With the expansion of the internet and online content, people are constantly exposed to so much information from so many platforms, they often feel as though they do not need journalists anymore. The disconnect between journalism and the wider population has been worsened by President Donald Trump and the way he labels all media criticism as ‘fake news’. On the other hand, if sensible people are prepared to go along with his spewings, it can only mean that professional journalism is already deeply discredited in their eyes. Once again, there is much for journalism to do re-connect.

I believe that the next generation of journalists can restore the authority of journalism by implementing a set of changes to the way journalism works.

Yes, we can operate on the nearly new platforms associated with digital media technology. But this in itself is not enough. What matters most is the content created for such platforms. For example, a YouTuber known as Philip DeFranco has garnered a sizeable audience for his daily news show that tackles everything from celebrity news to politics. He is a real and relatable person who approaches the news agenda in a fresh, fun way. Although there are lots of people doing this much, what makes DeFranco distinctive is his determination to look at topical issues from every side; he criticises all sides, appraising their strengths and weaknesses in order for his viewers to come to their own judgement. In this way, he separates his work from the set of views and beliefs which are unique to him as a private individual. Not that he does this as faceless fact collector; instead he has stretched his personality far enough to engage with opinions and arguments which are a long way from his own.

Philip DeFranco has managed to gain his audience’s trust through his ability to argue for and against both sides of every controversy. Most notably, this was the case with his coverage of the 2016 US Presidential Election, in which he critiqued all standpoints equally and fairly. In effect, he cracked the problem of objectivity by reinventing it in a personable form.

It would be a cop out to say that to safeguard the future of journalism all that is required of us is to make use of new kit. It is not just that journalism has been slow to embrace new platforms; the crucial question is how we re-formulate journalism to make best use of such vehicles.

In order to re-connect with today’s readers and viewers, journalism will have to change the way it approaches the news. Making it personal and disciplined at the same time, as DeFranco has managed to do, seems the best way for journalism to carry on. As I see it, that’s the combination with which to begin to restore the art of journalism.

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Introduction

What follows is a small scale attempt at a different way of doing journalism – a new version of journalism which might have less difficulty distinguishing itself from the rest of the digital landscape. However, the fact that the author of this experiment feels the need to introduce it, already suggests that it may not have been entirely successful. If his Cartoons really represented a new way of doing journalism, they would need no further presentation; speaking for themselves, they would be self-sufficient, surely?

But please note that nothing like the Cartoons experiment has ever been conducted before. Moreover, writing the Cartoons forms only part of the experiment; the other part consists of how you receive them. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to explain to you, in your role as Part Two of the experiment, what the author hopes you will receive from Part One. This in the further hope that something will be gained from the Cartoons experiment – perhaps enough for an improved version of it, even if the early results of the first iteration were not up to scratch.

Others among you will have recoiled at the prospect of ‘literary journalism’. Oil and water, some of you are saying. Again, please note that the current issue of Proof is primarily concerned with form; also that the Cartoons comprise an experimental form of words for potential use by journalists. Furthermore, following Cyril Connolly’s construction that literature is to be read twice and journalism less often, Proof’s Cartoons comprise a form of writing which requires the writer to read and re-read his own words, drafting and re-drafting in order to formulate them just so. Hence the hybrid: ‘literary journalism’.

Enough caveat; let’s get on.

The idea is to devise a new form of reporting which gets to the essence of what’s being reported. Not that previous forms of reporting have failed to do this. Formats such as the inverted pyramid were largely successful in their own way, for their own times. The problem is that their times and ours are not the same. Accordingly, at this time even old stagers cannot play the same part as well as they used to. New ways are needed for journalism to regain its essential character.

The argument that essence is essential to journalism – summarised as ‘the importance of being essentialist’ – is set out elsewhere in Proof, so there is no need to re-set it here. But why is this form – the Cartoon – thought to be of the essence? That is the question for this Introduction. Here is the Cartoonist’s first answer:

• The Cartoon is designed to allow the reporter to shift instantaneously from close up to long shot, from particular detail to general observation. Working within one, and only one, format – the Cartoon, the reporter can move his material very quickly, reconfiguring his observations the instant he arrives at them; in much less time than it would take to make the transfer across a series of multimedia platforms.
• The Cartoon caters for the reporter’s peripheral vision: it enables him to make sideways references to other, prior representations of human experience, such as advertising copy, pop songs, iconic images, as well as literary sources; incorporating these into what becomes a new composition. Thus the reported event is located not only in space and time (where and when, as of old); it is also positioned in the media landscape – today’s common land.
• Timing is crucial: the Cartoon is based on the assumption that most of its readers will have already received the latest basic information, coming at them along different, digital pathways (text, Twitter, online TV). It does not attempt to compete with these on speed of information delivery. Its selling point is composition. It addresses the reader as follows: though you will already have seen or heard of this event in bits and bytes, its essence is revealed here for the first time, now that it has been composed into a Cartoon.

By way of a second answer to the same question – why this form now?, here’s how the cartoonist came upon the Cartoon as a form of writing.

On and off over the past few years I have worked on a comic novel about the attempt to generate a shared national experience by hosting the Olympics in London. This story of mine, Games Makers: a London satire, was eventually published on April Fool’s Day 2012 and is now freely downloadable at http://londonsatire.com. I won’t ruin the suspense by summarising the plot; suffice to say that panic breaks out among those in charge of London 2012 when the mega-event they’ve staked everything on, looks set to become the non-event of all time – the world’s first mega-non-event. Their problem is that the Games are not tangible enough to become truly memorable; still less a transformative experience. With the Olympics about to start, Londoners remain stubbornly unengaged. Meanwhile the Director of the Cultural Olympiad cannot bear London’s lightness of being any longer; he makes a last ditch attempt to give the Games weight, substance and tangibility; until it all comes crashing down around him.

Clear as mud? You are welcome go ahead and read the novel. But for now, please note that writing Games Makers was my attempt to make the intangible, tangible. By describing London-lite, I was trying to constitute it as something we can grasp. Not blowing the mist away, but thickening the air; making London foggy again. Similarly, Alex Cameron, the superb designer who worked with me on the finished product (if you download Games Makers from our site, be sure to click on his PDF version), developed a set of typographical devices – twists and turns in the use of type – so that the form in which the story is contained, also contains the very thing that is lacking in the lives of its characters: texture. This bears repeating: with this text, texture is what we were aiming to create.

