They hope…
Attitude’s “world exclusive” coverline looks a bit, well, redundant when the magazines are displayed like this in my local Tesco.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in July 2009 …
FT’s Barber: the paywall dawns
(Photo by Today is a good day, used under Creative Commons)
Lionel Barber of the Financial Times has predicted that almost all news organisations will start charging for content within the next 12 months (reported by Journalism.co.uk). This sounds right, but sad – the interval between the expansion of news media online, and the realisation that free won’t pay for itself, has been a blissful window for information. Rather than buying one newspaper a day, I’ve had the option of reading all the stories that interest me as they’re reported across every publication, and while there will be ways to carry on doing this (probably for free) after the paywalls come in, it will be more fiddly and less appealing.
Barber said quality journalism would ‘wither’ if new revenue streams are not found.
“We should be under no illusions about the price we would pay as a result. It would not be measured in terms of jobs alone, but something more enduring and valuable,” he said.
“Journalism forms part of the lifeblood of free societies. Journalism is not perfect, nor was it ever meant to be. By its nature, it is often uncomfortable, especially for those in positions of power. But it matters – and I will defend it to the last.”
Journalism.co.uk, “Almost all news organisations will charge online in 12 months, says FT’s Barber”
One unintended (although maybe not unwelcome, at least to an industry that routinely resists self-scrutiny) consequence will be that writing a blog which criticises reporting will become a bit harder. But if your hope is to see reporting improve, and if you accept that it can’t get better without revenue, then opposing paywalls is a tricky position to take.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
Northcliffe local news: not so local, less of the news
(Photo by just.Luc, licensed under Creative Commons)
Northcliffe Media are cutting the equivalent of 30 full time posts on their West and Wales titles, including nine jobs from my area, Bath. One ex-employee of the Chronicle believes this will leave the Chron with an editorial staff of 12 – including the editor, dep ed, four reporters, sport, subs and pictures – to cover a city of 80,000 people. Some of the subbing will be moved to a Bristol-based hub, where four “sticklers for detail with a flair for layout” are being recruited to cover the Chron, BEP, WDP, Gloucester Citizen, Gloucestershire Echo and the Western Gazette.
Consolidation is superficially appealing when a business is trying to hold down its losses – and as the West and Wales papers already share content and some subbing will remain in-house, this central unit won’t be expected to do the work of seven distinct daily and weekly papers. And perhaps Northcliffe subs can be a tiny bit relieved that their entire profession hasn’t yet been rationalised our of existence, per Greenslade. But it does mean that local news production will be still further removed from the area it’s supposed to cover.
Does that matter? Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror Group, spoke to the Media Show about TMG’s closure of nine local papers, and was asked whether these “rationalisations” would affect the quality of local journalism. She answered:
I think that’s a great misnomer [...] the new technology that we’re equipping our journalists with now means that they don’t actually have to come to a building necessarily. They can spend more time on their patch, spend more time in their communities.
Bailey’s comforting vision of reporters filing copy to a faraway office from deep within their region leaves the newsrooms as ghost towns. No face-to-face communication between the team, every decision mediated by email and telephone, no opportunity for an editor to oversee and train his staff.
That’s one way in which cuts hurt local news. It’s also likely that reporters will simply be too stretched to know their area fully: if the Bath Chronicle has four reporters, it seems impossible that they can give dedicated coverage to the courts, council, schools, hospital and all the other authorities and services that make up an area. Is it really possible for four hacks to know enough people in Bath to find out everything that’s going on?
The same goes for subs. How will subs in another city be able to pick up on a geographically implausible street name, or a misspelt parish councillor? Probably they won’t. And as over time errors and omissions accumulate and readers realise that, actually, their local paper isn’t anything of the sort anymore, probably they will stop buying. Journalism is what newspapers sell. Fewer editorial staff means less journalism, of lower quality – immediate savings that must be balanced by long-term, incalculable losses.
© Sarah Ditum 2009. Thanks to Phil Chamberlain for help researching this post.
Newspaper classifieds: don’t blame the internet (but it’s still not good)
Graphs taken from The Media Business
Newspapers might be having trouble retaining their classified advertising, but Robert G Pickard on The Media Business blog reckons that’s not solely down to internet competition, and nor is it certainly fatal. He offers two graphs (above, using data from Newspaper Association of America and the Internet Advertising Bureau) to prove his point:
The Internet certainly is taking some money from newspapers, but it isn’t the worst culprit. The real competitor is direct mail and home delivery advertising that have taken much preprint and display advertising from newspapers in recent decades by delivering better household reach. That was compounded by the significant reduction in the number of large retailers in the late 1990s and 2000s. The development of the recession in 2007 and 2008 is currently playing a major role because newspaper advertising—especially classifieds—is more strongly affected by recessions than other types of advertising. But recessions come and go and there is no reason to believe that an advertising recovery will not accompany an improvement in the economy. [...]
