This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer however shows an increase in trust in the media in key parts of the world. Given the usually low trust in journalists and media, this is unusual.

I think there are two explanations. This year’s rise was alongside a significant decrease in trust in both government and financial institutions in particular – because of the current economic climate and perceived lack of political will to deal with things like the eurozone crisis and bankers bonuses. In that context, the serious media is seen as having done a good job in explaining what’s going on at a turbulent time and even holding some, including their own, to account.

However, at a deeper level, I think we are seeing A Tale of Two Media (excuse the continuing Dickens analogies). Historically, many mass media companies combined entertainment and serious information – in tabloid press, weekly magazines or TV. In the digital environment, those functions are separating out. Increasingly the tabloid press, for example, are seen as being in the entertainment business, rather than the news business. As such, trust is less of an issue. The serious end of the news business (The FT, New York Times, BBC) is seen as doing a trustworthy and responsible job. Some still sit on the fence – but even there the strains are showing. The Daily Mail website is very popular, but definitely in the entertainment sector. The traditional paper is a different, non digital, brand.  

The problem is that the entertainment end makes money – and the serious end loses money. With the combined products breaking down and revenues atomising there is a real question about the viability of serious news. In the past it was subsidised by revenues from business, sport or other activities or simply by prosperous owners seeking influence and prestige.

In a niche, fragmented digital environemnt it is hard to see where those subsidies can come from in future. Perhaps media  shareholders need to rediscover a little of Dickens social conscience (that’s the last reference I promise). Instead of demanding higher and higher returns (as happened in the US for example leading to the collapse of some regional papers) they might want to take note of another conclusion from the Edelman Trust barometer:  the public increasingly expect business to play a positive social role – and in their mind, the  licence to operate may depend on it.

*(Disclosure: News International is an Edelman client)

First, Frederic Filloux, from his weekly newsletter, the Monday Note, looks at the wide variety of pay experiments for news and which ones seem to be working. He also takes a perceptive tilt at the likely 2012 fortues of some big tech brands.

Second. my Edelman colleague David Armano has been telling the Harvard Business Review about six social media trends for 2012 – convergence, influence, gamification and more.

Google has released its annual Zeitgeist list of most popular search terms for 2011 giving us an untarnished view of what has been on our collective minds. I can honestly say I havn’t searched for any of the top terms in any category – but I’m not sure what that says about me. How about you? (Nice video too)

And speaking of video, here’s a good one of Forrester’s George Colony , apeaking at LeWeb 2011, on three social thunderstorms that are approaching next year. He sees a  ”post-social web” that will see social web applications evolve to deliver “more efficient, easier to use, higher value-to-time ratios”.

I’ll update if I spot more before the break…

Last night she gave a lecture at Oxford University looking at trust and the media – specifically after this year’s phone hacking scandals. It was an uncompromising look at the arguments in favour of press freedom, and the rights and responsibilities of institutions and individuals with regard to free expression and privacy. She concluded with a call for greater transparency – and regulation of – media process, but not of content. An elegant way around  one of the core dilemmas in the current debate about the role of the media and specifically the tabloid press.

“Journalists, editors and proprietors could be required to declare their interests (like others in positions of influence). They could be required to list payments made to informants and payments and favours received in relation to specific stories (where relevant without naming recipients or sources). They could be required to make such transactions explicit in company accounts. The media have often been keen on transparency for others with power or influence, and what is sauce for political geese is surely also sauce for media ganders.”

It’s hard to argue against the view that the media should live by the standards to which they hold others to account. Her full remarks are worth reading. Just as she did 9 years ago – there’s a sense Onora O’Neill may have once again set the terms of the debate.

(Disclosure, News International is an Edelman client. I am a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism which hosted the debate.)

There has been a spate of books making similar arguments. Joe Nye, from Harvard, argues in The Future of Power that the very meaning of power and politics is changed by distributed information, social media and mobile data. Former British diplomat Carne Ross in The Leaderless Revolution suggests that many people feel powerless over the issues that affect them directly and governments incresingly are losing influence over global problems.

Like Heather Brooke, he suggests we might be headed towards some kind of pan-national networked democracy (which sounds a little too much like the Paris Commune to me.)

Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion  reaffirms his place as the leading cyber-skeptic suggesting the web may strengthen repressive regimes as much as undermine them and that many in the west are too optimistic about the web’s potential to achieve good. 

Then we have a host of books on Wikileaks – from the new biography of Julian Assange to the Guardian’s version of partnering with him over the Iraq cables to the memoirs of one of the Wikileaks team.

There are others. The point is, there is a growing recognition of how fundamentally our structures of power and society are being changed by technology – that digital opportunity is running ahead of our ability to assimilate it.

It is more than simply cool ways to communicate with friends and colleagues – it goes the the foundations of how we organise ourselves and our expectations of social, corporate and political life.  But as another in the audience at Chatham House pointed out – it was probably the same as people went through the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution. It just takes time to adjust to the new.

Charlie Beckett has discussed the implications of this on The Guardian’s Comment is Free site:

The pressure to be instantly live is intense. Scoops are now measured in micro-seconds as editors seek desperately to become the public’s “go to” channel or platform for instant history. If you are a second behind the competition then Google will have sent the searchers to a rival’s website….It’s crazy that with such a planned, predictable news event that seconds should matter. I realise that in these extraordinarily competitive times and with such a massively popular story, that this will probably be the case. But in a world of super-abundant and unreliable media communications, I still hope that it is not frantic formula but the process of verification that wins in the end.

I think it shows more than the intense pressure to be first with the news – and the vulnerability of accuracy as a consequence. I think it reveals how traditional news methods and processes (pre-preparing print and broadcast pieces for either verdict) are no longer fit for purpose in the digital age. Public expectations of instant and accurate information have outstripped analogue medias ability to deliver them. And their clumsiness in getting it wrong pulls back the curtain on arcane processes which will have surprised many – like the Wizard of Oz hiding behind his curtain.

In other words, traditional media and time honoured practise has been shown up as inadequate in the face of technology and rising public expectations. And once again, Twitter was a better source of information than some news channels and newspapers.

 ”Their sites will have editorial independence, but the news outlets will share content, co-produce coverage of some news events and have “integrated bureaus” in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, “ABC News has historically languished low on the list of major news brands in terms of Web traffic,” notes Brian Stelter, “but the tie-up with Yahoo may help change that.” ABC News calls the deal “a game changer.”

As Rafat Ali (disclosure – he works with Edelman) ” Every year or two, Yahoo! News does a “major tie-up”, every few it disappears into ether. Why will it be different this time?” He cites previous announcements about partnerships between Yahoo! News and the Huffington Post, Gawker, Current TV, Gannett, and two previous deals with ABC!

The theory behind this kind of announcement is a digital company partnering with a traditional media company – Yahoo needs the video content and programming of ABC, ABC News needs the digital footprint of yahoo in the US. It ought to be a fair exchange that works for both of them. The problem with these kinds of announcements (and believe me I have announced plenty of them in the past myself!) is they are easier in theory than practise.

Editorial cultures, brand issues, ownership, first use issues, rights, the difficulty of making savings and not increasing costs to exploit the opportunity.. can all conspire to make reality substantially less than theory. And too often, having taken the PR boost of the announcement, the energy to push through the practical detail evaporates.

On the other hand – unlike Rafat – I think this one might work for the US. It’s a great example of Traditional and Digital (or Hybrid as Edelman calls them) working together to jointly exploit more of the new media landscape. It’s becoming clearer that, structured in the right way, digital media and traditional media are complementary and don’t need to cannibalise each other. And both Yahoo! and ABC need a significant boost in their markets – so the motivation to make this one real (unlike  others in the past) is significant.

UPDATE: See Harvard’s Nieman Lab analysis here.

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party Conference this week has attracted a mixed and lukewarm response - perhaps unfairly. This wasn’t a pre-election, rouse the crowd moment – there’s another three or four years to dig in. But it was a moment to start to differentiate himself and his party from the government – and his message achieved that. He started to draw clear lines around Labour’s values and priorities which will feed into the arguments and policies to come.

