Just over a month ago, the Guardian launched another one of their many forays into the digital media landscape by embracing Amazon’s Kindle and launching a collection of articles created specifically for the device. The first Guardian Short was called “Phone Hacking: How the Guardian broke the story”, which has now been followed by a commemorative collection of the Guardian’s articles about the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath. Having read both, I will briefly discuss the merits and downsides of the Guardian’s approach.
Phone Hacking: How the Guardian broke the story
This collection, with its rather self-congratulatory title, does exactly what it says on the tin, but does so rather disappointingly. One would have hoped that it would actually offer some insight into how the Guardian broke the story, perhaps relating stories of Nick Davies meeting a deep throat-style mole in a parking garage, but alas, it’s only a collection of stories that were already published in the Guardian and are available free of charge on its website. Since the website even has a special phone hacking section with these and many more of the Guardian’s articles on the subject, it’s hard to see why you would buy a £2.29 ebook to read them. The only non-Guardian addition is a Newsweek article by Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, which is available for free here. In other words, for just over the price of The Observer on Sunday, you get… nothing new.
Moreover, this Guardian Short is a collection of rather dry pieces of writing – important investigative journalism, certainly – but not especially beautifully written or compulsive page-turning material. It’s a shame the ebook falls so flat, because it surely could have been something interesting and worth buying, had there been some original content about the journalism behind the breaking of this story, as was successfully done in the Guardian’s book on the Wikileaks debacle.
9/11: Ten Years On
The second Guardian Short to be released cures at least one of the previous instance’s ills: although this, too, is a collection of stories faithful Guardian readers will have seen before, it is compulsively readable. In “9/11: Ten Years On”, the Guardian does a good job of exhibiting some of the fabulous writing that makes up its pages. Its eyewitness accounts are sharp and moving, as in this excerpt:
“Yards from the panic, a vast concrete girder crashed with a mighty sound not unlike a bomb into Church Street near a group of children, none of the little ones stopping to break their screams or to wonder who or how many were crushed beneath its ruthless weight. It would have been impossible to see anyway, such was the tidal wave of smoke that engulfed the stream of terrified humanity as it ran north, in no direction but away from the towering monsters behind.”
The collection also does a good job of presenting the broader aftermath, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the US Patriot Act, as well as the controversy over ‘the mosque at Ground Zero’ and the death of Bin Laden. Still, the question remains why anyone would shell out their precious pounds to read a collection of articles that they could find for free with a bit of browsing around on the Guardian website. Unless you desperately want to take these stories to the beach, there seems no point in paying for the ebook.
Keep experimenting
We should not, however, discount these attempts by the Guardian as pure folly. It’s commendable that the Guardian is willing to take risks and try out new ideas like this; done right, they could be a success. Yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Guardian was experimenting again, this time with a Twitter account that would tweet the events of 9/11 as if they were happening live. The idea created a backlash online and turned out to be something of a social media faux pas on that most hallowed of days. About an hour after the account started sending out tweets, the Guardian shut it down with the simple message ‘this account of the events is now ending.’
A lot of people were angry at the Guardian for what they perceived as an insensitive move. Perhaps they were right. However, I think we should all keep in mind that their intent was not malicious, and they should be commended for experimenting and trying to make their brand of news have an impact outside the realm of paper. The only way to develop that important new way of covering news online, that one way of achieving the most elusive of online achievements – actual profit – is to try repeatedly, and to brush yourself off with dignity after you’ve fallen.
Because I will be moving to Sheffield this week, it may be a while before another story appears on this blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed or enter your e-mail address on the right-hand side of this page to receive updates when another post appears.
Images courtesy of Flickr users Bernhard Benke and 21TonGiant.
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