Three Chords

I’m a cycling geek. I love it: the romance of the road; the century of history; the epic duels; the famous climbs. It’s a sport not without its scandals but still markedly different from the world of primadonna footballers with fans shelling out hundreds of pounds just to watch a match.

I’m also a journalism geek. I work for a newspaper and have been interested in publishing and writing since I was a kid. Similarly, it’s an industry that’s been in the spotlight lately for all the wrong reasons. I’d like to explore the perhaps surprising parallels between these two seemingly-unrelated worlds.

Nostalgia and the “golden age”

Cycling has already had its day, if you believe the cynics and traditionalists. The Tour de France, cycling’s grand spectacle, used to be much harder than it is today, with average distances almost a thousand miles longer than the current race length back in the 1960s. Riders back then couldn’t rely on in-ear radios and mics with constant feedback from their support teams: they had to read the race tactically and respond with bravery, panache and judgement, rather than be told when to make their move. Equipment was less complex, with things like skinsuits, aerodynamic helmets (or even helmets altogether) and tri-bars yet to be dreamed up for use on the road.

If you believe certain hoary old reporters, the same is true of journalism. These days, of course, there’s no traditional “shoe leather” journalism: it’s all reported via Twitter or, god forbid, “crowdsourced” from “citizen journalists”. Back in my day, they say, we didn’t have SEO and analytics: we had to learn the knack of finding a good story ourselves. And there was no email, no YouTube, no tweeting…

Scandal and cheats

Cycling has been infamous of late for its doping stories: Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace is well-documented and other riders have suffered less mainstream but equally dramatic public exposures in the past. Some parts of the cycling community still regard all professional riders as cheats through-and-through, casting suspicion on any successful rider who claims to be “clean”.  New and advanced techniques for escaping the eyes of the drug control testers are constantly appearing, with evidence that it’s been going on for years unchecked.

Journalism too has been airing its dirty laundry in public: phone hacking and its subsequent media farce has uncomfortable parallels with the Armstrong story: dozens of lackeys forced under the bus to hide the affairs of the senior figures; televised courtroom confessionals; the closure of publications (just as cycling teams were left without sponsors or equipment). A public who used to think only politicians were “all liars” now think the same of journalists, too. Seedy back-room collaborations with officials were rife in both worlds and laws set up to attempt to govern the misdeeds were quickly derided as toothless and irrelevant.

Technology and spirit

As manufacturing and digital tech develops, cycling has changed dramatically: the rulemakers have to enforce arbitrary weight limits on ever-more-lightweight bike frames, and teams increasingly dominate through their mastery of data and communications. Team Sky (already helping make the link between the worlds of cycling and journalism more explicit) have been criticised for their dominance of the sport but reliance on data to win races, with bitter rivals complaining that they’re not riding in the spirit of the race, but instead focusing more on their power meters than their competitors’ legs.

Likewise, journalism has been shaken by the arrival of new tech, with the more canny organisations quickly cottoning on to the best ways to attract eyeballs to their content. The cynical manipulations of SEO and linkbaiting aren’t worlds apart from the rider with both eyes on his power meter, knowing exactly what numbers he has to hit to climb the mountain the quickest. Increasingly, the news organisations stubbornly sticking with print and insisting those who innovate digitally are digging themselves into a hole are becoming  harder to take seriously.

Revolution?

In both industries, the wheels keep spinning (if you’ll pardon the pun). Cycling has had its watershed moment: riders are more conscious than ever that they’re in the public eye and they’re less able to get away with cheating. Similarly, journalists are more exposed than ever, with an audience frequently reminding them that they’re under scrutiny and potentially replaceable.

Cycling used to be a peasant’s sport, but now the best teams are the richest teams with the strongest commitment to data and analysis. That might not always be the case. In a stage race like the Tour, teams with a strong squad like Sky can dominate by sheer force of strength, but all it takes is a rouleur like Jens Voigt to blaze ahead and disrupt everything, adding a dash of excitement to proceedings and underscoring the point that ultimately, pro cycling is about courage, grit and showmanship.

Journalism, then, is at risk of becoming dominated by the numbers game too. In a climate where profits and losses are more crucial than ever, it’s tempting to dump the non-commercial sections and prioritise “viral” content to max out on monthly uniques. This won’t prevent a flyaway blogger or disruptive newcomer from stirring things up, though, and nor should it.

