Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

During election campaigns, immense effort and a great deal of money are expended in creating debates on policies and programmes which are intended to reach as many people as possible. However, the public process of electioneering comes to a head only in the voting booth where privacy is guaranteed and voters are thoroughly alone. This is just one example of how the schism between public and private, and also the relation between these two, are engrained in our political culture. What goes for infrequent elections is also a constant feature: throughout our lives, we alternately crave privacy and yearn to “go out” and act socially and publicly.

Perhaps because ideas of public and private are everywhere around us, it is easy to take the link between the two for granted. In recent discussions of the public sphere there has been a tendency to assume the split between public and private rather than to understand how exactly they are connected. And there are further complications. While the public/private division is formally universal, it seems to have been undermined in practice. Various contemporary commentators have observed a “confessional culture” in which people seek to make the details of their private lives into public property – celebrity being just a part of this. Elsewhere the state has moved into regulation of previously private matters, from health and lifestyle to parenting. Hence the slew of references to both “colonisation” of the public sphere by the private, and encroachment on privacy by public bodies.

Difficulties in the public sphere, often attributed to the lack of informed discussion or apathy towards politics, are happening at the same time as the blurring of the line between public and private. This seems more than a coincidence. My essay attempts to create a framework for understanding the public/private combination, at a time when this combination is itself under (partial) revision.

The Advent of Private and Public

Throughout history there have been what might be considered public events. However, it is important to understand that what we mean by ‘public’ cannot be retrospectively applied throughout all human history. The public sphere exists only in contradistinction to private individuals entering into it; moreover, these relations, and the individuals so related, acquired their full existence only in the modern period. In modern times, the close link between the historical development of the individual and the parallel development of the public sphere accounts for the enduring drive to create and recreate the public sphere on the part of individuals seeking to create and recreate themselves.

Clues as to when and how public and private began to interact fully, are writ large in the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s strongest characters, pertinent to this day, are distinctly public figures. However their decisions and actions require long, notably private monologues. Harold Bloom (1998) suggests that in making his characters perform their decision-making in public, Shakespeare is undertaking no less a task than the invention of the human. Bloom argues that such characters are only able to establish their private world because of the conversations they have with themselves. These conversations take place away from the action and outside the interaction between characters – in private, in other words. But they are also soliloquies, performed by actors for appraisal by the theatre audience – in public. Thus the Shakespearean soliloquy shows how public expectations play a formative role in the internal life of the modern individual; conversely, it seems that neither the individual nor society existed, at least not in modern terms, until the interaction of public and private came to exercise a decisive influence on human, historical development.

The comparative novelty of the private and its public counterpart is also illustrated by the development of another interior monologue: silent reading. While writing and reading have, of course, existed for a very long time, reading silently has, with notable exceptions, only relatively recently become the norm (Manguel, 1996). When in the fourth century BC that public character Alexander the Great read a message silently, his troops were amazed (Fischer, 2003: 90). Likewise when Julius Caesar read a note without speaking, his “ostentatious” display caused a furore (Fischer, 2003: 90). The word-separation and ordering required for silent reading, did not become firmly established in the West until the thirteenth century (Saenger, 1997:256).

There seems to have been an overall historical trend towards greater interior (or private) life among the population as a whole, which has, roughly speaking, gone along with greater participation in the public world on the part of “the masses”. Simply put, the development of the private individual, rather than a sign of being inward-looking or insular, can be seen as the condition for public life as we understand it today. After all, only with individuals and their differing outlooks being widely recognised as important, is there the need for a public sphere where individual intentions can be played out, reconciled, modified or fought over.

Expansion of the market; growth of the self

While great historical figures have perhaps long made their own decisions, it is only with the development of market societies, which take the decision-making of the bulk of the population as their essential feature, that there is a clear and general separation of public from private spheres. Market-based societies have at their heart individuals owning property and making decisions about the exchange of commodities – even when the commodity owned and being sold is simply their own labour. Hence it transpires that the private individual acting autonomously in the market is also creating the basis for the public sphere today.

