Osborne takes a leaf out of Gordon Brown's bluffer's guide to budget speeches

If George Osborne's objective yesterday was to pack so much detail into his spending review statement and rattle through it so quickly that no one had time to take much of it in, it must be heralded as a great success: clearly he learnt a lot from having to listen to so many budget speeches by Gordon Brown.

Reading so quickly means that you can't help stumbling on a few words here and there, and makes it too much of a risk to look up from your script very often or for longer than a split second or two. So all Mr Osborne was able to manage were slight glances away about once every 34 words.

On the three occasions when David Cameron raised his right had to his mouth, I couldn't help wondering whether he was trying to hide or suppress a yawn. And there were a number of moments when it began to look as though Nick Clegg was about to nod off, if he hadn't already done so.

As an exercise, you might like have a go at watching this 3 minute sequence through to the end and then try jotting down all the key points you can remember from it ....

Twittering journalists: the much followed reluctant followers

Earlier today, I followed a link on Twitter via @MartinShovel (to whom thanks) that led me to FRIENDorFOLLOW, a useful resource that enables you to tell at a glance which of the people you're 'following' on Twitter are (or are not) following you.

Although I 'follow' quite a number of journalists, it had never occurred to me to check on which of them might be following me. Quite a while ago, however, I'd noticed a couple of things about the way they use Twitter:
  1. They do quite a lot of 'chatting' between themselves.
  2. They don't seem to make as much use of the RT function on Twitter (even between themselves) as many of the other people I follow.
Inspired by FRIENDorFOLLOW, I've just done a bit of research into how journalists are using Twitter. Although they're very keen on tweeting news of their latest articles, broadcasts and blogs, they're not very keen at all on 'following' others.

'Follow' : 'Follower' ratios
The results from ten randomly selected British journalists can be inspected in the table below, from which you'll see that, in absolute numbers, Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer is the most diligent 'follower' - though the 262 people he 'follows' only amount to 2.2% of his 12,810 followers.

Top score on this ratio goes to Steve Richards of The Independent, who follows 4.8% of his 1,806 followers. Bottom score is BBC political editor Nick Robinson, who only follows 1 person (@WilHarris, who describes himself as a 'Recovering journalist. Certified media addict. Alleged entrepreneur').

Journalist

Follows

Followers

%

Steve Richards (Independent)

Benedict Brogan (Telegraph)

John Rentoul(Independent)

Andrew Rawnsley (Observer)

Paul Mason (BBC)

Jonathan Freedland(Guardian)

Daniel Finkelstein (Times)

Jon Sopel (BBC)

Laura Kuenssberg (BBC)

Nick Robinson (BBC)

87

166

138

262

77

88

75

58

241

1

1,806

4,622

4,733

12,081

4,578

5,744

7,087

6,545

32,505

22,598

4.8

3.6

2.9

2.2

1.7

1.5

1.0

0.9

0.74

0.004


(Thanks to observant journalist Jonathan Freedland for drawing my attention to an error involving a misplaced decimal point that had put Ms Kuenssberg top of the table when it was originally posted. This has now been been corrected).

Who are followed by journalists?
Although more research is needed on this, the initial results came up with the unsurprising finding that the overwhelming majority of those followed by journalists are other journalists, political bloggers and politicians past and present.

So should the rest of us carry on following them if they don't follow us?
This depends entirely on what you want or are hoping to get from Twitter. But I certainly don't have any immediate plans to go into a huff and 'un-follow' all those journalists who are misguided enough not follow me (i.e. most of them) - for a number of reasons:
  1. Following them is an easy way to keep up with what columnists and commentators are saying (except, of course, those hiding behind The Times's paywall).
  2. Sometimes their articles are interesting enough to inflict on your other followers via an RT.
  3. The possibility of using Twitter's @Journalist'sName 'reply' facility means that you're in with a chance of letting them know what you think about what they're saying.
  4. The same facility also means that you can try to draw their attention to your latest blog posts. Most of the time, of course, they take no notice - but you only need an occasional RT from one of them to see a massive increase in the numbers visiting your own blog, some of whom may actually be tempted to become regular readers.
  5. And that's good enough for me.
P.S. More promising numbers:
Since posting this earlier today, I'm grateful to a number of journalists for responding to and/or showing an interest in the above table. Interestingly, all of them score much higher on the Follow:Follower ratio than any of those in Table (1) above.

Matt Roper - @mattjroper - digital news editor of STV is way ahead of the field and is the only journalist I've come across (so far) who follows more people than those who follow him. Earlier in the day, he'd tweeted "Far too many journalists use Twitter to talk rather than listen."

Mr Roper's only serious contender, Neal Mann - @fieldproducer - who also tweeted '..only following a small number really misses the point of Twitter', is another digital specialist - which probably explains why they are both so far ahead of journalists specialising in print and broadcasting media:

Journalist

Follows

Followers

%

Matt Roper (STV)

Neal Mann (Sky News)

Patrick O’Flynn (Express)

Mary Ann Sieghart (Independent)

1,878

1,730

207

266

1,307

2,356

930

1,427

144.0

73.4

22.25

18.6

Clapping out the conference season

Thirty years on since I first got interested in how applause works in speeches, I'm still adding gems to my collection of video clips. This year's star exhibit came when the accountability of clapping (or not) became headline news with David Miliband's reproach to Harriet Harman for applauding his brother's declaration that something she'd voted for was wrong.



It reminded me of a fascinating moment from the Thatcher era, when the accountability of not applauding in the right places was highlighted by Peter Snow in a Newnight interview with Francis Pym:



Viewing applause as 'anthropologically strange
When people ask me how I came to do the research that changed my life (see Our Masters' Voices and the Claptrap saga, links to which are listed HERE), my answer is that I was merely trying to follow one of the central pieces of methodological advice from the founders of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

According to them, the starting point for escaping from the limitations of the hypotehetico-deductive model of science that had held (and continues to hold) sociology and psychology back was to follow the maxim: try to view the familiar and the ordinary as 'anthropologically strange', no matter how mundane it may be.

To give you an idea of what this means (and by way of bringing my posts on this year's conference season to a suitable close) I've spliced together some close-ups of audiences in action over the past few weeks.

Before watching it, imagine that you're a Martian anthropologist. You've just been beamed down to earth on your first mission of exploration, you've arrived in the middle of an audience at a party conference and this is what you see. Then ask yourself what, if anything, you'd make of what members of this alien species are doing:


A research project?
If, having watched it, you're wondering why it ends with an artificially extended sequence of Michael Gove in action, it's because I think there might be something going on here worth further examination. Having watched it several times (!), I get the impression that there could be a connection between his eye-blinking and the rhythm of his hand movements.

As it happens, I have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue it further. But if anyone else can be bothered, I'd be fascinated to know what, if anything, you come up with.

This year's conference season posts: