Posted in March 2009 …

Mar 22 2009
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Crafts, Culture, Print, Writing

Your friendly neighbourhood newspaper

When I was doing my GCSEs, I wanted to be a journalist. I told one of my teachers this: she shuddered as if I’d said I was planning a career in the brothel over the kebab shop, and then said, “You do know that journalists have to do some awful things.” I was 14, so I wasn’t quite savvy enough to explain that I was after a job writing well-informed topical essays rather than one where I had to doorstep the bereaved.

Anyway, the summer after that and before I started college, I did three stints of work experience at the other sort of journalism: three local papers took me on and assigned a patient hack to show me around their world. I interviewed a new lady priest. I scammed sandwiches and wrote the restaurant review. I turned police reports into crime stories (getting bollocked by the sub for my sloppy tabloidese) and magicked interminable NFU press releases into news-in-briefs. I went to the magistrates court, and I went to county council meetings, and found them both fascinatingly banal.

Some of the journalists who taught me were middle-aged and comfortably cynical; some of them were young and ambitiously cynical. But importantly, there was lots of cynicism and a fair amount of smoking at desks, which is what counts when your idea of glamour is mostly derived from Brighton Rock. Ian Jack wrote a good column this weekend about why the local paper matters. Ignore the junior Marxists in the comments: they’re only half right, and Jack’s half is more important.

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Mar 22 2009
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Culture, Print

The Express is a rotten lover

Scottish Express Dunblane apologyThe Express has said sorry to the people of Dunblane. Well, barely. The apology acknowledges that story was “undeniably inappropriate”, although it doesn’t say why: maybe the feeling in the Express newsroom is that they just had a lapse of taste in picking the wrong subjects for an exposé. There’s no mention here of invasion of privacy or public interest – both key principles which ought to be respected by any paper which expects to be protected as a democratic institution – although there’s room to stress that “nobody was misquoted”, if that makes you feel better. There’s no mention of all the ways in which the front page could have been used better, no apology for the genuine reporting and truly revealing journalism which has been trampled on by crass splashes like this one.

Readers of the Express: your paper is sorry that you’re offended. The Express thinks it’s having a love affair with its readers (really: someone thought that the best way to deal with this was to sexualise the relationship between paper and reader), and now the paper has caused upset and offence and distress, it’s sorry you feel that way. Well, Express, if you really want to run with that metaphor, newspapers are probably more like prostitutes than lovers. And I’d suggest to any Express readers that you really shouldn’t be paying for this sort of treatment.

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Mar 21 2009
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Culture, Print

Mags not dying, just a bit poorly

Magculture linked to a Salon feature arguing that the magazine isn’t doomed, it’s just been badly mishandled. According to the writer (Gabriel Sherman), publishers aggressively launched titles during the “bubble years” (is that we’re calling the last decade now?) to exploit new advertising markets, but without cultivating the standards that build lasting readerships:

a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason for each category’s challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers’ wholesale abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.

As someone who’s pretty keen for people to carry on buying magazines so that some of the magazines will hopefully pay me to write for them, I don’t feel totally consoled by the suggestion that it’s ‘just’ the teenagers who are deserting the news-stands: if teenagers aren’t buying mags now, then what’s going to make them start in time to replace the older readers who’ll be dying off? And similarly, it’s possible that the tech audience is just out at the front of a movement into reading online, and the recession is masking a much more permanent shift.

Still, the failed mags gibbeted by Advertising Age do seem to have been mostly aimed at conspicuous consumers, and the fact that so many were diffusion titles – jimmying an established brand into a new marketplace – backs up Sherman’s thesis. And obviously, I’d really like this part to be true:

the current downturn can be good for publishers. Magazines still offer an unsurpassed ability to marry literary ambitions with deep reporting, photography, and visual design. In this new media age, people talk about the importance of transforming readers into “communities.” Magazines have never had a community problem. Great magazines have built enduring relationships with their readers that Facebook and Tumblr still aspire to. But in a race to grow their businesses, publishers put advertising first and editorial excellence second.

Magazines still retain emotional capital, and publishers need to remember that they’re not in the advertising-delivery business. If a magazine can speak directly to the reader, advertising dollars will follow. Titles launched to capitalize on a booming market segment will never survive over the long haul.