As I finished the novel, I started to apply some of the same techniques in an effort to describe not just one event, visible on the London horizon since 2005; but a stream of events, as and when they appeared in the news. Again, the goal was to capture each event, to materialise it in the description thereof. In other words, to get at the essence of it; where essence is not to be confused with the basics, which, increasingly, can be obtained for free, and with decreasing reference to paid-for, professional journalists.

Thus the work which has gone into the Cartoons is a continuation of the work which went into Games Makers. In both projects, in much the same way, I have been trying to arrive at a form which allows us (the writer and his readers) to hover over the media landscape and touch base with the fine detail of human experience.

Whether this could work as a new way of working for journalists; moreover, a way of working that other people would be willing to pay for – I honestly do not know. I would like to think so. As a precedent, I have in mind the kind of photography which emerged in the 1930s in the work of Kertesz and others. At that moment more people than ever before were starting to take photographs, partly because of the increasing availability of cameras such the Kodak Brownie, and partly because of the proliferation of cars like the Model T, which transported millions of folk to new places where they were keen to take pictures of each other. However, just as the camera became generally available, instead of all photographs defaulting to the level of holiday snaps, there emerged a special form of photography – a higher form, and with it a new kind of photographer. Similarly, the moment – this moment of ours – when almost anyone can report the basics using digital media technology, may also be the moment when a special form of reporting emerges – a higher form, and with it a new kind of reporter.

But the Proof of the writing is in the reading: it is for you to decide whether the sketches I have come up with could form the template for a different kind of reporting.

You may think that the writing is just not good enough; or perhaps you will say this is simply not journalism; and even if you accept that the writing is not bad, and that it could be described as journalistic, it might also be the case that the form in which it appears, remains prohibitively idiosyncratic. If having read the Cartoons you come to this last conclusion, you are effectively saying that the experiment was a brave one, and its results may be worth looking at, if you happen to have the time, yet it is ultimately unreal, not serviceable, because it is not reproducible: nothing like this form of writing can be practiced by other writers. This would make me a far, far lesser version of L.S. Lowry, who was both a uniquely brilliant artist and a dead-end in the history of art. Whereas with the Cartoons my ambition has been – still is – to influence the history of journalism, by showing that journalism can become not the first draft of history (been there, done that), but history’s first composition.

Please read the following Cartoons and compose your responses, if you have any, to andrewcalcutt@gmail.com

Cartoons

(1)

Royal Preserve

Dateline: 2^nd March 2012

Halfway between a wave and the brush-off, Prince Harry gestures to Caribbean photographers at the start of his first solo tour. He is ginger and slightly gauche. Back in London his grandmother, the elderly Queen Elizabeth, looks quizzically at the food hamper produced by Fortnum and Mason to mark her Diamond Jubilee (1952-2012).

Nestling among the preserves, 60 years of judgment reserved.

(2)

By A Nose

Dateline: 2^nd March 2012

When injured journalist Edith Bouvier was brought home to Paris from Homs, Syria, she was carried off the plane sheathed in protective padding – only her nose poking out from under the red wraparound. On the runway, in attendance: President Sarkozy. But this homecoming was too intimate – daughters rush forward to hug their mother’s prostrate form – for Sarkozy to make a show of it. Like the estranged husband that no one finds time to acknowledge, the president of France was obliged to withdraw.

(3)

Anders Breivik: the fascist salute that hardly was

Dateline: 16^th April, Central Criminal Court, Oslo

Enter the……disappointment

Fat face. Small eyes behind considerable expanse of flesh and forehead. Receding hair and a thin strip of beard with a patch that’s missing – either his beard is also balding, or he made a mistake when shaving. Bulky. Suit, collar and tie in a style that might be 1970s-retro; but isn’t.

‘Defiant salute,’ they said of Anders Behring Breivik’s far-right gesture to the Oslo court on the first day of his mass murder trial.

(Norway, summer 2011; 77 dead in a killing spree directed ‘against multiculturalism’ – Breivik’s description).

But the Reuters clip shows an understated movement. Breivik’s right arm touches the left side of his chest, grazing it lightly before unbending into the familiar, straight-armed gesture – only for a moment.

His arm has performed a cautious curve, not the absolute angles associated with ‘fascist salute’. Completing this modest arc, Breivik sits down with downcast eyes.

Perhaps he swore to himself he would salute, then lacked the will to tough it out. Perhaps that’s how he murdered his victims: diffidently.

Responding to the rattle and shuffle of countless camera shutters, Breivik half-smiles, his teeth kept hidden by thin lips. Although the cameras are keen, keen, keen to find something striking, exciting, disturbing, there is nothing to show for the extraordinary carnage caused by this seemingly unexceptional person.

A man ill-at-ease with himself, but so what? On that score, no different from a billion others.

(4)

Jason Russell: textbook study of arrested development

Dateline 10^th March 2012, Reuters studio

Firm chin, full jaw, and a smile so wide a family of Mexicans could move in there. Of course his teeth are pearly white.

Raised in San Diego, graduate of the University of Southern California, Jason Russell’s face testifies to the expansive wealth of the Sunshine State.

Co-producer/director of world-renowned viral movie Kony 2012, and co-founder of the charity, Invisible Children, Russell is famous for bearing witness to the plight of African child soldiers pressed into Joseph Kony’s militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army. He has come in to a Reuter’s studio to respond to queries and criticisms of his film.

‘I had just finished my film degree at USC’, Russell recalls, ‘and I wanted that post-graduation globetrotting adventure. I figured instead of backpacking Europe, I’d visit an African genocide.’

‘Figured’ – early morning reruns of Wagon Train and Rawhide sure left their mark. ‘Visit an African genocide’ – is this Kardashian-style self-obsession? Or candid admission of same, which effectively cancels it out? Russell’s relaxed manner says: you decide; his self-confidence comes with 40 million internet hits.

He shrugs off the complaint that Kony 2012 is one-sided: ‘this video is not the answer, it is just the gateway to the conversation.’ But this self-confidence is only skin deep; super-facial. Having exposed the plight of particular children, Russell has to hide behind the condition of childhood in general.

‘When you get older, you get muddled and polluted by the way the world is supposed to work,’ he explains. Thus children respond unequivocally to his film because they ‘have very clear understanding’, not ‘muddled’ or ‘polluted’ by grown-up hang-ups; such as objectivity or getting the story right, right?

All that bone and muscle and gristle. So much protein invested in such a prize specimen of American manhood. But still Russell defers to a child’s ‘understanding’.

His kind of deference would make kids of us all.