The end for newspapers is not in sight and those who think that the $50 billion industry is going to collapse and disappear within a year or two because of Internet advertising are just not paying attention close enough attention to what is really happening across media industries.
Measuring the market value isn’t an especially good way to judge the effect of online competition on print ad spending: an online listing is cheaper than one in a newspaper, so every customer who deserts print for the internet will only take a small portion of their advertising spend with them. And while Pickard is correct when he says it’s not just the internet squeezing advertising away from print, it still seems to take a mighty squint to get these figures looking good for newspapers.
Classified advertising revenue for newspapers continues to plummet dramatically according to both graphs – whether or not that revenue is being diverted to online services, newspapers still aren’t getting it, and publications who have formerly relied on their small ads can’t depend on getting them back when the recession is through.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
The Telegraph and Boris: what chickenfeed will buy you
The Telegraph is in the perplexing position of having both made rather a lot of money last year, and then lost even more of it buying itself out of joint ventures. And from the outside, the newsroom looks similarly financially contrary: the Telegraph appears to have invented seven sports hacks to cover up a reliance on agency copy, and yet still have the money hanging around to spend a quarter of a million hiring Boris Johnson as a columnist. So what does Boris think about his good fortune? Well, it’s “chickenfeed”, apparently, because he doesn’t work very hard for it:
Stephen Glover on NOTW phone hacking: lay off, we’re dying
A painfully constant theme of journalists talking about their trade is the wail that things are hard enough for them already and papers shouldn’t make things harder by criticising their own industry. You get it from Dacre, you get it from Wade, and this morning, you get it from Stephen Glover in the Independent.
Glover indentifies a conspiracy between the BBC and the Guardian to push the NOTW phone hack story. If I was looking for the ingredients of a conspiracy in this business, I’d probably be looking at the organisation that’s been paying off the victims of its own criminal actions. Not Glover:
Most of this story was old. We already knew eight-tenths of it, though we had probably forgotten we did. Nonetheless, it was imaginatively repackaged by those symbiotic organisations, The Guardian and the BBC, and sold as new. The Corporation had been put on red alert by the newspaper at a senior level well before the story broke.
In the next paragraph, he dismissively mentions the part of the story that was new – the vast pay-offs – and instead accuses the BBC of being vindictively anti-Murdoch. Has it been? The BBC routinely runs heavily on critical media stories about its own actions. During the Brand/Ross farrago, most bulletins led on the outrage; when the BBC executives’ expenses were released, a large chunk of PM was devoted to picking them over. The BBC is an imperfect organisation and there’s plenty that it should be criticised for, but the best I can say without having a breakdown of broadcast-minutes-per-story is that the BBC has given no more prominence to the phone hack story than to any of those (probably much less important) stories. In contrast, News International has barely acknowledged that it’s under discussion.
But Glover is distressed to see the press’ failings exposed, as his ad hom attack on Nick Davies shows. First he silkily denigrates the investigative work of Flat Earth News by calling it “a book which suggests that the press is wildly dysfunctional” (my emphasis), and then, having failed to represent Davies’ ideas fairly, he goes on to give a poisonous description of his personality:
I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but he seems to me a misanthropic, apocalyptic sort of fellow – the sort of journalist who can find a scandal in a jar of tadpoles.
What Glover doesn’t mention – and this is curious given how aghast he was a few paragraphs ago at Newsnight’s failure to reveal a perceived conflict of interest in Peter Wilby’s commentary – is that his own employers (along with every other Fleet Street institution) were substantially and specifically criticised in Flat Earth News. Glover is also a columnist for the Daily Mail. Apparently that’s not relevent to his views on Davies, though. Nor, seemingly, is the fact the Indy and its parent company have their own reasons to be displeased with the Guardian’s media coverage.