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Mar 20 2009
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Culture, Online, Print

The new journalism

Abandoned newspaper racks via newspaperdeathwatch.com

Last Saturday, James Harkin published a ‘Facebook is rubbish, let’s go to the pub’ column in the Guardian which, six days latter, looks pretty tattered:

Last week, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre, a reporter from the Sunday Express managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town and write a salacious piece about their “antics”, based on information culled from their profiles. The blogosphere went ballistic, but it was too late.

What use, then, are imaginary friends like these? Set up to pass information speedily from one place to another, it is hardly surprising that electronic networks turn out to be a very potent way of ferrying our information around. Very few of us had been in the habit of phoning up numbers from the telephone book at random to impart information, for example, but now we are more than happy to pass it on to our network of weak electronic ties.

But not all of our imaginary friends are out to stitch us up and sell us to the Express. My friend Rachel is imaginary friends with comedian Chris Addison, and he’s friends with Father Ted and IT Crowd scriptwriter Graham Linehan – so when Linehan tweeted the link to his plan of direct action against the Express, his followers (including Addison) re-tweeted it, and their followers (including Rachel) retweeted it, and I read it, retweeted it, blogged it, signed the petition and wrote my letters of complaint. And this quick dispersal of information through a collection of loose affiliates had an effect: 6000 signatures, and whispers that an apology is on its way. Which is not the reform of journalism or anything, but it’s a start.

So if social networking facilitated both an intrusion and a response, then it seems like a pretty neutral creation. Invasive journalism and reader kerfuffles weren’t born with web 2.0 – it’s just that now they can both be bigger, faster and more aggressive than paper and telephones allowed. And bloggers have done some pretty impressive digging recently – Ben Goldacre lists some of their triumphs in his talk “in praise of puerile, chaotic, disseminated investigative journalism.”

The only thing is that all of the examples he comes up with (and the Express outrage could be added to them) seem to cohere around a mainstream media outlet. Yes, the newspapers and radio stations often look slow and stupid, but they’re still a point of contact for lots of people who are otherwise frisking information from hundreds and thousands of disparate sources. And for every blogger who cautiously tries to extract some truth from the sources, there’ll be another one carelessly inciting fear, and little incentive for the reader to go anywhere that challenges their prior assumptions. There are journalists online who easily outpunch some of the big names on the nationals, but if newspapers really are on the fade, I wonder how long it will take for culture to stop organising around their mastheads.

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Mar 20 2009
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Books, Culture, Radio

Bragg’s finch

darwins-finches

There’s more to writing about yourself and your relations than brute honesty advocates such as Liz Jones would like to think. ‘Honesty’ isn’t really that awesome: devoutly repeating what you believe to be true is the quickest way of pulping your experience and turning it into paper, but it’s an unreflective sort of introspection. When we think about ourselves and other people, there are multiple mechanisms at work in our brains which tend to act against our telling the truth. Memory is corruptible. We find it hard to accept that we have behaved on ways that go against our beliefs (cognitive dissonance).  We find it easy to attribute positive characteristics to ourselves and negative ones to other people and situations (attribution bias). We are, basically, fucked when it comes to telling the truth.

Which is why fiction is so important. Fiction has a set of rules which let the author and reader separate out experiences, imagine different motivations, play sympathetically at being in situations we’ve never had. And making up stories is a much more powerful way of investigating yourself than embarking on a self-justifying soliloquy. On 6 March, about the same time that the Julie Myerson story was exploding, Melvyn Bragg did an interview with Simon Mayo about his latest work of autobiographical fiction. “The hero, is that you?” asked Simon.

He’s not me. He’s inspired by me, if that’s what you say, inspired by my life, based on the life of my first wife and our daughter and where we lived and what we did, very much so. But it’s not me. And I think there’s been a lot about Darwin going on recently, and everyone knows about Darwin’s finches – that he saw a finch, put very simply, on one island, and the next island along it was a bit different, and the next island a bit different, till in the end it was still the finch, but it wasn’t a finch at all, it was a different bird.

And I think that’s the same about writing autobiographical fiction, which I write. You start by thinking about something in yourself that you want to work through – that’s the finch. By the time you’ve started to write it and shape it and work it, it’s something else – and that’s the fiction. And that’s what I’m doing. There’s no denying that there’s an autobiographical strand to it, I would never dream of doing that, and I think that gives it strength. [...] After all, this book is quite long, it’s 500 pages – but what’s 500 pages in 11 years? You select, you invent, there are lots of characters in the book who are totally made up, there are times when the wife concerned is alone – what do I do there? Conversations I can’t remember in the early 60s, of course I can’t. But I want to build up a tension between these two people.