There are many facets to the general character of the individual associated with the market. In the 1920s, a legal theorist by the name of Evgeny Pashukanis, sought to understand why today’s individual was at the same time a legal subject. He started by examining market exchange or, specifically, the exchange of commodities. Pashukanis concluded that in societies organised around the market there are three aspects of the private individual which can be derived from the process of exchange:

“The party to the exchange must be an egoist, i.e. be guided by naked economic calculation otherwise the value relationship cannot appear as a socially necessary relationship. The exchanging party must be the bearer of a right, i.e. have the possibility of making an autonomous decision, for his will must ‘be embedded in objects’. Finally, the exchanging party must embody the basic principle of the equality of all human personalities, because in exchange all types of labour are equalized and are reduced to abstract human labour.” (Pashukanis 1924: 102)

What Pashukanis is saying here is that the modern individual has particular characteristics – rather than simply being “private” or wanting their own space – which are traceable to the ever-present trading of commodities. Because commodities cannot trade themselves there is an underlying requirement for individuals to act privately: to be able to own commodities and make their own decisions on what to exchange and in what ratio their commodities might be best exchanged for their own benefit. Individual calculations in which each seeks to get the best deal, give expression to the regulation of the working time of society by market trading – what Adam Smith might have called the hidden hand of the market. In trying to establish the basis for the private individual being also a legal subject and the form that law takes “independent of the content of legal norms” (Arx cited in Miéville, 2005: 91), Pashukanis identified a set of underlying characteristics essential to that individual as private actor. His analysis presents us not with the individual as such – outside history, but with the bourgeois individual – the individual in the time of capitalist society.

This analysis opens the way to understanding why the ideas of rights, freedom and equality are felt so strongly by modern individuals and are so significant a feature of the public sphere. These ideas can be clearly linked to the stamp that commodity exchange puts on the world. Rights are established through the contract made implicitly in exchange, in being able to own commodities. Freedom from restraint, for the exercise of will, derives from the freedom to act on one’s own will in the market in the disposal of commodities. From the form of commodity exchange, Pashukanis derives the idea of private individuals as being equal – expressed in terms of equality before the law, or as having an equal vote, or, as the Unites States’ constitution puts it (even stating it as birthright), “all men are created equal”. The comparison made in exchange strips away the particular qualities of the individual producer and their particular labour, transforming all efforts alike into an amount of undifferentiated money. Similarly, in the exchange relationship the people who meet via their products are just labourers in the abstract: all personalities are equal (Pashukanis, 1924: 101-102; Rubin, 1972). This equality of personality also occurs at the point of exchange where buyers and sellers meet as owners of commodities. In exchange the person’s goods, not the person, are taken into account. With the sale of labour, for example, the question being asked, strictly speaking, is not who you are, but what you cost compared to what you can produce.

The link between the independence of private individuals and the market is to a degree hidden because this independence is presumed to be established outside the market prior to exchange taking place. Being fit to take part in exchange becomes the business of all individuals to be undertaken (partly in the sphere of consumption) before they come to market. The private sphere becomes a necessity in market societies as the time and place for rest and reflection, so that these preconditions can be met. Individuals must take responsibility for their own physical upkeep and for establishing their own sense of self in private reflection. By comparison, in feudal societies, the obligations, roles and decisions of most people were much more fixed, and required far less autonomy.

Rather than the market, the “intimate sphere” of the family is the central location for private reflection. The family is an institution for social reproduction. At its most basic, it serves as the mechanism for nurturing new generations, but it also provides for intimacy, privacy and some material support (hence Engels’ description of the family as a “haven in a heartless world” ). Intimacy allows for behaviour which is not judged with the same harshness as the outside world. However, intimacy in the family, although it might act as a place to test out one’s personality, does not transcend the need for that other aspect of privacy in which it serves as the domain for establishing a level of independence that is to be taken into the outside world and applied there.

Of course no man is an island: in general it can be asserted that the private individual, despite being so constituted, cannot exist in isolation and must at least to a degree seek out the public world. While the egotistical individual might see himself ideally as an atom – as a self-sufficient, Robinson Crusoe figure – the reality is that each of the activities and attributes of individuals require resolution and satisfaction through others with the means to meet these demands. Social reality transforms the egoism of the individual “into a hunger for the objects and people of the external world” (Marx cited in Pashukanis, 1924: 81). Individuals are compelled through self interest to attempt to make the social connections which will result in their needs being met. Thus, “[h]owever alien they may seem to one another, the members of civil society are united through self interest.” (Marx cited in Pashukanis, 1924: 81)

Barriers to Growth

More specifically, among the earliest generations of fully fledged, private individuals, it was those with the closest association to trade whose private interests first led them to attempt public interventions with much wider ramifications. There is a particular self interest exhibited by those in pursuit of private commercial interests as traders. Their ambition to expand trade and increase its profitability requires them to make more and more products commensurate, and this is what constitutes the expansion of markets. Their self interest might then cohere around obstacles to this expansion, in particular the pre-modern state and the monarchy which headed the ancient, feudal system.