For followers of Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer, (which showed how the financial crisis has undermined trust in governm,ent as well as city institutions) it was unsurprising that he put Trust on Economic policy front and centre:

 “The Labour party lost trust on the economy and under my leadership we will regain that trust. I am determined to prove to you that the next Labour government will only spend what it can afford.”

And a look at his script is also enlightening for anyone who has to deliver a keynote speech. Simple one line sentences – nearly all below ten words and on average about five words. Point by simple point building his argument. Self-deprecating, carefully paced, building to moments of emphasis and passion (whether you agree with him or not).

Of course he, and the other leaders, have some of the best scriptwriters and message-crafters working for them – the three annual conferences give communication professionals a chance to watch and learn.

“The psychological profile of a compelling leader — think of tech pioneers like Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Steven P. Jobs — is also that of the compulsive risk-taker, someone with a high degree of novelty-seeking behavior.  In short, what we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex or drugs.”

It’s to do with our brains craving dopamine, triggered by unpredictable rewards. It’s a view unwittingly reinforced in an interview with Tony Blair in the pop culture magazine, Word (we are all entitled to entertainment). Here the former Prime Minister says leadership is often about risk taking – being prepared to take the difficult decision and accept risk for reward and achievement. It sounds as if he was in need of a dopamine hit from time to time as well.

A slightly different creative perspective was offered by the new Head of the MIT Media Lab in Boston, Joi Ito, in a profile in the Financial Times.

“MIT’s Media Lab has produced commercial products from the E-Ink used in Kindle reading devices to the Guitar Hero video game and Lego Mindstorms, as well as advances in medicine and prosthetics. It has provided a home for some of the most provocative work on digital convergence and digital lifestyles.”

He points to two factors in providing successful leadership for this kind of innovation. Getting smart people from diverse backgrounds to collaborate on undirected research  - but within a practical framework. What makes it successful is building models and staying close to the real world. “Intuition is vital in management and you get your intuition from the field…you won’t succeed unless you understand the content of your business”

Finally, one of the world’s most successful editors, David Remnick of The New Yorker, is interviewed in a new magazine, Port. He attributes his success to simple, old-fashioned, relentless hard work; being obsessed with getting it right, which sets the standards for others to follow.

Hard work, obsession, intuition and understanding your business – more conventional but perhaps more reliable guides for leadership than dopamine addiction?

This was initially greeted as a bold move likely to support the case for ending the courts growing tendency to issue all encompassing injunctions – but of course within a day or two the tide turned. Led by Private Eye’s Editor, Ian Hislop, Andrew is now accused of being a hypocrite for working as a journalist and seeking an injunction. Increasingly it is suggested he should no longer have his political interview show at the weekends as he’s compromised in asking politicians about their private lives. (A view well encapsulated by Charlie Beckett of Polis).

Surely, there is wrongheadedness here. There is a difference between public and personal lives and between matters of public importance as opposed to public prurience. Of course affairs are newsworthy – they sell newspapers because the public enjoy reading about them. But that doesn’t mean they are important except to the individuals and families involved. Some super-injunctions may be preventing the press from reporting matters of genuine public importance – but they are also used as almost the only means of fending off invasive and damaging purience into personal matters of no public interest. The issue here is the lack of a sensible Privacy Law which allows that distinction to be properly made.

Hugh Tomlinson QC recently blogged at The Guardian about the way ahead for a Privacy Law. To my layman’s eyes it seems the current criteria around a “reasonable expectation of privacy” is too broad and too subjective to be of much help. In the meantime, progress is caught in a tangle with European legislation and the Human Rights Act.

However, I don’t agree that just because Andrew Marr sought to protect his family and others from harmful and intrusive publicity about an affair it means he is disqualified from asking poltiicans or others about matters of genuine public importance. The two are not the same, even if the law, or media chatter, is unable to differentiate sufficiently between them.

Points to note: clear division of responsiblities with a corporate level co-ordinating function allowed swift response, management of the local crisis, the medium and longer term impacts effectively and in parallel; a separate focus on business needs and local human needs of the workforce; organising local workforce and mangement in teams and shifts to manage stress and fatigue – all hands on deck is fine for 24 hours, but can’t be sustained for longer.

Sony emerged in good shape amidst the extraordinary destruction. This was in part down to  luck – but also thanks to clear strong leadership.