Putting your experiences outside of yourself and into a fictional character is a way of making your own experience an object of study. It’s s0rt of rough control for bias: in fiction, the provisional relationship to reality allows some freedom from the usual crippling distortions, and this freedom lets the writer and the reader get to a more intimate and sympathetic understanding. The differences between the finch on the first island and the finch on the last tells you how the habitat shapes the species: you understand the bird by seeing how it’s been transformed.

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Mar 19 2009
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Books, Culture, Design, Politics

Paperhouse reads: Penguin By Design

paperhouse-0031

The loyalty and affection that Penguin have built up derives as much from their covers as the contents of the books. The consistency and appeal of their designs makes Penguins feel familiar – so one of the biggest surprises is how much Penguin’s design rules have changed and expanded on the iconic three-striped Penguin grid, while somehow always hanging on to an essential Penguin-ness by retaining some element or other. Even on a full-bleed illustration with a completely distinct style of lettering can discretely flash its heritage in the orange oval of the logo.

I’ve spent a lot of time dipping into my parents’ library of Penguins and building up my own, so I recognised most of the series and styles represented in this 70th-anniversary retrospective. But there was one part of the Penguin catalogue that surprised me: the Specials. These short books on social and political issues seem to be a version of the 18th and 19th century pamphlet (a relationship emphasised by “a layout which has much in common with Victorian handbills): topical, provocative, portable. In the text, Phil Baines describes the Specials as “Fulfilling a purpose not unlike the investigative journalism and current affairs television programmes of today”.

They were launched in 1937, and the first spread of Specials covers shows public debate agonising over German expansion, genocides and life at war. Clockwise from left: Ourselves And Germany (“Should Britain regard Germany as her potential enemy or seek her friendship? Lord Londonderry thinks we should adopt a policy of friendship with Hitler…”), The Jewish Problem, One Man Against Europe:

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The next selection from the series shows the politicised output of the sixties, and there’s a feeling of furious urgency about both the topics and the blazing tomato-red of the covers. The titles often convey the now-ness of the issue: Has Man A Future?, Persecution 1961. The subjects are direct entries into ongoing public conversations: the risks of smoking, potential miscarriages of justice. These are titles that demand to be read and responded to immediately:

paperhouse-0071

The last spread shows the tail-end of the series. In terms of design, this spread is pretty depressing. An inconsistent selection suggests a series that had lost a sense of its own importance and place:

paperhouse-0091

But even more depressing is that the subjects on display here all feel wearily familiar. Abuses of medicine; fucking up with public money; Debt And Danger: The World Financial Crisis. In between the end of the Penguin Specials series in the mid-1980s and now, these issues have gone churning on, apparently untouched by debate. Partly, I suspect that this is because investigative reporting and current affairs television have been dying out since the end of the Specials – they didn’t replace the pamphlet form, they were just slower to choke, so that now there are serious suggestions of a voucher system to subsidise the democratic necessity of journalism.

Maybe, though, with papers struggling to escape from the cycle of churnalism described by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News, now would be a good time to revive the Special. There’s maybe a bigger constituency of people for this sort of stuff than bookselling and the press at large would suggest, and there’s definitely a good argument for offering coherent long-form essays as well as the ongoing debate of blogging. I don’t know the economics of bookselling, but maybe with digital downloads, reviving the pamphlet could help to revive investigative journalism.

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Mar 19 2009
4 Comments
Culture, Politics, Religion

Good news, Africa!

popeinafrica-copy1

The Pope is coming to see you! And he’s very, very concerned that so many Africans are dying from a preventable, treatable disease, so he’s taking extra powerful steps to help. Will it be money? Will it be pragmatic sexual education?

HIV/Aids was, he [the Pope] argued, “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem”

So no money, then, and no pragmatic sexual education. What is the Pope’s godly plan?

Pope Benedict said on the eve of his trip that he wanted to wrap his arms around the entire continent, with “its painful wounds, its enormous potential and hopes”.

Oh. Turns out Africa is getting a big, Papal hug. Any other vague and empty gestures in your bag of tricks, Pope Benedict?

The solution lay, he said, in a “spiritual and human awakening” and “friendship for those who suffer”.