It’s also key to recognise that nostalgia is a fool’s errand. Riders in the days of Simpson and Merckx were doping too, albeit without today’s sophistication. Advances in equipment shouldn’t be ignored: they aren’t racing in a vacuum. Likewise journalists harking back to the glory days of print and sounding off about the internet “killing journalism” need to look at the bigger picture again.

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The best stages of the Tour are the mountains: the sheer, grinding effort; the constant possibility that a leading contender might cave in and drop out of the race; the unpredictable young challengers rising up to overtake the seasoned pros. And after the climb comes the descent: not everyone can handle that relentless speed, either. But the ones who can: they’re the winners, it’s in their DNA. As journalists, we need to climb that mountain too, but we also need to be ready to move with speed and urgency when we’ve made it to the top if we want to pull on the yellow jersey.

A few months ago I was approached by John Mair of the University of Northampton who’d attended my class at the Guardian’s Digital Journalism masterclass. He asked me if I’d be up for speaking at a mini-conference for journalism students titled “Imagine journalism in ten years’ time”. I went along and presented my thoughts, along with a brilliant set of speakers: my former colleague Judith Townend, now finishing a PhD at City; Andy Dickinson, lecturer in journalism at UCLAN; Teodora Beleaga, Insights Analyst at KBM Group EU, and Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, who joined us via Skype. The event was chaired by former BBC editor Kevin Marsh.

This blogpost is a writeup of the ideas I rattled off in my fifteen minute talk. Judith and Andy have also shared their presentations, both of which were extremely interesting and well-presented — go and check theirs out, too!

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A caveat to begin with: this kind of thing is difficult. Trying to anticipate the future is almost always an exercise in futility. Let’s start by looking backwards: what world did we live in ten years ago?

It’s 2003: Facebook and Twitter are just twinkles in the eyes of Silicon Valley. Google’s dominance of the entire information sector is mostly limited to search. No iPhone, Android or any other true smartphone. News websites are growing but not eclipsing print yet. Burgers were still made out of beef.

Today we live in a world where news stories break in seconds and the first people to report on them often aren’t journalists. Young people no longer buy newspapers but get their information from their social networks. The most profitable technology companies are the ones with the most information stored and capacity to use it. A huge proportion of society uses mobile computing as their primary or secondary device.

Trying to anticipate this all over again is challenging, but not impossible. It’s tempting to imagine that a decade from now we’ll all be using some revolutionary new device or app, living in virtual reality, that kind of thing. The reality is perhaps a bit less “futuristic”: the things that will dominate the year 2023 are probably already with us now, or at least, the seeds of their conception.

The journalism industry is in a strange place at the moment. An optimist might describe it like a phoenix about to burn to ashes, shortly to be reborn in a blaze of glory. A pessimist might describe it as just being burnt to ashes.

What’s certain is that change — dramatic change — is a constant. The brilliant thing about the web is that it’s levelled communication and collaboration — and it doesn’t wait to ask permission from those it’s making obsolete.

That doesn’t mean to say that in 2023, journalism will be obsolete. I’d argue that it will be even more relevant, perhaps more important than it has ever been. Right now, we’re in the infancy of what I’m creatively calling the “data age”. A decade from now, society will probably look back and laugh at us for the way we willingly surrendered our personal data to Facebook, Google and co, without really worrying. We don’t really appreciate the scale and the scope of what we’re giving away.

Prediction #1: Google and co will still dominate, but the news industry can add value via curation and verification of information.

The dominance of Google, Twitter and Facebook will continue — they’ve laid the groundwork for storing and retrieving all kinds of information, to the point where it’s not financially viable to even consider competing with them. Their monopolisation of the information space means their value lies in being able to do things with that data.

How is this relevant to journalism? Well: isn’t that all journalism really is: doing things with data? You don’t have to be writing about government statistics or financial scandals to be working alongside information: especially the “social” information Facebook specialises in.

This means that by 2023, large news companies need to offer something that Google and co can’t or won’t: human curation. Google pride themselves on the power of their algorithms: computational functions which decide the importance of various bits of data. Introducing human judgement into the process would be an admission of failure in their eyes; a weak link in the chain.

