GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The hottest media story in Geneva in recent weeks has been about safety in the city, the rising rate of crime, the poor police response, the danger to foreigners visiting the city, the danger of foreigners bringing crime into the city: in short, Geneva, that haven of peace, isn’t what it used to be.

Here’s my suggestion: let’s lighten up and let the Swiss politicians fight it out.

Crime-fighting and politics, old bedfellows

Rising crime is a favourite topic of politicians everywhere in an election year, and citizens in Switzerland will elect their parliament later this year.

Geneva has had a tug of war over the police department for several years, so the themes of not enough support for the police, and its opposite, police are not being managed well, resurface like clockwork.

Swiss media have sunk their teeth into this story

World Radio Switzerland, WRS, kicked off the latest round by reporting on the mugging of the son of a US diplomat in mid-July. It was a story that deserved to be told. Illustré carried an interview with photos of the young man and the other Edipresse publications, notably the Tribune de Geneve picked up the thread and ran with it.

The initial story has been extended, in headlines, to not just one, but several international workers who are victims of assaults in the city. The message sent by the UN to its workers this summer, which prompted the news stories, was the result of not just one attack on a diplomatic family member, but two. There are plenty of other stories around, of course, as there are in any city.

WRS today published a story that begins: “From muggings in the middle of the night to burglar alarm scams—the public’s perception is that crime in Geneva is out of control. Many people have related their stories to WRS and other Swiss media as well social networking sites . . .” (Italics are mine)

Who is measuring public perception and how

The problem with media stories about public perceptions is that they are whatever the editors decide they will be, for unless you hire a creditable polling agency to survey a large sample audience, you simply don’t know: it’s too easy to find large numbers of people who will back any point of view for stories like this.

Do foreigners really believe Geneva is not safe? Is it less safe than it used to be? That it’s not a city where you can go out at night? That is doesn’t compare well to other cities around the world? And what kind of cities do you compare it to – ones of the same size or of the same degree of openness to the world?

We have two sources of information on public perception it seems: news media, part of whose job is to create stories that pull in audiences, and social media, who for all the large numbers of members they claim, tend to have the same relatively small and vocal groups speaking up on hot topics.

Crime in Switzerland low, compared internationally

So what’s the reality?

Geneva police statistics show crime up in the first half of 2011 compared to the previous year, but the figures were actually lower during the summer months. The city’s crime rate fell by 5 percent in 2010. It has the highest crime rate of Swiss cities, but to keep this in perspective, four of the city’s five murders in 2010 were cases of domestic violence and crime statistics have been harmonized nationwide only since 2010, so federal officials warn they should be read with caution.

Swiss crime statistics are low compared to other countries, for crimes recorded by police. Assault, for example: the Swiss rate is 2.9 per 100,000, compared to 281.6 for the US, 150.4 for New Zealand, 32.2 for England and Wales and 3.1 for Australia. France, to my great surprise, is at the bottom of the assault rates in major countries, with only 0.3 per 100,000. France’s rates for intentional homicide and rape are twice as high as Switzerland’s.

Car theft? Switzerland is the number one country for this. Draw your own conclusions.

Of course, these are based on figures recorded by police, and I’ve been hearing arguments that not all crimes are reported to the police. There is little evidence this happens more often in Switzerland than elsewhere, however. And comparative statistics are also a couple years old. In Geneva, crime went up in 2009, went down in 2010, appears to be going up again, but the percentages look high because the base is small.

The other public perception

Here’s my personal perception, my two bits based on a handful of conversations with others who have lived in the area for several years. I could say public perception corresponds to this:

• I don’t think Geneva is as safe as it was 25 years ago when I arrived, but I also don’t think Paris is as safe as it was 25 years ago when I left it, and I think this is probably true for many cities. There are more drugs, populations are larger, transient populations move around more easily.
• I think Geneva is nevertheless a much safer city than most but like any urban area, there are and will be muggings, thefts and worse. The police force probably does need beefing up, another remark that could be applied to most cities I know.
• Urban living requires paying close attention to your surroundings, avoiding situations and places where trouble is more likely to occur, stirred with a good dose of common sense. A city you don’t know is generally more dangerous, as is any city when you’ve been out drinking. And any city will feel more dangerous if you don’t tune out people who turn unfortunate personal experiences into generalizations. Your surroundings are as scary as your sense of drama lets them be, so if you don’t want to live in fear, trying reining it in.