But try not to feel too short-changed by this, people of Africa. Because a metaphorical hug is all the physical affection the Pope plans on you having:

While in Africa, the pontiff is expected to talk to young people about the Aids epidemic and explain to them why the Catholic Church recommends sexual abstinence as the best way to prevent the spread of the disease.

So that’s ok, then. Just as long as everyone can avoid having sex indefinitely, the Aids crisis can be eliminated! This is exactly the kind of radical thinking we need God’s representative on Earth to come out with! I would have just gone for the rusty old ‘save lives, ameliorate suffering’ angle, but Benedict’s got bigger things in mind: he’s looking out for your immortal, implausible soul. Wait, why can I hear singing?

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Mar 18 2009
1 Comment
Culture, Politics, Print

The world’s nastiest intrusion

Graham Linehan’s plan of direct action against the Express.

If you didn’t see the Express front page, and you haven’t followed the story on The Enemies Of Reason and elsewhere, then now would be a good time to catch up, get outraged and follow Linehan’s four-point plan:

So! What can we do? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Stand up and be counted. Matt Nida has started an online petition which you can find here. When he’s got a decent number of names, he’ll be submitting it to the editor responsible for the story, the publishers and managing directors of Express Group Newspapers, the PCC, Downing Street and all media outlets who may be able to help shame the Express Group into action by making public the strength of national feeling about this.

2) Email your personal complaint to the Editorial Director of the Express Group about the conduct of Paula Murray and Scottish Sunday Express, Derek Lambie, who was responsible for placing the piece on the front cover. The Editorial Director is Paul Ashford, and this is his secretary’s email address, so please try to avoid being abusive to her – it’s not her fault! – and preface your email by asking Jo to pass your letter on to Mr Ashford. Jo.dimond@express.co.uk

3) Write to Express Group publisher Richard Desmond. He keeps his email address well hidden, but you can write to him by snail mail at: Richard Desmond, Northern and Shell building, 10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN

4) If you have a Facebook account and would like to vent with likeminded folks, here’s a group set up to protest the story.

Bad, exploitative journalism is pretty much impossible to avoid, but this is one case where invasion of privacy, lack of public interest, sneering hypocrisy and actual harm to actual people are all unequivocally present. Reporting like this is damaging to the people it exposes, but also ultimately to the function of the press – who have no right to claim any role in democratic scrutiny if they condone the humiliation of traumatised young adults. As Linehan points out, it’s partly because of the weakness of self-legislation that newspapers are able to repeat this sort of grotesque intrusion again and again and again. So let the press know how disgraceful they are. It’s for their own good.

Then after you’ve done that, check out the ersatz justice Bloggerheads weilds over Paula Murray. It’s pretty satisfying, so make sure you do your civic duty before you enjoy the reward.

(Updated 19 March to mirror changes on the original.)

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Mar 17 2009
1 Comment
Books, Culture, TV

Panned

stewart-lees-comedy-vehicle-still

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, “Toilet Books” on iPlayer (until 23 March 2009)

In a world of stratified markets, every special interest gets its own TV channel. If you’re hot for cars and stuff that explodes, you can watch Dave. If you like racy exploitation docs, there’s Channel 4. If you can simply never see too many expensively formulaic dramas about sexcrimes, Hallmark is your friend with a rolling schedule of Law And Order: SVU. So I’m expecting that very soon one of the networks will announce the launch of a channel to service my very own special interest: middle-aged men looking uncomfortable in suits while getting eloquently profane about how shit modern life is.

It could be called “Charlie” after the current king of being funny and a bit sneery. The idents could feature the channel’s stars looking really annoyed. You could even build the marketing campaign around pathetic puns on the channel’s name (“Coming up: Mark Kermode on Charlie!” – oh, how the laughter will ring out). Anyway, until someone picks up my obviously amazing idea, I’m going to be watching the very brilliant and funny Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle on BBC2, Mondays, 10pm.

Last night, Stewart took on publishing in a routine that kicked at bloated blockbusters, misery memoirs, celebrity clag, the self-destructive discount economics of publishing and the depressing influence of supermarkets on bookselling (“Get yer books! Pile up the books! Get a multipack of books! Why not take an extra book home, put it in the freezer!”). “Did Willian Tyndale burn at the stake in 1536 in the cause of vernacular English literature so that you could read The Gospel According To Chris Moyles? No he didn’t,” says Lee. And he’s got a mardy, elitist, excellent point. Books can be radical and world-shaking, not just something you chuck in the trolley with the other consumables:

What does it tells us about our civilisation when the book is held in such low esteem that it’s possible to append the word “book” to the word “toilet” and make the compound word “toilet book”. [...] Library book, yes. Children’s book, yes. Poetry book, yes. Toilet book, no. Toilet paper, yes. Toilet brush, yes. Toilet duck, you can have toilet duck. Toilet book, no.