You can’t automate all journalism, though (but that won’t stop people trying). In a world where things are reported almost in real time, the problem of 2023 will be information overload. Actually, I’ll correct that: the problem of 2013 is information overload. By 2023 journalism should have fixed that problem. I can’t possibly keep up with everything that’s posted on Twitter, nor do I want to. Good journalism can find the story there, work out what’s relevant to me, and show me the parts I want to see.

This means, then, that the real value of future journalism is in verification, curation, and access. Even today when news is broken by “citizen journalists”, people openly speculate about the truth of the story until it’s “confirmed” by the mainstream press. A gas plant exploded up the road from my flat a few years ago and Twitter was the first thing I turned to for news: the papers didn’t cover it for almost 24 hours but in that period, Twitter “witnesses” had variously labelled it a tube train accident, an electricity failure, a gas explosion and a terrorist attack. The papers, when they got around to reporting it, had access to the right people and institutions and were able to get to the source of what had actually happened. In a future full of armchair experts, the journalism of 2023 can cut through the information density to show us what’s truthful.

Prediction #2: we’ll see sharper, more focused journalism.

One thing we’ll see in 2023 is sharper, more focused journalism. Gone are the days when newspapers were all things to all people. In a world where the news was hand-delivered to your door every morning, shipped to your town or village from the busy printing press every night, it made sense that your newspaper told you the news, but also the weather, the TV listings, the best new films and culture, and the football results. These days it’s getting harder to argue for that monopoly: in 2023 it’ll be gone. It’s already becoming unlikely that a single publication can provide the majority of content its readers consume. People are used to shopping around for the things they want to read, especially when much of it is free online. Larger publications might have to scale back to be leaner and more specific to the most loyal or profitable parts of their audience.

Similarly, because the concept of a “physical” newspaper is already in decline, by 2023, a general-purpose print newspaper will be a kind of luxury or “boutique” product, a bit like bands today still putting out their records on vinyl or even cassette: aimed at specialist, even hobbyist followers with niche interests. The upshot of this is that the “narrative” of a daily paper is completely removed: nobody will read the entire day’s news and features.

Again, even today this is already the case: every weekday the Guardian publishes enough words to fill the average Tolstoy novel. Newspaper websites can no longer rely on all their visitors being “Guardian readers” or “Daily Mail readers”: traffic will largely come from referrals via search and social networks where readers are less interested in the specific brand of the newspaper they’re reading as the content of that news itself. This is great news if you’re a journalist but perhaps less great if you’re a newspaper company.

Prediction #3: (some) journalists and their networks become more valuable and powerful than newspaper organisations.

This means that the real value for newspapers of the future are journalists with a strong network who know how to promote their own content. In the past, less popular editorial content was buoyed up by virtue of its inclusion in the larger body of a popular publication. In the future, individual journalists will become more empowered to own their content from production through to publication and promotion: you don’t need a printing press any more to be a journalist, but a decade from now, you might not even need the newspaper company.

Prediction #4: hardware becomes even more fragmented; networks will be always-on.

Hardware is another interesting area: while we probably won’t be strapping on headsets and goggles to view augmented reality eight-dimensional newspapers, we will certainly be using handheld, portable computers as our main entrypoints to the web. It’ll be a given to consumers of the future that the content they read follows them from device to device, seamlessly. Leave the house and read half an article on the bus, then get to work and carry on from the same paragraph on a desktop computer. Similarly, we’ll always be connected: the days when we had to stand, arm outstretched, in a field in Glastonbury just to send a text will be long gone. Fast 4G (or better) signal will be a given, even underground or in the sky.

In relation to this web of devices, the role of digital editors will evolve to become much more data-focused: specifically metadata about content itself. No more will journalists battle with CMSs to arrange pixels on screens to tell the day’s news. Instead they’ll focus on providing context and guidance to algorithms and functions which can in turn lay out pages for a variety of screens, devices and other contexts — automatically. In a world where the concept of a single template for a page of content is almost completely impossible to define, we’ll focus our energies on automating what we can’t keep up with manually.