(5)

Mourning Man and the Dissolution of Self

Dateline 20^th April 2012, Jinnah International Airport

Eyes more than half-closed, mouth wide open; thick, upper lip stretched across the horseshoe arch of his top teeth. Whatever it is pouring out of this man’s throat, it clearly means an awful lot to him.

If it was his own hand caressing his right cheek, looking at this picture we’d put him in the midst of a vocal performance; and in our minds we would fill in the sound of him singing. But the hand in the photograph is someone else’s, reaching out to comfort this man whose wife, child, father, friend – who knows?, is presumed dead after an airliner fell out of the sky while preparing to land at Jinnah International Airport, Islamabad.

Microphones on either side of the mourning man, thrust forward to capture his moans and wails, serve to reinforce the idea of performance. For us, in a way, it is. The curve of his open mouth, the framing of the photograph – this is grief, perfectly formed.

But for the man we’re looking at, sheer loss has rendered him shapeless. His feelings are not framed at all. Right now, he does not even have a point of view from which to look back at us.

(6)

Sisters of Surprise

Dateline: 21^st April Bahrain

Her head is loosely covered with a shawl, and a lock of hair has spilled out and splashed over the right side of the young woman’s face. The left side is obscured by the glare of bright sunlight shining through a police visor. Right, left – her face is effectively screened off on both sides. Thus the religious rules are more-or-less observed, if only by chance.

Without seeing right through this accidental screening, we are looking at the face of Zayban al-Kkawaja, daughter of human rights activist Adbulhadi al-Khawaja, stopped by helmeted riot cops on her way to the anti-F1 Grand Prix protest in the markets district of Manama, Bahrain. But Zayban is not the one wearing the visor; this belongs to a police officer standing directly in front of her.

Zayban is holding her hands at chest height. She has made them into fists, and although we can’t see her eyes, from the tilt of her head we can tell she is looking intently into the eyes of the officer blocking her way. ‘Are you going to cuff me, then?’, her look, which we can’t quite see, would seem to be saying. The officer’s thumb and forefinger are already wrapped around Zayban’s right wrist.

In order for the religious rules to be observed, however, the restraining officer must be a woman. The rules that dictate segregated protests in Bahrain (male protestors separated from women), also demand segregated policing – only female officers to manhandle female protestors.

Underneath the visor, therefore, a pert nose. Decked out in the stuff of Robocop (matt black padding and webbing), a small, human form. There is even a pouch beneath her helmet at the back of her neck, so that the female Robocop can conceal the rope of her own dark hair.

(7)

Pretend Answers and Real Questions

Dateline: 24^th April 2012, Leveson Inquiry, London

Young James’ eyebrows are raised in a continuous, upward frown. Beneath them, his spectacles are fashionably large, the frames transparent like the Milky Bar Kid’s.

The Milky Bar Kid is coming to town. This Milky Bar Kid can’t help himself frown.

With his left hand he is holding onto the lower part of his right arm, which is resting – it’s being made to lie still – on the table in front of him. Meanwhile his right hand is tucked under his left elbow, so that the weight of his left, upper arm is keeping it down.

Hold on tight, he seems to be telling himself, lest extravagant hand movements lead to loose talk.

In town today is James Murdoch, son of, recently resigned from, due to the phone hacking scandal and related events at his father’s News International. At the current session of the Leveson Inquiry, chaired by Lord Leveson and commissioned by prime minister David Cameron to investigate ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’, James Murdoch is being asked to answer for a series of internal emails re: his thwarted attempt to overcome restrictions on UK media ownership and gain full control of BSkyB.

The question is: given that the (Liberal Democrat) secretary of state for business was not well disposed towards ‘the Murdoch press’, were you not jockeying for position with the (Conservative) secretary of state for culture, who was likely to look more favourably on a bid from your family firm?

Although James clearly feels the need to keep a grip on himself, he seems to be handling the pressure. He maintains that he would not conduct business in a directly politicised manner. While it is hard to credit such a clear cut distinction between business class and the political elite – as if they only ever speak to each other through formal channels, as he makes this distinction and elaborates upon it, Young James’ voice becomes more insistent; he appears to gain in stature.

Not for what he is ostensibly saying in response to his inquisitors (the flat denial simply sounds flat), but for the tacit questions underlying his answers:

Don’t you people know better than to wash this kind of linen in public? In the tired, old country that you guys live in, have you forgotten what it takes to get anything done?

(8)

Messrs Rueful

Dateline: 1^st May 2012

His hands on the table are the mottled hands of an old man, though his eyes are sharp as pins. Pausing between sentences, his mouth defaults to a downward curve – a pictogram of sadness and regret.

Last week, giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch kept his composure, managing to maintain his stance as a newspaperman. Particular answers to detailed questions (so much detail from all those emails) were generally a way of saying: that’s who I am – a newspaperman.

In front of Lord Leveson, Rupert was careful to regret the damage done to others, ruing the day he allowed himself to be compromised by corporate concerns.

If I hadn’t let myself be corporatised, none of this would have happened, Murdoch seemed to be saying. And the way he said it: so much the cartoon he could have been Roger Hargreaves’ latest character, Mister Rueful.

This was a more positive performance than last year when, quizzed by the parliamentary select committee for Culture, Media and Sport (a group of senior MPs), Murdoch Snr had seemed like King Lear upon the blasted heath: lost.

Days later, he killed a newspaper; akin to suicide for a man like him; or, for the man he wants us to think is him. But then, by launching the Sun on Sunday to replace the News of the World (deceased), he was seen resurrecting himself. In his shirtsleeves among the newsmen of Wapping, Rupert rolled the stone away from his own tomb.

Two months later on 1^st May, with their announcement that ‘Rupert Murdoch is not fit to undertake the stewardship of a major international company’, members of that select committee are trying to roll it back on top of him; punching his lights out; shutting him out of the corridors of power.

They looked nervous, conscious of the whole world watching, even while making their pronouncement. However much they want to be the MPs who dethroned Murdoch, there’s no guarantee that the British government – or even the British people – will let the old king go down.

In months or years to come, those MPs may be rueful about what they said today; just as Rupert has come to rue the day he looked the other way.

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Collision At The Crossroads: tabloids crash into celebrity journalism

It had to happen. The recent shift towards the cult of personality (in journalism and wider society) was bound to collide with impersonal news reporting in the narrow, tabloid tradition. Combine this with left-of-centre hostility towards ‘the Murdoch Press’, and the conditions were ripe for the multiple pile-up which includes Hackgate, the end of the News of the World, and LevesonPlus (Lord Leveson’s inquiry plus the report of the parliamentary select committee for Culture, Media and Sport, frequent calls for media reform, etc etc).