Still, it’s not as though Glover approves of the dark arts. It’s just that his “guess is that most newspapers have cleaned up their act”, and anyway, newspapers have more important things to think about than the quality or legality of their investigations:
Naturally I do not condone newspapers listening into the private conversations of celebrities, though I would have no problem in the case of a minister who was on the fiddle or betraying his country. I do know that the national press is weaker than it has been for more than a century, with most titles losing money, and I regret that, at such a time, The Guardian and the BBC should use largely old information to weaken it further
When pundits speaking for the press adopt this line, they sound like nothing so much as Angie Watts weedling Dirty Den to take her back by pretending she only had six months to live. There’s no other organisation from which newspapers would allow such claims: MPs who complained that the heavy reporting of the expenses scandal was undermining public respect for parliament were, rightly, ridiculed. The idea that newspapers’ problems come from an excess of self-examination is – as this indulgent, incoherent and partial article inadvertently shows – equally absurd.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
The News Of The World: everyone’s at it
(Photo by donknuth, used under Creative Commons licence.)
The News Of The World’s first strike back at the Guardian is pretty unconvincing, calling the stories “ferocious and, at times, hysterical attacks on its credibility, integrity and journalistic standards” while also having to admit that the hacking, the blagging and the snooping all went on. All that’s really under discussion is the number of crimes committed, and the extent of management complicity.
The paper’s self-defence is less shaky when it turns round to attack the Guardian’s own sometime news practices:
No newspaper, least of all the Guardian, is perfect. Nor is our craft a perfect science. Its practitioners are human. They misbehave and make mistakes for which they – rightly – pay a heavy price. So let us remember that it was the Guardian that knowingly, deliberately and illegally forged a cabinet minister’s signature to get an exclusive story. It was the Guardian that cynically abandoned one of journalism’s most fundamental and sacred covenants by revealing the identity of a confidential informant.
The NOTW doesn’t come out and say that a story is a story by any mean necessary, because one of the problems they’ve got is that almost all what they were doing falls a long way outside of a public interest defence: when WikiLeaks defends the NOTW’s cheap inbox hacking by comparing those findings to tape recordings of corrupt South American politicians, the mismatch between the authority claimed by journalists and the use they put it to feels more like a devastating criticism than the winning argument it’s supposed to be. It’s hard to feel like there’s a democratic principle being exercised everytime someone snoops on Vanessa Feltz’s voicemail (and while John Prescott might be the most vocal victim at the moment, he’s also probably one of the most defensible targets).
But it’s accepted that journalists will do bad things in search of a good story, and they’re allowed certain privileges legally and culturally for that reason. Blunt, a local newspaper editor who blogs pseudonymously at Playing The Game, pushes this line hard:
It will be fun to watch this unfold and every major national paper is likely to get dragged into it but what actual purpose does it serve?
Journalists often lie, cheat, beg, borrow, and steal for a cracking story.
But is using subterfuge really that bad to expose the porkie pies of others, especially celebrities. Those vacuous arseholes who only want publicity when it serves their own purposes but, in the words of Dad’s Army, ‘don’t like it up ‘em’.
I agree that it may got out of hand over at News Int’s factory farming of mobiles (ALLEGEDLY) but, Christ, good intel is still good intel wherever it comes from.
Many people say what gives us the right to appoint ourselves the moral bastions of this country. But I would argue that because most good journalists are essentially amoral – it goes beyond what we think is right or wrong.
The problem with this, though, is that it starts out claiming that journalism is working to a higher standard than the law, and ends by saying that it’s amoral, playing out in a few lines the cognitive dissonance that the News Of The World was trying to avoid over several paragraphs. You can be immoral and inside the law, and claim to be untouchable; or you can be outside the law and morally inspired, and claim special privileges.
But when you demand extra-legal privileges so that you can pursue your amoral craft – well, then you’re not making an appeal for sympathy so much as inviting crushing regulation on your own trade. Giving evidence to the select committee on culture, media and sport, Ian Hislop said “It’s dangerous to let Mr Mosley impose his anger at what happened to him to allow him to change the law.” One of the problems with the mass invasion engaged in by the NOTW is that they may well have created scores more mini-Mosleys, some of whom may well have the fury, the political sympathy and the private means to push for legal changes.
