piece. A lot of it is to pander to the vanity of these highly paid syndicated columnists I’m afraid.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Not sure about that!

IAIN DALE: I detect that there are maybe one or two in the audience. Also, I think it’s the 24 hour news agenda that is doing this. I watch Sky News, I’m on Sky News quite a lot in Britain. A lot of the minutes are filled up with people like me pontificating about things. Sometimes I do wonder how valid and relevant that is. I often get called up by Sky News. In fact it happened on Friday just before I came out here, I’m trying to remember what it was about now –

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Were you called up as an expert?

IAIN DALE: Yeah but this was because I had tweeted something – this is why you should tweet – Sharon Shoesmith was head of children’s services in a local council where a baby was killed by its parents. And the social services department had failed to spot that this child was in danger despite numerous visits to the parents’ home. This woman has never issued any sign of regret for the fact that she ran a shambolic children’s services department with no systems in place to do this. She was sacked by the then education secretary, Ed Bulls, under the last Labour government. She was just sacked, she lost her job. She then took the Government to court saying she should have been given an opportunity to explain herself, give “due process” was I think the phrase that was used. She is now going to get two million pounds compensation. I just wrote a tweet saying “sorry, this woman should be in prison not getting two million pounds.” And on that basis I get on Sky News to give my views on this case, frankly, of which I know very little about beyond –

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Did you say that on Sky News?

IAIN DALE: No, of course I didn’t.

IAIN DALE: But the fact is my office happens to be just over Lambeth Bridge just over the broadcasting studio. So they know that they can just ring me up and I will get there within five minutes. I think actually they had someone drop out. But it is a 24 hour news agenda which means you have to fill the space with a lot of pundits. Some of whom will have interesting things to say, some of whom won’t. I’m not saying the news programs themselves are in any way biased but in newspapers – because OFCOM regulations in Britain actually prevent a news station from being biased – but in newspapers anything goes. I just think to have opinion on the front page of a newspaper is wrong. The newspaper is a newspaper; the opinion belongs on the comment pages.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: I wouldn’t have as much to write if that was the case. In terms of the political system, in Australia particularly from a technological perspective we tend to follow Britain, follow the United States. So blogging is certainly not new here but I suspect that it’s behind where it is in Britain and in the US. I’m interested in where you see it being in Britain and the US in 10 years from now.

IAIN DALE: I think you’re right. The US in all sorts of media and communications and indeed political campaigning, or the use of new media in political campaigning is probably four or five years ahead of where we are in Britain. I’m told that we are slightly ahead of where you are here. I don’t know enough about what goes on here to judge that. But who can tell where we will be in 10 years time. I do think that internet television will have made a massive breakthrough. The reason I say that is we already have a much more diverse media now than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. I’ll just use this anecdote to explain this. Back in 1976 on Christmas day in England, 26 million people would sit down and watch Morecambe and Wise. Now 10 years ago, 12-15 million people would sit down and watch EastEnders on Christmas day. That was the most popular program. Last year about 7 million people sat down and watched EastEnders. Now that wasn’t particularly because the quality of programming had diminished. It’s because now there are thousands of channels – or hundreds of channels out there for people to watch. They have also got computers to use. Our leisure pursuits are much more diverse than they were 30 years ago. So the main TV channels have lost a huge amount of audience. Now that will have an impact on the programs that they’re able to make, particularly if they’re a commercial television as opposed to the BBC

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Sorry to interrupt there – do you see a way that the traditional media can strike back? I ask that in the context of one of my shows on Sky. We have an enormous amount of viewer interaction. They can tweet, they can email the contrarians on Sky News, they can tweet, they can email, and we’ve just introduced a segment starting up this coming Friday where we were going to actually bring a viewer on into one of the Sky News studios around Australia where they can sort of “spit the dummy” if they didn’t like something that was said in the previous week. It’s that sort of interactivity which I see more and more of in a lot of forms of media.

IAIN DALE: Sky are very good at doing that. Sometimes it can be too gimmicky. I mean the fact that you can read out emails or people can send in texts – I mean, well great but unless those people have something meaning to say…

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Tokenistic?

IAIN DALE: It can be. I know this with my radio show, all the time I’m saying “You can phone me, text me, email me, tweet me”. By the end of the decade we’re going to have about 10 different ways that people can interact with the different programs. Now, that can be a good thing. But I think the mainstream media or the big mainstream media – TV channels, radio stations – can survive if they innovate. By innovate I don’t just mean gimmicky things, I mean have much better quality programming. I think there’s far too much rubbish. Particularly if you look at the BBC programs which you will only see the best of, I assume, here. We have to see the whole lot that they produce and it’s not public service broadcasting. To me public service broadcasting is producing programs which the commercial sector just wouldn’t do because they can’t afford to do it. Yet if you watch BBC1 on a Saturday night, where you have all the reality TV, all the talent shows and all that sort of thing, it is just competing with the commercial channels. I don’t think the BBC should be doing that. They’re getting $3bn pounds of my money – well, taxpayer’s money – to spend on all of these programs. And they should not be using it to try and audience chase and that’s exactly what they’re doing. Now in a way you’ve got new entrants into the market now which is great. I mean Sky really shook up particularly the sports TV market in the UK back in the 1990s. You’ve got all sorts of history channels and there will be a channel for anybody who enjoys knitting in ten years’ time. There’ll be all sorts of niche channels and they will inevitably grab audience gradually from the mainstream channels. And the challenge for the mainstream channels is to compete with that.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Going back specifically to blogging. You mentioned earlier on that blogging has become an almost form of oversight for the traditional media. You also mentioned a concern, if you like, for overregulation of blogging. What is the oversight therefore for the blogger?