We are constantly reminded that there were more than a few bad apples rotting in the News International barrel. But (if you’ll allow my original metaphor) ascribing the car crash to a whole fleet of journalists, is no less inadequate than putting it down to a few reckless motorists. The road is the thing. In order to explain the collision, we need to map the route leading up to it. Accordingly, this essay surveys the main approaches pursued by the two, different drivers of UK journalism since the late 1980s, and shows how they would inevitably come together, head-on.

The Tabloid Route

The tabloid road is especially demanding. The style of writing required of tabloid journalists is unusually compressed. Direct and to the point. If broadsheet newspapers sometimes take on the characteristics of a dinner party, the tabs are more like fast food. Though the results can be messy, there’s no messing about.

Tabloid style is the result of pressure to cram news into a smaller space, i.e. fewer square inches of newsprint than a broadsheet. Over time, the pressure to compress was consolidated into a distinctive tradition. Furthermore, there is less room to deviate from this tradition. Literally. Space restrictions are an additional restriction on further development. The tabloid has fewer columns in which to try out alternatives.

This means that the tabloid tradition is stronger than most. In other words, the tabs are journalism’s natural conservatives. (NB if this were a tabloid, there would be no space to make the same point ‘in other words’.) In tabloid news, even today, the journalist is still expected to write the story as if he himself does not exist, using an impersonal frame of reference which has been largely lifted from other news platforms. Where both broadsheets and the BBC would now allow or even encourage their reporters to say ‘I’, more often than not the tabloids still say ‘no’ to such usage.

There are other ways in which the ghost of Journalism Past continues to haunt the tabloids. Tabloid journalists continue to see themselves hunting quarry and capturing stories. Moreover, they expect the hunt to come to a decisive end in a key phrase or ‘killer quote’ that clinches it. Thus the Sun‘s infamous headline, ‘Gotcha!’, not only described the sinking of the General Belgrano, it also told the story of the tabloid tradition in one, deathly word. Though this headline only appeared in the paper’s first edition, three decades later the tabloids were still living the life which it symbolised.

The celebrity route

Meanwhile, the rest of the world had moved on. As early as the late 1980s, celebrity magazines put a new gloss on UK journalism. Titles such as Hello! allowed readers to download the domestic interiors of the rich and famous, thereby uploading themselves into a newly privatised culture – enacted in Thatcherite legislation; represented by the rapid rise of celebrity magazines.

Whereas in the tabloid tradition, finality is the supreme virtue (this is the story; end of), celebrity journalism has been deliberately inconclusive: in our next issue, we go inside XXX’s wardrobe; in the following issue, we will turn out her handbag, etc etc. Thus each magazine article serves only to connect the one before and the one after. In this respect, celebrity magazines anticipated the continuous flow of social media.

In the 1980s the new emphasis on celebrity also signalled a revised role for journalism, which coincided with the emergence of financial services as the UK’s ‘engine for growth’. But this was no mere coincidence. In different ways, both the rise of celebrity journalism and the expansion of financial services represented the growing role of mediating activity in a society at some distance from industrial production. When news is a ‘conversation’ and journalists its mediators, they are acting in much the same mediating capacity as their counterparts in the City; and just like the markets for fictitious capital, this kind of journalism is particularly liable to crash.

Coming to the crossroads

Celebrity magazines (early incarnation) and the iPhone (first iteration) are separated by two decades. During that time there was a considerable amount of lane-hopping between the tabloid tradition and the newly personalised form of celebrity journalism.

Although the tabs and the magz were always going to bang into each other, at first they seemed to hit it off.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showed that one of the staples of modern journalism – the battle of political ideologies – was fast becoming a hollow exercise. Within the space of a few months, the world of politics was largely emptied out; and this left the tabloids in something of a vacuum. They filled it with a knowing tone of voice, partly in tune with what was then referred to as ‘the postmodern condition’, and partly a straight lift from the nudge and the wink of the music hall, which had been a formative influence on the tabloids’ original incarnation. Headlines such as ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ were largely an aside to the audience; sorry, readership. Between the lines, the subs were saying: we know you don’t believe what you read in the papers, or what the politicians are telling you; neither do we.

In turn, this tone of voice was adopted by the next generation of celebrity magazines, epitomised in the re-vamp of Heat under its second editor, Mark Frith. Instead of the adulatory tones of Hello! and OK!, the new version of celebrity took a knowing look at celebrity itself. Once described as ‘irony in the soul’, this kind of knowingness may also be considered ‘postmodern’. Yet the new magz took the form of their postmodernism from the tabs, who had themselves resurrected it from the good old days when popular journalism was a kind of theatre, with the drama laid out on the breakfast table instead of the stage.

Having taken up the aside – the point at which the performer steps out of the action and comes to the side of the stage to address the audience, the new journalism has been running away with it ever since. Led by, but not exclusive to magazines, what was only on the side has since become central. In such media circles (as we have seen, they are intended to be circuitous), direct speech is now the default mode of address: your magazine; tell us about your life, your feelings etc. In its new-found you-and-us mode, journalism is no longer the staging of the story; instead it becomes a conversation about some personalities (celebrities) undertaken by other persons, aka journalists and ‘users’ (the people formerly known as readers). This is the point at which journalism, especially magazine journalism, segues into our current usage of social media.

So far we have shown celebrity journalism borrowing from the tabloid tradition, in such a way as to make its borrowings into something else. But there was traffic in the other direction, too. During the 1990s, tabloids became heavily indebted to the world of celebrity, especially that part of it which appears on TV. Accordingly, the boss of the Daily Mirror became a ‘celebrity tabloid editor’: Piers Morgan turned the Mirror into a celebrity-based paper and became a ‘sleb’ himself. Forced to resign after he was hoaxed (Morgan was unable to kick the tyres on a traditional tabloid ‘scoop’), he went on to be a TV personality.

But just as the magz re-made what they borrowed from the tabs, when the tabloids took up with celebrity, their tradition obliged them to treat it differently. Although they signed up to perform some of that circulating journalism in which stories need not – indeed, they had better not – come to a head, tabloid journalists could not give up the habit of trying to get the story and finish the job. Furthermore, this habit was more than a hangover from the past. Uncharacteristically removed from the tradition of popular, political journalism (deceased), uncomfortably reliant on the alien world of televised celebrity, the tabloids felt they had to hold onto something of their former selves, lest they cease to exist as a distinctive type within the print. Without the presence of the past, the tabloids would have feared even more for their future. Hence the fateful decision – more like compulsion, really – to combine the close-up on personality with the traditionally impersonal tone of hard news reporting.

Slow motion crash

It took Milly Dowler’s phone to set off the crash. On the one hand, journalists hacking into it, in search of the elusive personal detail that would somehow be conclusive; on the other hand, the dead girl’s phone symbolising the new life (ours as well as hers) comprised of countless, continuous exchanges.

The tabloid tradition, in which murder is the best story because it is the ultimate compression of human life. Versus the new journalism, which prefers illness because it is comparatively indefinite. Only now, as LevesonPlus looks set to run and run, we are asked to sit through saga of journalism’s own sickness.

In the current case notes, some positive aspects of news reporting have been misdiagnosed as morbid symptoms; even the ambition to ‘nail the story’ comes in for a bad press. But we do not have to sit on our hands. Although the crash was going to happen in some shape or form, we are not condemned to watch the sequence again and again without protest. Even if it did become distorted, we should still celebrate the tabloid ambition to get the definitive story, and define it in the shortest, simplest terms. Having allowed the tabloid tradition to be corrupted, we will have to find new ways of meeting those terms; but they are worth holding out for, nonetheless.

Andrew Calcutt

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Introduction

Previously in Proof, a small number of journalists made the case for reinstating the much-maligned concept of objectivity – a strong case based on four, substantial points:

1) Journalism is the objectification of human experience. The journalist makes an object – the story – out of what is happening to human beings; and objectivity is the quality of objectification. Thus the rejection of objectivity is a rejection of objectification; as such, it is also the negation of journalism.

2) Journalism is a secondary form of objectification: it makes an account of the world which human beings have already made. Primary objectification (human activity) and its secondary form (journalism followed by other kinds of knowledge of the world we humans have activated) together amount to the realisation of the human subject. In its widest sense, objectification compounds the primary and the secondary: it is the sum of what the human subject has done, in thought and deed. Thus subjectivity and objectivity are not only opposites, they are also related; and the value of journalism is the strength of their relationship. Conversely, the strength of their relationship is the value of journalism. Accordingly, when their relationship is weak, the value of journalism is lowered.

3) Against a background of ‘citizen journalism’ and user-generated media content, the value of professional journalism has never been lower. In response, journalists have further weakened the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity by disowning objectivity in favour of subjectivity. In effect, we have been short-selling our own stock, deflating what we do in a misguided attempt to re-float it for the digital age. But objectivity is the USP of the professionals. As we distance ourselves from it, so we endanger our own jobs in journalism and the social role of journalism. On both counts, journalists must rediscover their objective side – or risk extinction.

If you have got this far, Dear Reader, you’ll know why the Proof-ers who made this argument did not make much headway with it. As formulated above, its positive message – objectivity is human not alien, requires prior recognition of ‘the human subject’ – a universal concept which few people are now able to recognise. In other words, to understand Proof‘s positive message in this form, requires prior conceptualisation of universal human activity. If you can get the message, in other words, you don’t need to hear it, aka preaching to the converted. Meanwhile, the journalists we were trying to get to, could not get past the negative connotations of objectivity, no matter how often we said that its bad press was totally unjustified.

What follows, then, is a new way of conveying the original message of the first issue of Proof: the journalist is essential, but only if journalists live up to their social role; moreover, since the public will only pay for essentials, professional journalists had better live up to this social role or they risk becoming superfluous.

However, apart from our internal limitations, events in the outside world also demand a different level of Proof. If our first issue came out when journalism was entering an economic crisis, during the past two years UK journalists have been dragged into a moral crisis. In both senses – moral and commercial – journalism is now called upon to prove its worth; and Proof will duly respond to each aspect of this dual crisis.

In the good old days (2009-10) when we only had one crisis to deal with, it was widely believed that digital technology had done the dirty on paid-for journalism. Now it is widely held that the sordid activity of journalists, especially those employed by the Dirty Digger, has damned the ‘profession’ a second time. But in our analysis, the second form of damnation is as spurious as the first. Moral re-armament will not be the ultimate salvation of journalism, any more than digital technology was the only cause of its commercial decline. Similarly, if the fixation with digital technology was unhelpful, preoccupying ourselves with morality is equally misguided. The real priority is to reformulate the story. Ethics and economics will solve themselves, almost, if journalists first focus on finding form.

Reformulating Journalism: the essentialist manifesto

Journalism faces reform
The Leveson inquiry is yet to conclude, but the stage is already set for ‘statutory underpinning’ of journalism, i.e. legitimate, journalistic activity designated so that journalists will be obliged to adhere to this designation in order to gain legitimacy. Journalism’s reformers stress that this constitutes neither gatekeeping nor state censorship. They may be right; but ‘statutory underpinning’ will import into journalism the compliance culture (an audit for this, a risk assessment for that) which has already proved so obstructive elsewhere. In higher education, for example, ‘closing the loop’ means that academics are increasingly bound up within procedural circuits. This kind of circular definition is absolutely not what journalism needs.

Journalism faces formlessness
To keep up with what non-journalists can now do for themselves in social media, journalists have been doing whatever it takes to stay in the conversation. But when journalism loses its close association with recognised forms, e.g. the hard news story in the form of an inverted pyramid, unless it also finds new forms to be identified by, it can only be moving towards formlessness. Recent movements in this direction have been championed as the liberation of journalism from formal constraint and elitist restraint. Unfortunately, as journalism becomes anything you want it to be, there is less certainty about what anyone will want it for (or why they would pay for professional journalists to do whatever it is).

Journalism needs reformulation
The trend towards formlessness in journalism amounts to the deformation of journalism. This is the biggest threat facing journalism today. Phone hacking may have got out of hand, but the deformation of journalism as a whole is a more pressing problem than the defamation of individuals by particular journalists. Moreover, if journalists continue to be preoccupied with the moral reform of journalism, the deformation process may continue unchecked until there is little left to reform.

For journalism to thrive, journalists must not be dragooned into reform school, to be lectured by the new worthies of ‘self-esteem’ and ‘well being’; instead we should be teaching ourselves to reformulate the story, finding new forms of expression in which journalism can distinguish itself once more.

Journalism is essentialism
We habitually say that ‘journalism is essential’ but recent developments suggest otherwise; increasingly, the-people-formerly-known-as -readers can take it or leave it. Better to say that journalism was essential as and when it was essentialist, i.e. when journalism was expected to capture the essence of events and journalists found a distinctive way of realising this expectation – at least, in part. Having studiously avoided philosophy, journalists may well recoil from such terms; nonetheless, the journalist has always been a tacit essentialist.

The essence of events is the necessity of journalism
If journalists must capture the essence of events in order to remain essential, this means that journalism needs essentialism or it is bound to become optional.

In our faux modest way we are wont to say that we have ‘nailed the story’; but this really means capturing the essence of an event, where ‘essence’ includes the basics (who, what, where etc), but it is not reducible to them. Thus the essence of events entails more than the old formula; and it is different again from the new digital discourse around events and non-events.

Conversely, without aiming for essence and minus a distinctive form in which to attain it, what looks and sounds like journalism has already slipped into something casual; and therefore inessential. Many journalists are now performing a kind of post-journalism, which lacks definition because it has lost the ambition to define. Their work is in poor shape; and their long-term employment prospects are equally uncertain.

But if journalism shapes up, it could regain its essentialism. The best chance we have lies in the attempt to capture the essential character of events and to make this capture in new and distinctive forms.

Reformulating the story along essentialist lines is the only way to make journalism essential again.

By analysis and experiment, the current issue of Proof makes a small contribution to the fulfilment of this daunting task.

. But the absence of morality among some journalists is less damaging than the lack of definition across journalism as a whole. Having conceded that ‘there’s always someone out there who knows more than us’, we are losing the will to define what we see; and we tend to write our stories in the same way – without a definite shape. In form as well as content, our stories are becoming indefinite. As a result, journalism is close to losing its distinctive character. In this context, the reformation we really need is a re-formation of the story.

[pullquote]But the absence of morality among some journalists is less damaging than the lack of definition across journalism as a whole[/pullquote]

The Reformation of Journalism is Proof’s theme for 2012. But re-forming the story must take precedence over re-setting the moral compass. Story, first; morality, second – unless we follow this order of priorities, journalism will be unable to regain its sense of direction.

ISSN 2042-1621

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Dear Journo,

The Leveson Inquiry may be the most far-reaching investigation into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’ (if only today’s investigative journalism was so well-resourced), yet it is way wide of the mark. The most pressing problem in journalism is not moral collapse but the collapse of ‘the story’.

‘The story’ is journalese for capturing events: it is the form in which an event appears, as and when we journalists have captured it. But today the story is on the point of escaping us; and we have done little to stop it.

The idea of capturing events strikes many, younger journalists as impossibly authoritarian. After the advent of Web 2.0, even senior editors began to share these misgivings. The cat is out of the bag, they said. With the media landscape opening up, there is no need for the kind of closure that capture contains: it’s foolish even to try. To keep hold of readers, go for Twitter instead.

Then along comes LevesonPlus (the man himself and the whole ensemble of his inquiry) with the message that capture is not merely mad, it is also morally bad. Thus the News of the World was doomed in the attempt to capture the story in a killer quote from Milly Dowler’s voicemail, allegedly. Unless it is regulated/reined in, the ambition to ‘nail it’ will be the death of journalism, supposedly.

On the contrary, it would be morally reprehensible if journalists did renounce their ambition to capture the essence of events; as if doctors could take back their Hippocratic oath while continuing to practise medicine. Moreover, journalism practised without this ambition is quack journalism: it collapses the distinction between casual media content and professional journalism, i.e. journalism worth paying for. So YPay for it? Indeed there is a now a generation that does not expect to. If you weren’t the journalist whose job depends on it, you wouldn’t, would you? And if we continue operating along these lines we will find ourselves writing the longest, professional suicide note in history – our own.

Previous issues of Proof made the case for the continuation of professional journalism, assuming that professional journalists continue to distinguish themselves by capturing the essence of events. The current issue is primarily concerned with how that happens, at a time when it seems to be happening less, and there is growing resistance, even among journalists, to it happening at all.

For journalism to remain a must-read, it must devise new story forms, capable of capturing the essence of the early twentieth century. Even more important than the moral choices facing journalists, journalism is destined to become optional if it does not rediscover its own essentialism, and devise new ways in which to formulate it. These are the tasks to which this Proof is dedicated.

All human life has to be here, in our pages and on our screens; or we don’t have to be here at all.

Please feel free to agree or disagree, extend or challenge the ideas and analysis contained in Proof.

Andrew Calcutt andrewcalcutt@gmail.com

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 1, January 2010 The Scale and Origins of the Threat to Journalism

Introduction: Under Fire

Journalists are facing new pressures. Even before ‘credit crunch’ became full-blown recession, there was the perceived threat to professional journalism posed by user-generated content (UGC), and the migration of classified advertising from the local press to the internet.

Now, in the current context of reduced advertising revenue, declining readership and deepening recession (at least in the UK), publishers are especially keen on UGC. They see it as an opportunity to cut costs by reducing the number of professional journalists involved in the production of media content (note, ‘media content’; no longer ‘news’ or ‘features’). Compared to paid-for journalists, citizens come cheap.

From the publishers’ point of view, it makes sense: if readers don’t pay for online content, why should publishers have to fork out for it? What’s free to the goose should be no-fee to the gander.

If implemented to the letter, this approach would spell the end of the professional reporter. News reporting, the front line of journalism and also its single, costliest component, now faces the firing squad.

Battle Of Ideas

Journalists are naturally opposed to this view, and the cost-cutting, job-slashing measures which it reflects. But so far we have been unable to re-think the problems facing journalism in such a way as to reinforce the role of professional journalists and confirm the essential character of news reporting.

What’s thinking got to do with it? Journalists are often called upon to enter into readers’ thought processes, but we ‘hacks’ do not normally include independent thinking in our job description. In any case, you can’t think yourself out of recession.

However, given that we are in recession, and recession means that already limited resources are becoming even more so, we should recognise that the ensuing battle for resources partly depends on a battle of ideas – ideas about what journalism does, what it can be expected to do, and what it is about professional journalism that is worth paying a premium for.

Holding The Line

The cut and thrust of office politics largely determine whether more or less of a fixed budget is spent on news reporting; and whether UGC is deployed as a substitute for it. Of course personal loyalties (and their absence) also play a significant part in these battles, but ultimately you can only hold the line if first you have an original line of thought to hold onto; and this we hacks have lacked.

Instead, journalists have entered the conflict on other people’s terms, unwisely accepting that digital technology destroys journalism; conceding, unnecessarily, that UGC inevitably undermines the role of professionals. Having ceded so much to the other side, we’ve hardly been able to convince ourselves of the importance of professional journalism. We know we would be penniless without it. But that’s about as much as we have managed to say; and in these penny-pinching times, it is nowhere near enough to prevent journalists being made to feel the pinch.

Commentator Ben Goldacre nearly had it when he said of ‘the media’ and swine-flu ‘hype’: they ‘have lost all confidence in their own ability to give us the facts’ (the Guardian, 29/4/09 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/swine-flu-hype ).

More than that, nowadays we journalists hardly dare claim to ‘speak truth to power’, because we have largely conceded that truth is beyond our ken.

The purpose of this essay is to show how journalism is true to the world it describes, despite the many, fully justifiable complaints levelled against some aspects of it; moreover, that professionally produced news reporting is disposed to provide a unique kind of truth which is not generally replicable by non-professionals – at least, not in current conditions nor in the foreseeable future; furthermore, that journalism which is true to the world is both true to itself and up to the money. Hard facts, if only they are hard enough, will measure up to the harsh realities of economic life.

By the same token, this essay also provides journalists with a convincing argument for professional journalism in general and news reporting in particular; an argument to be used against publishers disposed to dispense with professional journalism at its costliest and also its most important point, i.e. news reporting, the point at which new information originates.

This is the first in a volume of essays, ‘Journalists Defending Journalism’, published by Proof. The authors of these essays object to the various prosecutions currently brought against professional journalism, and offer a host of powerful arguments in defence of it. By lodging these objections and acting upon them, we can do more than cover our backs. The uncertainties we are presented with also present us with the opportunity to certify what journalism is for; and the chance to do this with more confidence than ever before.

Vested with the following arguments in support of our own professional interests, we journalists need not go naked into the conference chamber.

Economy of Time

Journalism pictures the world for its readers, viewers and listeners. Not so that they can appreciate the depiction (though we don’t mind if they do), but in order that they may know what’s going on.

Long before BBC iplayer, it was professional journalism which made the unmissable, unmissable.

Web 2.0 enthusiasts make out that people can do this largely for themselves nowadays, for and on behalf of each other. In the new world of their numerous catch-phrases, ‘here comes everybody’ segues into ‘we the media’. But this outlook confuses the possibility afforded by new media technology with the realisation of that possibility in an historically specific social context. Standing in between the two is an enormous obstacle – much more than a technicality – known as the economy of time.

We all know that ‘time is money’, and the ‘economy of time’ is shorthand for the allocation of work time, and thus the measuring out of lifetimes, according to the pressure to make money. All commercial companies are obliged to operate within the economy of time, and so are their employees. Accordingly, most people spend most of their time either working for the company or recreating themselves so that they are fit for work next day; and time allocated to these mainly mundane activities, is not available for journalistic purposes. What’s already spoken for, is not free to be spent any other way.

By the same token, i.e. having to have money to live, to earn a living we journalists are obliged to allocate the time of our working lives to the business of reporting the world. At first sight, this is merely to state the obvious distinction between amateur and professional; but it has been so readily obscured recently, that it merits a second look.

The economic pressures which inevitably distract non-professionals from journalistic activities, have the opposite effect on professional journalists, consistently focussing our attention on the continuous task of reporting the world and processing our reports into revenue-generating packages. Under the terms of this arrangement, consistent economic pressure matches the continuous nature of the reporting role that journalism takes on. The economy of time means that journalism is best-equipped to support readers, viewers and listeners, providing them with high-quality information about a wide range of events, when the people best-qualified to practise it are financially supported for doing so.

‘We the media’ people will have their calculators out, by now. They will have worked out that if you add up the shorter time available to most individuals for journalistic activity, it may outlast the longer time at the disposal of a relatively small number of professional journalists, so long as the non-professionals taking part are sufficiently numerous. But even this trade-off cannot match the unique social role played by professional journalism – a role which depends on the economy of time but is not reducible to it.

Time and Time Again

Setting aside quantitative considerations for a moment, getting paid to do journalism allows journalists whose time is paid-for to practise journalism continuously, which in turn lends a particular quality to the journalism they are thus able to produce. We journalists soon recognise this, just as we are quick to laugh at those who have not had enough practice. But there is more at issue here than technique; the latter is merely the outward form of the essentially social character of professional journalism.

Those paid to do journalism all day, cannot but do one story after another. Although we are not often asked to write exactly the same story twice (it sometimes seems otherwise!), repeated reporting – going out on one story after another – means that each time we do go out, we take with us what we saw last time, and what we think we might encounter on our next outing, even as we are working on the job in hand.

Continual repetition, in other words, makes for continuous comparison. As well as reporting on specific events, as and when they report them, professional journalists are also comparing these events to other events and relating them to other stories they have already reported. While recording the details of any one story, professional journalists are also measuring its details on a scale constructed from the previous details of earlier stories, and the way those other stories were also calibrated by reporters, sub-editors, desk editors, title editors, and the editor of last resort – readers. In describing one experience the professional journalist also inscribes it with other experiences, so that in making an account of it, journalists render every experience commensurate with all other experiences.

As authors of ‘the first draft of history’, professional journalists are the first to perform this comparison; moreover, all subsequent comparisons depend on our original evaluation, even if they end by rejecting it as incomplete or inaccurate.

A simple simile: each time they hear patients’ symptoms, doctors make their diagnosis based on what they have heard just now, together with what they have previously heard at medical school or from other patients. Without this comparative capability, they would be quacks; with it, they are essential to the health of society.

The Social Role of Journalism

Among professional journalists, the same sort of ability is loosely described as ‘news sense’. To veterans of the newsroom, it is as natural as walking and chewing gum at the same time. It is casually described but also rightly revered, for this is not only a matter of practised technique; it is also an essential component in journalism’s social role.

When professional journalists compare one story with another – the comparison which repetitive reporting will prompt them to make automatically, in their mind’s eye they are exchanging one human experience for another. This enables them to rate the new story according to its ‘news value’, i.e. to identify its significance in relation to other stories. But there is more to this rating than the ratings (viewing figures, readership, professional status). The fact that individual human beings can understand the experiences of other individuals, and even their own, depends on those experiences being exchangeable, commensurate, measured according to the same scale.

On a monthly, weekly, daily, hourly basis, professional journalism makes a particular contribution to mutual understanding because professional journalists are exceptionally well trained in sizing up a wide variety of current experiences according to standards held in common. Yes, these standards and the way we journalists apply them should both be open to question; nonetheless, it is largely by our efforts that each new experience is placed in relation to other experiences; and this association of all experiences is not only the stuff of journalism, it is also the precursor to every association between people. It is vital to the production of society itself. Moreover, because of the economy of time professional journalists are uniquely placed to play this socially constructive role: being regularly paid for long periods of reporting prompts particular development of the comparative capability from which society itself is partly derived.

Retrospective Standards

In taking up with UGC, and encouraging it to take over from professional reporting, publishers seem to think that the comparative capability of the professional can be introduced at a later stage in the production of media content, usually in the person of the sub-editor tasked with making some decent copy (applying common standards) out of the variable stuff (non-standard) sent in by the punters. But this is wholly unsatisfactory.

Though reporters and sub-editors have often differed sharply in their interpretation, nonetheless they are accustomed to working to a common standard. The comparative capability characteristic of the professional journalist is writ large in the sub’s re-drafting as it is in the reporter’s first draft. But it is not normally present in the raw form of UGC, which often consists of a simple invitation to ‘look at that’, or even to ‘look at me.’ This is one-dimensional, and when sub-editors (‘re-badged’ as ‘content processors’) are required to make something more of it, they are being asked to insert the social dimension retrospectively, into one-sided material which lacks the duality inherent in professional work.

The resulting content is devoid of integrity; it is highly manipulated, which makes it prone to inaccuracy; and at its worst it is laughable. Charlie Brooker got it right when he roasted BBC Online for the vast expanse of UGC which it devoted to…..snow.

Properly deployed, UGC allows news organisations to widen the range of their source material. A wider range of material may well result in better coverage, not least because there is more material available for comparative evaluation; but if used as a substitute for professional reporting, it can only lead to inferior coverage – and less (commercial) interest in that coverage on the part of readers, listeners and viewers.

The Money Shot

In response to all of the above, publishers will say that professional concern about journalism’s decline does not in itself make a convincing case for investing more money in news reporting. They point out that:

Journalism’s ‘social role’, as you have chosen to call it, is conditional on its commercial function; and now that its business model has been broken by the worldwide web, professional journalism, especially paid-for reporting, is increasingly dysfunctional.

For an industry which frequently declares itself ‘platform agnostic’, it is strange how many senior managers are true believers in the power (divine or devilish?) of one platform to destroy all others. Equally strange that journalism’s ‘broken’ business model is considerably stronger in parts of the world which have recently experienced rapid economic growth and cultural development, including the expansion of the internet. The simple equation of internet expansion with the contraction of professional journalism, does not add up.

Furthermore, the statements made by many American and European publishers are at odds with the measures they themselves have taken, and the promiscuous investments they have made. Without waiting for the development of a sustainable business model, many of these publishers have spent millions attempting to turn their titles into branded social media where readers can recognise themselves and associate with each other via the people (peers, professionals, celebrities) they see represented in them. This trend, which began nearly 10 years ago with magazines imitating online communities, has since spread along all media platforms.

Instead of updating and improving the outward-looking role that professional reporting plays in support of society, all sorts of publishers have sought to use quasi-journalism as the mechanism for engineering inward-facing, small-scale societies into short-term existence – just long enough (they hope) for the eyeballs of reader-participants to acquire a commercial existence. But it has never been clear why free association between people would produce a cash cow. Who needs to buy a magazine, or pay for access to any other media platform, if it offers virtually the same experience as Facebook? Or going to church/mosque/synagogue?

Greatly Exaggerated

The social role of professional journalism is to associate new human experiences by composing accounts of these experiences which are both singularly accurate and inherently comparative. Professional journalists have been paid by publishers on account of their dual capacity to capture an event in its particularity and its comparability; and in turn, readers have been ready to pay for paid-for journalists to rehearse this particular combination on their behalf.

From a global perspective, this model is by no means broken. In parts of the world such as China, India and Brazil, it is thriving like never before. In the West it has come close to breaking point (despite Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to retrench), but this point has been reached largely because publishers (and some journalists) have been promoting their publications not as journalism but as sites where users participate in quasi-therapeutic encounters. Instead of developing a relationship with readers via the quality of reporting, they have sought to establish a direct relationship between personalised users and the persona of a particular publication, aka the brand. By the same token, however, they themselves have demoted journalism’s mission to report, which in turn has done much to undermine the commercial basis for reporting.

Perhaps publishers were hoping to advertise the experience of media-based community, i.e. to turn the existence of such communities into a hook for advertising, in order to counter-act recessionary tendencies within the core business of bringing new information into the public domain. If so, this tactic has backfired. Disguised until recently, recessionary tendencies are now very much in evidence, and there is no evidence that the monetisation of community is enough to hold them off.

Worse still, many Western publishers gave up on journalism without waiting to see whether it would give up on them. They changed their core business from truth-telling (allegedly) to facilitating conviviality, and now they complain that the traditional model for journalism does not cater for the new package of therapy and hospitality which they want us journalists to produce (in smaller numbers and on lower salaries).

Meanwhile the continuing success of some titles which have positioned themselves primarily on the strength of their professional journalism, e.g. the Economist, confirms that publishers need not have rushed to abandon the core business of speaking truth to power. Even the devoted following for TV shows such as The Wire points to a continuing public appetite for veracity.

Publishers claim to have been responding to drastically different appetites on the part of new media users, but they were already predisposed to the demise of journalism before they announced the death of its traditional business model. This means that reports of the end of journalism have been grossly exaggerated; but unless publishers are confronted and their miscalculations challenged, unfounded rumour may yet become self-fulfilling prophesy.

Conclusion: Recovering Our Nerve

On the other hand, if we professionals recover our nerve, and re-assert the significance of journalism for society (not as a substitute for it), hence its commercial viability, it is more likely that publishers will re-instate us. They may even find some backbone of their own, as Murdoch seems to have done.

If many remain resistant to the force of our argument, we should remind them of the terrible fate of those other companies which recently moved away from their core business in search of new models and (over)-extended revenue streams, only to find that they had made their own situation far worse. In the UK, such companies were formerly known as….. building societies.

Securing the future by extending publishers’ brands into non-journalistic areas, has been as fallacious as the ‘securitisation’ of assets in over-extended financial products. Conversely, just as the further development of society requires journalism to play its social role, so economic recovery in publishing demands the immediate recovery of professional reporting.

On this occasion, our demands as professional journalists coincide with our employers’ long-term economic interests, and the common good. Professional news reporting must be recognised and re-instated not only as the foundation of our trade, but also as the cornerstone connecting commercial publishing with the public realm.

Andrew Calcutt is the editor of Proof and course leader of MA Journalism and Society, UEL.