I feel as sorry as anyone else for people who’ve run into trouble, through no fault of their own, and the young son and daughter of diplomats certainly didn’t deserve the treatment they got at the hands of thugs. I think the public should know about it.

But I don’t believe we should make them victims again, to suit personal or professional needs to dramatize what happened to them.

My own son was mugged at age 19 in Vancouver, his first month at university there (he managed to get away with minor injuries by running very fast, not always an option). I was held up at gunpoint in a dark courtyard in Paris, with insinuations about sex, when I had been there only a month, several years ago. When I had been in Geneva a short while a close friend was traumatized by a ghastly acid-throwing incident in the laundry room of a building, which disfigured a work colleague. The student apartment two girlfriends and I had vacated a week earlier one summer in Milwaukee was broken into by a drug hustler who had the wrong building; one of the girls who had just moved in was cruelly raped and beaten up.

Most people I know who live in cities have tales like this to tell. But urban life continues, and people find their own ways of dealing with safety issues and crime.

That doesn’t make for exciting journalism or social network chatting, though.

It’s time to be responsible news consumers and move on.

Two world leaders get together and hold what are presumably key talks. China, the US. Two world powers, two potential adversaries or, if not partners, at least friends, depending on your perspective.

Presidents Hu and Obama, ready to share with the world the fruits of their discussions.

So the rest of us, sitting at home and watching TV, thought they might say something about what they discussed, during a post-meeting press conference.

We don’t expect earthshaking question-and-answer sessions, since at this level press conferences are somewhat orchestrated (note the tidy black suits, not the daily attire of most journalists).

What we got was so far less than this that I fear it doesn’t bode well for future trade or political discussions. It’s hard to tell if the press conference was badly planned, or if the problems were technical or human, but most of those wonderfully expensive TV minutes were spent watching the two men waiting for translators to repeat what the other had just said.

We heard and saw Obama several times, but Hu was left virtually speechless, not always by choice. The reporters who were there (see NPR blog from the conference, below) seemed blissfully unaware it was mostly incoherent to the watching world.

The NPR blog doesn’t include a Chinese reporter from Xinhua demanding that his question be translated correctly, which brought laughs, so maybe we missed something there, too, watching it on a little screen.

The BBC has a headline about Hu’s response to a human right’s question, which certainly shifts the emphasis away from economic issues, which appeared to me to be the bulk of what the press conference dealt with, not human rights. CNN and China’s CCTV both emphasized that the talks were about positive ties, somewhat empty as headline news goes.

Duh . . . Maybe the two nations’ communications gap isn’t cultural after all, but just plain bureaucratic? Surely the technology they both sell is up to the job.

I watched the BBC, switched to CNN, checked out China’s CCTV, which not surprisingly was not carrying the live press conference.

Summaries of their talks, from broadcast media: BBC Britain, CNN US, FR1 France carried no story on this, NPR US, CCTV China

I’ve just published a news story about swissinfo‘s latest appeal to the public to help it survive. The story is an old one: budget cuts that look like they will save money are in fact sure to mean the death of the media organization. What’s new is that the threat appears to be real, and imminent.

Swissinfo must be saved. The reasons are simple:

• it provides some of the most professional journalism in Switzerland, at a time when serious journalism is shrinking
• it publishes in English and other languages, in the process creating a window with news about Switzerland that is available to the rest of the world in a that way French, German and Italian news is not
• it is the rare media organization that can afford to, and does, provide background explanations about how this small and rather complicated country works.

Swissinfo rose from the ashes of Swiss Radio International, a switch from an older media approach shared by other countries: Britain’s BBC, the US Voice of America and others. Moving to the Internet made sense, and swissinfo has proved its worth with strong traffic.