The always-on connectedness of the future means that breaking news will become a kind of arms race: some publications will choose to end hostilities altogether. News companies will have to choose between chasing breaking news and competing against less scrupulous sources who don’t wait to verify or confirm stories, or accepting they’ll never beat the social networks and instead focusing on in-depth analysis, verification and comment. Newspapers were originally created to tell people what had been happening: the future won’t need them for that any more. This gives journalism a unique opportunity to act not only as the voice of record, but the voice of response.

Prediction #5: readers will replace editors (in some capacities)

Will the journalism of the future need editors any more? The great democratisation of the web means that users are becoming commissioner, interviewer and reporter. Sites like reddit offer an “Ask Me Anything” section where members of the public, celebrities, and, occasionally, sitting presidents of the USA turn up to ask questions submitted by reddit users. This community is self-organising: reddit’s staff didn’t create it and they don’t police it. Users suggest interesting topics or people to talk about; users submit questions and vote for the ones they like best; users step up to answer questions where they’ve had interesting jobs or experiences. Users do the investigative work when a dubious source appears, often tracking down internet history to prove or disprove a particularly bold claim. They’re doing the jobs of journalists without knowing it. Reddit gets over four billion pageviews every month.

In this kind of environment it becomes harder to justify the inner circle of privileged people who control the day’s new agenda. Power is transferring away from institutions and directly onto content. The internet today is becoming a tapestry of connected links, with traffic crossing and diverging from every thread. Individual nodes on that graph attract readers and revenue, but those nodes are pieces of content, not entire publications.

Prediction #6: models of content become much more web-first and driven by information

The model of that content is also likely to be dramatically different in the future. For an industry claiming to be “digital first”, much of the production work is still rooted in print. Newspaper websites use clunky content management systems to dump lengthy blocks of text into boxes, add a few tags and then press “Publish”. In the future this will be exposed as dumb and unhelpful. Even today, forward-thinking news organisations are looking at how to re-model news to show its narrative: the articles that cover a specific event; the events that happen as part of a larger story; the importance and tone of these stories against other things currently occurring.

In ten years’ time there’ll be a much reduced concept of the “atomic unit of news”. Articles will no longer have a single, one-size-fits-all form. We’ll tailor content automatically to different audiences: the reader who has five minutes before their train arrives; the reader with half an hour on their lunch break; the reader who’s an expert on this topic and doesn’t need the context; the reader who’s never heard of Oscar Pistorius and needs background. These newly-modelled articles can show you what’s new since you last visited; show you the key events in the sequence; cut out the paragraphs of “explainers” you already read in the four previous articles.

Prediction #7: digital advertising will never replace print advertising in terms of revenue.

Digital advertising as a revenue source will perhaps never replace print advertising in terms of scale. The future of ad-supported journalism is therefore at stake: it seems unlikely that it can continue a decade from now. This could mean that all large publications eventually put up some form of paywall, but I think the trend in free digital products on the web will continue and the news industry will eventually conclude that it can never reproduce the model it had in the print days and find alternate revenue streams. Advertising will be much more focused and quality-over-quantity than it is today: even in the age of Facebook advertising where brands can aim their ads at ever-more-specific niche audiences, we still see newspaper website lumbering with dozens of unrelated and irrelevant ads. In the future there might only be one ad on the page, but it’ll be the one most likely to engage you.

Prediction #8: user comments “below the line” become tamed (or neutered)

Reader interaction with papers could transform hugely: most newspapers today offer comment sections for readers to respond, and these are currently becoming fairly polarising among journalists, many of whom have called for comments to be disabled on their articles. We’ve also seen the rise of Twitter users being charged for contempt of court, with a gradual understanding coming into place that the “free speech” of the web isn’t always as free as we think. Newspapers of the future may decide to revert back to a one-way form of communication, moderating all responses via the equivalent of the “letters page”, rather than opening things up as a free-for-all.

Prediction #9: we’ll learn how to “scale” journalism.

There’s a term in software development called “scalability”: it refers to the ability of the software in question to expand outwards to satisfy increasing demands. In software terms it means writing efficient code which doesn’t put unnecessary strain on servers, and also the ability to deploy code into “the cloud”, meaning that in times of high traffic, we can quickly add more server capacity to cope with the extra load.

By this definition, journalism as we know it today doesn’t scale. To put it in software terms, it’s a “legacy product”. Once, it was feasible to have journalists around the world in various bureaux, each reporting on their patch and filing copy over the wires. The day’s news was assembled in one location and sent off to the printers, who then shipped it around the country while the nation slept.

Today, though, this approach is no longer scalable. More and more of the world is becoming “connected”: where once an Egyptian revolution would’ve been covered by foreign correspondents, we’re now seeing local citizens tweet minute-by-minute accounts. The notion of a newspaper reporting events from 12 hours or more ago seems laughable in this information age: it’s old news. The physical labour and financial burden of shipping newsprint around the world seems archaic and quaint. The old mechanisms can no longer scale to meet the challenges of modern journalism.

Luckily for us, though, the means of upscaling the news are already here — we don’t have to wait for the future. Where once an investigative reporter had to sift through six thousand documents to find the three important ones, now they can work with data scientists to find the stuff that really matters: or even open it up to their audience. This doesn’t devalue journalists: in fact, it gives them more value because they have the ultimate say in what goes and what doesn’t. They have the specialist knowledge of the subject, whereas the crowd of assistants might simply recognise something juicy and pass it on.

Prediction #10: there will still be journalism in ten years’ time.

This period of change that we’re in now is a perilous time for those old structures: it’s hard to see how we get to this utopian future of curation, automation and, well, profitability. Nobody feels confident enough to make the first move and every mis-step is branded a failure. Journalism is too important to be tied down to nostalgia and traditionalism

I’m definitely a believer in the phoenix-from-the-ashes analogy, though: the internet may herald the death of many “offline” traditions and methodologies, but it also ushers in a thousand new ones, each with massive possibilities for change and engagement, in ways impossible even a decade ago.

Our choice as journalists is simple: we can lament the “death of journalism” as the things we once knew become a legacy, or we can feel reinvigorated by the possibility of what’s just around the corner.

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Endnotes: I’m much indebted to the work of C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky for their fantastic Post-Industrial Journalism, which I read midway through preparing these ideas and finished feeling like I’d have to throw everything out and start again. Also thanks to Theresa Malone at the Guardian for letting me bounce some of these ideas off her, as well as offering me feedback and even reading the damned thing of her own volition (unlike my long-suffering partner Maddy who was forced to listen to me read it out).

Here are some things I saw in Paris on a recent trip. I really enjoyed the weekend and found it a beautiful and fascinating place, and these are some of the moments which stood out to me as different or unexpected. Positive or negative, they’ll stay with me as memories.

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On the Metro, taking line 12 through Jules Joffrin station, looking out of the window to see two homeless people lying at the far end of the station. A man and a woman, they were both surrounded by a huge array of equipment: blankets, sleeping bags, boxes, bags, containers. The man was asleep surrounded by his things and looked like he’d been there for a long time (days, weeks, more). The woman drank from a fizzy drink can and maintained eye contact with me the entire time we passed through the station.

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The Eiffel tower, lit up “like a vajazzle”, after the laser light show was done at the end of the night. Why on earth did Paris’s rulers decide turning one of the world’s most famous structures into a giant disco ball was a good idea?

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Sitting in an almost apologetically bad fast food place opposite Gare du Nord, exhausted after a day of carrying a heavy bag around Montmarte and still with two hours to kill before the train. Laughing at the succession of people trying to enter the restaurant via sealed-shut emergency exit door, until one man stood swaying like a zombie in front of it, eyes blank. He then appeared in front of our table minutes later, young and unblinking, simply holding his hand out wordlessly for money. He shuffled away and was gone like our appetites.

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Young, attractive Parisians in a tucked-away wine bar in the 1st arrondissement, eating expensive cheese carelessly from the end of sharp knives. The perspiring waitress taking our wine order in terms of how many Euros we wanted to spend. A mid-thirties Frenchwoman gently mocking me in English when I pretended to understand her friendly aside and she overheard my “dunno” when Maddy asked me what she’d said. Drunk on good wine we didn’t know the name of.

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Casually throwing ourselves into the Metro with the cocksure confidence of Londoners abroad only to find ourselves struggling to locate the exit (any exit) in Chatelet station, as we circle around the warren-like tunnels following multiple conflicting signs marked Sortie.

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Turning off the buzzing Rue de Rivoli, like a French Oxford Street, into a silent court with enormous wooden doors, to find our Airbnb accommodation peaceful, quiet and wonderful.