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Mar 16 2009
4 Comments
Culture, Radio

“Don’t blame the women, blame those lapdancers”

While I was in bed last night, trying to fall asleep and being irritated back to consciousness by Stephen Nolan but still feeling too tired to reach out and turn the radio off, I heard something so intensely depressing I wished I’d been listening to Radio 4′s platitude half-hour Something Understood instead. Stephen was interviewing Jill, a rape victim who now campaigns against sexual violence, on why more women don’t report and prosecute rapes – by way of following up on the appalling Worboys case.

Listen to the interview (begins about 2:33, available until 22 March 2009)

Jill spoke very clearly and affectingly about her attack, the trauma it caused and the way that the investigation and prosectution compounded her distress. She made a very good spokesperson for herself, and an admirable advocate for coming forward. But Stephen Nolan was presenting her as an expert and asking her to comment on issues way beyond her individual experience. The answers she gave ranged from powerful to naive to offensive, and while I don’t feel especially good about criticising a rape victim for talking about rape, it bothers me enormously that the BBC selected her emotional response as a survivor over the analysis that a criminologist or sociologist could have given on some of these issues. This is how Jill describes what happened to her:

I was at home in my father’s vicarage. I wasn’t very well, I was watching TV with my boyfriend, my dad was working in his study, and four men broke into the house. Two of them… well, one of them raped me, the other committed sexual assaults on me.

Then Stephen asks Jill if she felt that she wouldn’t be believed, and Jill says: “I never had that doubt in my mind,” and explains that building the case against her rapists was her way of coping with the attack. “But that’s not true for very very many people,” she adds. What she doesn’t mention – and I wish she or Nolan had – was that her rape sounds unusual in that it was committed by (apparently) strangers who invaded her home rather someone she knew, and it was witnessed by two people. Assisting the prosecution probably did help her a lot, but most rapes aren’t so amenable to prosecution. Most rapes don’t involve extreme violence in a vicarage and eyewitnesses, and many attacks can be presented as something much more equivocal in the courtroom: for women who are raped by acquaintances, or after they’ve been drinking, or when they’ve gone into a rapist’s home or car, remembering all the details would simply be pointlessly reviving suffering.

Jill forcefully knocks backs Nolan’s questions about false allegations (rates no higher than any other crime) and the issue of confusion over consent: “Sex is very different from rape, which is an unwanted invasion of somebody. To say that sex and rape are the same thing seems to justify in a man’s mind why he’s doing this.” And then, having made that clear, Jill talks about why juries might be reluctant to convict rapists. And this is where it gets sort of unpleasant:

In this country we tend to believe that women ask for rape, that realistically they have some deep down desire to want to be taken. And some women portay that, and some women have no understanding of the damage that they’re actually doing to the rest of the people who don’t want to be treated in that way. [...] There are some women who seem to feel that it’s their right to do whatever they want to do sexually and don’t see that what they do has an impact on how men perceive women and how men perceive how they can treat women. [...] One thing that you could talk about that’s been hitting the news quite a bit recently is the spread of lapdancing clubs. [...] We are eroding any kind of sexual rules in this country. [...] We’re clouding the issue so much, and we’re giving so many mixed messages, that people think they have a right to go out and get what they want.

It shouldn’t need saying – and it’s painful to say it to someone who’s actually been raped – but portraying yourself as sexual doesn’t take away the right to say no. Lapdancing, prostitution or even “doing whatever you want sexually” doesn’t place you in a state of perpetual consent. Jill should have stuck to saying that sex and rape are different, because here she seems to be saying that there are some women who are so sexually available they’re inviting rape on every female. (I guess if you get raped in a lapdancing club, that would be your lookout.) And of course, this long assault on the nation’s morals isn’t backed up any study of the correlation between lapdancing clubs and incidence of rape – it’s just what Jill feels to be true.

There’s a lot that could be said about how rape is prosecuted in this country. “I blame the lapdancers” shouldn’t come into it at all.

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