A primary mission is to help the one-fifth of the Swiss population that lives outside the country stay in touch and informed. In addition, its reporters often offset skewered reports by journalists from outside the country who misunderstand or don’t take the time to educate themselves about how Switzerland functions—critical at times like the summer of 2009 when the US and Switzerland were negotiating their UBS treaty.

WRS was set up as the radio arm of public broadcasting, but with a primary mission of reaching people inside the country who are English-speaking. That’s great, but there is a need for Switzerland to get its head out of the sand and explain itself, regularly, to those outside the country: the Internet is the medium and swissinfo should remain the media.

A final word on why GenevaLunch.com in particular supports swissinfo’s petition: people sometimes ask me, as the editor of GL, if I see swissinfo as competition. We both publish Swiss news in English. Absolutely not: we’re very complementary, and I would be sorely disappointed to see them disappear. We focus on local and regional news, we’re private and totally independent. They cover Switzerland as a whole, and are part of the larger SSR, public broadcasting, with the rights but also responsibilities that entails.

Sometimes our stories overlap, as when in today’s reports on smart radars, but we’re writing for slightly different audiences and I’m happy to refer our readers to their far longer report. I always know I can count on their professionalism: they check their sources, write original material, provide useful links for their readers, and they write frequently write stories the rest of us don’t.

The budget doctors need to take another look.

The new Nike summer World Cup ad that’s making a lot of noise is now viewable on YouTube. See what you think.

A Swiss man with a terrace overlooking the airport in Samui, Thailand, appears to have been the first person to put photos of the Koh Samui crash in early August online, reports Andy, editor of the Bangkok Bugle, a blog on Thailand and the media there. Within 20 minutes of the crash, the man had posted them on a forum and from there they zoomed to Twitter and from there – the world, mostly with no credit to him. There was an intermediate stop, however: when he posted them on the forum he also sent them off to Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, which did the decent thing and credited him and asked for more photos (here’s a link – forgive us for not showing the image here :–). But the rest of the world didn’t bother too much about the credit or copyright, it seems. He never gave up the copyright – as the author, it’s always yours but conditions of use need discussion – but it sounds like it ran away from him and once gone, you can’t easily get it back.

The post on the Bangkok Bugle raises a lot of issues that need more discussion: how do citizen journalists protect their copyright, how much do citizen journalists know and understand of media laws, how much do media laws in most countries reflect aging dinosaur mainstream media rather than today’s world, and more. Tages-Anzeiger could have done a few things to protect his work, such as embedding his copyright information in the image code, making sure they didn’t run it too large online, and then tracking anyone who ran the image. The last is the most important bit, but the number of media organizations with those kinds of resources is pretty rare.

Twitter and Facebook are the real gray area for most people, individuals and media producers alike. There is a lot of discussion out there about using photos from them, but one of the tricky bits is the right of media people to call on the notion of “fair use” and just use them for news. Ok, but then who is the media, legally speaking? Are aggregators and sites that copy news true news sites? Are legitimate journalists working alone news sites? If you put together a chatty online newsletter for the 10 houses on your street, does that make you an editor? The questions are endless.

One small but common misperception needs airing, too: the idea that information from citizen journalists is often worth serious money. Let’s be realistic – media companies just about everywhere are in far worse financial condition than they say publicly, they barely pay their journalists, they have next to nothing left for freelancers. Time Magazine this week has four ads. Four. Even if they cost a fortune by most people’s standards, that won’t pay the rent, never mind salaries.

But what about those once in a great while photos worth millions, sold to The Sun or Fox?

Buy a lottery ticket; your chances are better.

For the record, I liked the photographer’s attitude, as quoted by Andy. His main concern was to inform people. Now that’s an attitude worth a fortune!

Check out this photo linked to riots in Teheran. Is English now Iran’s national language? Or do protestors feel it’s more important to talk to the international media than to their government? I find it disturbing that in so many political upheavals, influencing the point of view of foreign journalists, and more particularly English language journalists, is now considered so important. The idea, of course, is that we’ll pass the message on to a larger world and create pressure from the outside, but unless journalists do their research well, and that’s not always the case, we risk being easy dupes of one side or another in a conflict.

The placards of Iranian protestors, in English were shot in Frankfurt, Germany, and the language choice is telling.