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Snarling “non!” with rapidly-increasing annoyance at persistent and aggressive trinket sellers surrounding the park below Sacré Coeur, whose stalking and surrounding forced us to unwillingly ascend the hundreds of steep concrete steps to the summit, rather than linger amid their desperate salesmanship as we decided how best to reach the top in comfort.

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Pacing around Saint-Germain on a Friday night looking for a bar that wasn’t a restaurant, stumbling upon the perfect candidate, only to hear loud Brits abroad braying from the outdoor seating and reminding us guiltily of our hypocrisy. Finding somewhere much better instead.

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Noting the succession of scam artists surrounding the Eiffel tower playing variations on the three cups game, with each “winner” receiving their €200 note with blank-faced “delight”. Each player was by sheer co-incidence the same ethnicity as the ruddy-faced eastern European gamesmaster so bravely grinning despite his losses.

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Nipping into a mini supermarket to buy coffee to find it stocking a better selection of cheeses than many British fromageries.

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Watching six dozen tourists fight one another for elbow space so they could take photos of the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass and two security guards. For the first time in my life, I see people turning their backs to great artworks to take self-shots of themselves with a classic in the background.

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Going for breakfast in the café from Amelie and despite our attempts at being subtle fans on a homage, feeling our cover completely blown by the multiple Japanese couples each performing a full-scale photoshoot complete with professional-grade SLRs all over the venue.

In moments of downtime I think about that Paul Graham post about frighteningly ambitious startup ideas; specifically the part  about generating ideas:

One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations. And I’m pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

I love speculating on this topic (what will completely baffle our descendants when examining us?). I often cite things like smoking (“wait, why did people in 2013 keep smoking even after they knew how much it damaged their lungs?”), manual control cars (“seriously, anybody was allowed to just get inside a fast, powerful machine? Even if they’d been drinking? And they could drive it down public streets without control?!”) and others as my theories about the future. One thing I started thinking about recently was how all of this relates to politics.

In the UK (and probably most countries using our parliamentary model), MPs were elected as representatives of a given area, and they’d go to Westminster (or wherever the seat of government was located) to vote on issues and pass laws. Every couple of years, the populace was able to vote on their representative and choose someone they thought best reflected their wishes on local issues, as well as national.

When I think about how the world of the future will regard us in, let’s say, 60 years’ time, I keep coming back to this: they’ll wonder why it took us so long to realise that we’d built a global communications system covering almost every home (wait a couple more years, maybe). They’ll wonder why we still turned out to elect someone every four years that we didn’t genuinely believe would reflect our opinions. They’ll wonder why the country’s political decisions were effectively made by an elite of a thousand or so people who were supposed to be representing an entire nation’s citizens.

They’ll wonder why we built things like Facebook and Twitter but it didn’t occur to us to sweep away a government system built for a world where travelling between cities took days, communicating with voters took weeks, and voting on legislation cost millions.

A “Google Government” might be just as bad, but I’m struggling to see how we can continue to make excuses in support of a system that’s become a relic. We could have country-wide referendums on every issue the government debates — no need for electing local representatives if everyone’s got a say; directly. Parliamentary terms could be made up of voluntary committees of the public (like jury service) to set the agenda. Experts from industry and academia could sit on advisory boards to provide public context for votes and debates. The infighting and point-scoring between political parties would become redundant as every vote suddenly became equal.

Of course, this is a naive and pie-in-the-sky theory. I’m nowhere near politically educated enough to work through the implications or implementation of something like this. But I do believe that a century from now, people will wonder what took us so long to iterate once we’d built the tools to replace what was broken.

A colleague today mentioned the newly-announced Edge Conference — an event covering “advanced web technologies for developers and browser vendors”. It’s organised in partnership between the Financial Times’ Labs group, Google, and Facebook.

I opened up the website and scanned through it, quite excited by the premise and the talk schedules. It was only when I scrolled down a little further that I saw this:

I had to go back and check a second time to be sure: 22 speakers, all male. Not a single woman (at the time of writing).

I can’t remember the last time I saw a single-day web conference with this many speakers, which only makes it worse. If they’d featured one woman alongside 21 male speakers, it would’ve been embarrassing. To feature none looks almost deliberate.