Scale counts, of course. The comparison with the MP’s expenses scandal works on two levels, as Fleet Street Blues points out: because that was an example of longstanding and fairly mundane malpractice that suddenly hit the headlines, and because it’s also an example of a very good story picked up nefariously. Lots of MPs need a second home, but that doesn’t mean they should get away with a moat. Journalists need stories, but a scoop like expenses doesn’t justify low-grade habitual spying. Throwing out the logic of the newsroom as justification risks dragging down the good stuff with the dicey, and journalists who fervently believe that there’s nothing to see here might be wise to remember the treatment that they – and MPs – dealt to Speaker Martin.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
“The sheer thrill of disclosure”
When Rebekah Wade gave her Cudlipp lecture this January, her description of the journalistic process was breathless excitement with a few throwaway suggestions of democratic principle:
Our ancient craft is to tell many people what few people know. The sheer thrill of disclosure motivates the best journalists. And as an industry, we should use our collective power to campaign for the freedom to do so. [...]
One efficient, if immoral, way of telling many people what few people know is to hack mobile phone inboxes while fishing for stories – a practice for which Wade’s employer News International has had to pay £1m in compensation. And the Guardian’s front page story on the News Of The World’s surveillance habits (by Nick Davies, who has been following the use of dark arts in newsrooms for some years now) is also a great example of telling many what few people know. Except that, according to Wade’s lecture, scrutiny of the media is a special case where disclosure ought to be avoided:
Sometimes I suspect most of the media commentariat are suffering from Munchausen syndrome. They are certainly making us suffer unnecessarily! Only journalism allows us to exist. Yet they often decry its existence. And it’s the epitome of self-flagellation when The Guardian publishes Max Mosley’s views on press freedom. The relentless negativity, this almost morbid fascination with our own demise, must stop. [...] You would understand if the public were interested in our navel-gazing. But they are not.
News International papers are currently avoiding navel gazing with admirable consistency: the Sun and the News Of The World aren’t running the story at all, while the Times has tucked the story away in their “More News” section. This is a story with many angles – privacy, self-regulation, the role of the police, the relationship between media corporations and parliament. It just happens that all these angles conflict with the mission statement that Wade lay out at the end of her lecture:
We need to ask ourselves: Can we unite to fight against a privacy law that has no place in a democracy ? Can we agree that self-regulation is the best way to deal with the occasional excesses of a free press? Can we have a press that has the courage and commitment to listen to and fight for its readers? Can we survive this economic climate if we keep investment in journalism at the heart of what we do? I suggest to you tonight: in the words of Bob The Builder, plagiarised by Barak Obama. Yes. We. Can.
Wade’s employers have been “investing in journalism” by invading privacy and then paying off the victims with huge compensation. Self-regulation has failed to deal with that practice. And she proposes that the newspaper industry “listen to and fight for” their readers by hiding their own workings from the people who consume their product. The real excitement in this story is that it offers to throw wide open all those things that Wade would rather nobody talked about.
© Sarah Ditum 2009
Past Papers: washed out
In summer 2007, I was living in Sheffield in a house that backed onto the River Don. When the flood came, I was on my own with my children (then five and one) – and, it turned out, not very much idea of how to cope with a natural disaster. This is my account of the flood as I blogged it a few days later. Tonight, I’m going to see The Caravan, a piece of theatre about the floods and their aftermath, so it seemed like a good time to dust off this post and relive my horrors. (The Chris who appears at the end is currently fighting cinema rather than the elements.)
Edit 11 August 2009: my review of The Caravan is now up here.
(Photo by minkymonkeymoo, used under Creative Commons license.)
And the PCC’s decision is in on the Dunblane splash…
Ms Elizabeth Mullan, Mr Robert Weir & Ms Morag Campbell complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an article headlined “Anniversary shame of Dunblane survivors”, published in the Scottish Sunday Express on 8 March 2009, intruded into their sons’ private lives in breach of Clause 3 (Privacy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.
The complaint was upheld. [...]
[The boys] had done nothing to warrant media scrutiny, and the images appeared to have been taken out of context and presented in a way that was designed to humiliate or embarrass them. Even if the images were available freely online, the way they were used – when there was no particular reason for the boys to be in the news – represented a fundamental failure to respect their private lives. Publication represented a serious error of judgement on the part of the newspaper.
Although the editor had taken steps to resolve the complaint, and rightly published an apology, the breach of the Code was so serious that no apology could remedy it.
And that’s where the judgement ends, because that’s where the PCC’s powers end. But then, we already knew that press self-regulation doesn’t work: if judgements like these had any value, newspapers would avoid them by not publishing cheap, intrusive, salacious pieces in the first place. The PCC is right at least that an apology can’t remedy the damage already done. It’s also highly unlikely to dissuade future journalists from commiting more damage of the same kind.
(I originally blogged here on the Express’ Dunblane story and the reaction to it.)
© Sarah Ditum 2009.