IAIN DALE: The reader, basically. You have to build a relationship of trust with you and the reader. And if the reader loses trust in you then they’re going to go elsewhere. I have made mistakes on my blog. I’ve called something wrong or I’ve got a fact wrong but if I do, there’ll be someone out there who immediately calls me on it. And I will always apologize.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Other bloggers wouldn’t necessarily.

IAIN DALE: Well a lot do, some don’t. But think about how difficult it is to get a retraction from a newspaper or a TV channel or a radio station. Now OK, on some of the occasions it’s probably been just as difficult to get a retraction out of me. But if I feel I have gotten something wrong, then I’m going to say so because I think in that realm you do, to use that awful phrase, keep it real. People think well “Ok good on him, he might have made a bit of a fool of himself but at least he’s recognized that he’s got something wrong.”

There is talk about bloggers being regulated by the Press Complaints Commission in England which is a completely toothless body because it is actually run by all the newspapers. I’ve submitted a complaint to the Commission about two years ago, which to me was a cut and dried case of the Daily Mail being homophobic. But of course they found in the Daily Mail’s favour. Why? Because it’s just a very incestuous body, it’s not a meaningful body in any sense. So there has been suggestion that bloggers should come under the auspices of that. I mean it could never work because all I would do is then host my blog in Australia and they couldn’t touch me. Guido Fawkes has a record of extreme scandal mongering, and doesn’t really care what he writes. In fact, he’s sometimes quite irresponsible in what he writes in my view. His blog is hosted in the Cayman Islands, I think, so he can break – I don’t know if it’s reached here but there’s this thing about super-injunctions where footballers and politicians have applied to the High Court for what’s called a super-injunction to stop these papers naming them. And it’s mainly because they’ve had affairs. So Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer is the latest example where he got a super-injunction but then it got out, really through Twitter more than anything else. Everyone knew there was somebody out there who was trying to stop the world knowing. So somebody would start a thread of “Super-injunction film titles”. “Shaving Ryan’s Privates” was one particularly tasteful one but it doesn’t take too much. All the others people just knew who it was and then some people started naming him.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: But a lot of us would have some sympathy for examples where libel laws are protecting people that perhaps we don’t feel that comfortable about being protected. But there are also plenty of examples aren’t there of where blogs, particularly if they’re hosted from overseas, getting around defamation laws, where they get around regulation to the extent that there is any. That must be something that is a concern though with a system where the traditional media for all its faults, there is more protection for the person that is written about there is in that kind of blogosphere.

IAIN DALE: I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with people always breaking super-injunctions. I do think that where it’s a case of public hypocrisy, there is a case for doing so. And if somebody who to all intents and purposes is living a sort of pristine life and yet they’re having affair after affair I think that is fair game for anyone in the media even if they are footballers.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: We don’t have time to discuss whether private lives are public business. But for what it’s worth, I tend to agree with you, I take a view that politicians’ private lives are public business because I believe that a lot of politicians use their family and their moral virtue towards their political campaign. So I’m quite relaxed about that but that’s a whole other debate. Let me ask you about something else. Political activism and political engagement. I’m interested in your thoughts about the extent to which voters within nation are likely to partake in that based around the nature of the electoral system. I do it in the context of Britain having non-compulsory voting and Australia having a version of compulsory voting, you can always informal vote, but it is compulsory in this country to turn up to a polling booth. I wonder whether you think that that is a good thing or a bad thing because it drags people out to vote that may not be that interested in voting and does it or doesn’t it change the system.

IAIN DALE: Well I think it’s a terrible thing because the Government compels us to do enough things already. To compel us to vote? What bright spark had that idea? I mean, to my mind, if you are compelled to vote, there should be a thing at the bottom of the ballot paper that says “none of the above”. But you know what? I bet “none of the above” would win most of the time.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: Maybe that’s why it’s not on the bottom of the ballot paper.

IAIN DALE: I think Belgium is the only other country that does this and that just says it all.

PETER VAN OLSELEN: It’s been done since the 1920s I think so it’s –

IAIN DALE: But I mean what do they do? Bang people up for not voting?

PETER VAN OLSELEN: You get fined.

IAIN DALE: It’s lunatic.