The lineup of speakers is brilliant — there’s some of the leading lights of the British web development scene on that list. But none of them are women. Are there no women out there worth a place amongst these 22 web technology experts?

I put this question to Andrew Betts, one of the event’s organisers. He wasn’t happy with my accusation that the conference’s speaker profile was “inexcusable”, though:

@mattpointblank inexcusable is pretty strong. I don't feel need to defend this, but am happy with our process.

January 3, 2013 4:45 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@triblondon

Andrew Betts

I pressed him, asking him if he really didn’t think they were any worthy female speakers to be found. He replied that my argument was a straw man, and that he wouldn’t be “debating” it further. I was massively disappointed (and haven’t heard back since, despite further requests for clarity).

Now, I’ve seen Andrew speak at events before and he’s very good — a talented developer, innovative thinker and all-round nice guy. I don’t for a minute think he’s sexist or deliberately curating an event which doesn’t include any female speakers. His refusal, though, to engage with my (and others‘) concerns about the representation that Edge Conference offers, is a big issue for me.

His comment about being “happy with our process” doesn’t cut it in 2013. I’ve seen excuses from other criticised conference organisers, saying that they couldn’t find any female developers, or the ones they asked didn’t want to speak, or that their specific niche just doesn’t have that many female developers — I don’t think it’s good enough any more.

I don’t know what their selection process was, but if it was me organising it, I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22  possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women.

And, if I’d genuinely been unable to find any women using my mysterious “process”, or all the ones I’d asked weren’t interested, or some freak event meant that any available woman was swept into a hurricane on the day of the conference and would be unable to attend, I would have added a note stating as much, prominently, underneath the pictures of 22 men, not leaving it to attendees to draw their own conclusions about my interest in encouraging equality at developer events.

I appreciate the hard work and often high costs that go into organising a conference. It’s perhaps unfairly easy to pick on developer-focussed events for being overly male in demographics, especially in an industry where female representation is particularly low. The Guardian’s own recent Scale Camp was poorly attended by women, both in terms of speakers and attendees — this stuff is hard.

But with the recent high-profile cancellation of a similar British web development conference with a similarly poor female representation (although only 15 speakers, not 22…), I honestly can’t fathom why anybody organising events in 2013 doesn’t have this stuff tattooed onto their frontal lobe. Look:

Equality? What’s that? MT @katebevan: No women, non-white people or >30yo speaking at this conf. http://t.co/VQb6Iehd (via @technokitten)

January 2, 2013 5:14 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@girlonetrack

Zoe Margolis

(editor’s note: it’s been pointed out that the age-related claims in the above tweet aren’t backed by any known data)

I don’t want to start a Twitter mob or cause a conference to be cancelled. But I do want to know why a well-intentioned group of developers and companies have managed to create an event stunning for its cheap price, its strong technical themes, and its hugely disappointing lack of the most basic diversity — and it won’t even acknowledge there’s a problem.

The Edge Conference tagline states that attendees will “debate what’s broken, and how we can fix it”. I have a suggestion for a topic.

Post-postscript: Andrew and team have posted an FAQ statement on the site after Andrew and I went for a coffee and a chat about this article and the conference. It clarifies a few things I raise here and confirms that the people behind EdgeConf aren’t sexist, women-hating misogynists (as I hope nobody seriously suspected) but perhaps made assumptions that others shared their viewpoints on speaker selection criteria.  Anyone calling for boycotts and cancellations should read this first before engaging angry mob mode on Twitter.

Post-post-postscript (this is getting a bit silly now, isn’t it): There’ve been a few good articles now written in response to my blogpost here and the issue in general:

• Martin Belam wrote an emotive blogpost titled “One day my daughter will ask me how we tolerated this“. I was going to pick out a key quote to summarise but the whole thing is brilliant so just go over there and read it all.
• Kate Bowles wrote a good piece called “Nothing personal“, reflecting on the statement by EdgeConf and her experiences in the academic world with these issues.
• The Atlantic began a campaign kicked off by Rebecca Rosen calling for speakers on all-male conference rosters to “refuse to participate unless there are women on stage with you“. It’s a bold request and while I’m not sure boycotts are always the answer, emphasising that these things are as much about individual responsibility as they are about society-wide concerns is a good point to make.