Far more powerful for me is this series of images from boston.com, although, as with words, it is easy to jump to conclusions about what is really happening.

I appreciated the honesty of the BBC TV reporter in Teheran who said last night that he could only share what people had told him – and their reliability as witnesses is not a given – because the media were not being allowed near protest areas.

Tim at most emailed news tells me their hits have zoomed since Swiss Miss posted something about the site. “The Internet is a strange place.” Right you are, tim! I’m one of the new fans. So here’s what I’ve just learned:

• the Internet is really fun when it gets the buzz going
• Swiss Miss is one of my new favourite sites and Most emailed news is another
• Madoff could give Obama a run for the money, so to speak, for Time’s Man of the Year – look how many people are emailing stories about him! And if you’ve managed to miss all the news stories about him and you don’t know who he is, take your pick from the most emailed ones.

Bad news again from the New York Times company, widely considered one of the world’s top newspapers. The New York Observer reported 20 November that after posting a loss-making third quarter the dividends paid out to NY Times shareholders, including the Sulzberger-Ochs family which owns a large chunk of the company, are being cut by about 75%. Shares have declined nearly 70% in one year, Ad Age, the advertising industry bible, reported the next day, with advertising sales falling more than 16% in October, compared to October 2007.

The news doesn’t bode well for the newspaper industry in the US. National Newspaper Association overall figures for 2008 to date show that even online advertising, the only silver lining in the gloomy newspaper ad cloud, fell in the second quarter of 2008, for the first time in several years – and this in an election year, and before the economic news worsened considerably over the summer.

Maybe bigger owning smaller, the case of the New York Times Company and the standard model for journalism in much of the world, is not the path for media in the future. Reflect on this: the BBC Trust at the end of last week refused to let the BBC go ahead with plans to spend £68m for a network of local news websites with video content. Let local newspapers do it, was the message.

For those of you/us who are fond of the International Herald Tribune and its web site, the not-quite-correct information floating around this week about the IHT site being “folded into” the New York Times is puzzling. To set the record straight: if you read the AFP story on this it points out that the two newspapers, part of the same New York Times company, will “merge the web sites” to create a “co-branded” site in coming months. This should come as no surprise: discussions have been going on for some time about a more efficient web operation. I met with the IHT‘s marketing director in London in August who told me that with the two papers and web sites sharing much content, it clearly makes little sense to continue with an international IHT and international web pages for the NY Times, a situation that has lingered since the NY Times company bought out the Washington Post‘s share of the IHT in 2003. The New York paper’s site, with 25 million unique users a month according to AFP, nearly 20 million of whom are in the US, has 90 employees for the web site alone, I was told; the IHT, with 2.5 million unique users a month (AFP figures), has a far smaller staff, but there is some duplication.

The issue is how to find the most efficient solution without weakening branding. The development of the new joint international site is expected to take several months. Given the mix of the strength of the two brands but revenue that continues to fall after a first quarter 2008 loss of $335,000 at the New York Times, with news about a joint site, the 23 October report on the the NY Times third quarter results are likely to provoke a good deal of interest.

It’s a news media disaster that’s been begging for a chance to happen: CBS jumped on the citizen journalism wagon, like every other mass media company, and found itself with a nasty little problem. Check out the image and the story in Ad Age today.

The language, the photo and the text are clearly not what CBS normally does and the grand old man of US journalism has to be mortified that someone managed to post this on his site, but it’s so obvious we can just say we’ve been waiting for this to happen. Ad Age turns it into a story by talking about iPhone apps, but I think that’s an almost irrelevant wrinkle.

What worries me more is the dangerous appeal of fame that makes John and Jane Doe shift a story a bit, add a few flourishes, or record and film in such a way that the story is more spectacular. Personally, I’m fed up with a lot of citizen journalism: it’s too often rubbish.

I went to a meeting the other day with senior managers from the region and when a presenter commented that the beauty of web 2.0 is that information is no longer owned by mass media, a small cheer went up. No one wants mass media to dictate information these days, but the idea that the masses will do a better job calls for a reality check.

We haven’t got the balance right yet.