The English Civil War in the seventeenth century is one of the earliest conflicts between the old and new orders. And, to attract support, the civil war was at the same time a hotbed of debate and pamphleteering, a public sphere given sharp impetus, in which the clash of ideas variously took natural, religious, or abstract-rational forms. On both sides, ideas and arguments were brought to bear in the attempt to break people from old loyalties and fixities: now you must decide.

One episode from the English Civil War in particular serves as a pointed example of how developed this public sphere became, and how the influence of the market was already making itself felt. In 1647 the Putney Debates within the New Model Army set the Levellers against the army grandees. The Leveller-inspired manifesto An Agreement of the People, argued for “our just freedom” and for “common rights and liberties” (Purkiss, 2007: 488). The poorest sections of the army were attempting to grasp power and take what they needed. As one Leveller, Thomas Rainsborough, had it: “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he” (ibid: 495). Opposing Rainsborough, the rights-based case for the defence was put by MP Henry Ireton:

“If you will resort only to the law of nature…you have no more right to this land, or anything else, than I have. But here comes the foundation of all right that I understand to be betwixt men, as to the enjoying of one thing or not enjoying of it; we are under a contract, and, we are under an agreement, and that agreement is what a man has for a matter of land that he hath received by a traduction from his ancestors, which according to the law does fall upon him to be his right (ibid: 492)

When Rainsborough asked whether “the soldier” had fought to “give power to men of riches…to make him a perpetual slave” (ibid: 494). Ireton responded that the soldier had fought the danger that “one man’s will must be a law”, and so that the law was better decided by “common consent” on the part of “fixed men” that “had the interests of the kingdoms in them” (ibid: 494). Ireton’s argument was that the vote – which could determine law – was for everyone. However, each voter must have a stake in property relations as was: otherwise there might be a law that ordered redistribution of property, resulting in anarchy rather than the stability of “fixed men”. In other words, in this case, ‘equal’ rights qualified by property trumped anything approaching absolute equality. Ireton’s measure of equality could carry conviction in debate (aside from carrying the day by force of arms), because the debate itself was prompted primarily by the expansion of only that qualified form of equality inherent in the exchange of property.

With unusual clarity, perhaps because unguarded by precedent, the Putney Debates crystallized the rights of bourgeois man. Liberty and equality were ideas put forward by both sides in the argument. Ireton’s response shows how the legal form of the enforcement of rights could be used as a defence of property and the conditions of rule by his (bourgeois) class, even if the latter depended on (limited) common consent and had been forged against monarchic tyranny. Also note the address to “he” and “man”: political rights were only discussed for men, as women were then dependants with limited autonomy (ibid: 509). The forces of popular involvement unleashed by the Civil War were to be firmly put back by repression of the Levellers and confirmation of Cromwell’s dictatorship; but only after prior removal of the power of the monarchy to block reform completely. This power was taken off in 1649, along with the head of the king.

From Battlefield to Coffee House

The more conventional starting point for a discussion of the public sphere is not the battlefields of England in the seventeenth century, but the coffee houses and salons of Europe in the eighteenth. In many ways this period has been taken as an ideal or model for the public sphere in general. Nonetheless the nascent bourgeoisie meeting in new public arenas were continuing the programme of the English parliamentarians and continuing an assault on the ancien regime with a trade wind behind them. The freshness of an emerging ruling class in the eighteenth century with novel ideas and growing confidence explains why the period might be attractive as an ideal. However, these particular qualities also make it difficult to generalise from this situation – especially to today’s public sphere.

Likewise the “normative”, or standard, analysis of the eighteenth century public sphere found in Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), despite many insights, is problematic in taking the particular features of the period as the starting points for an analysis of the public sphere in general. For example, when in Structural Transformation Habermas takes up the point that civil society came as the “corollary of depersonalized state authority” (Habermas, 1989: 19) this becomes a “basic blueprint” (ibid: 29) for his understanding of public and private: “The line between state and society, fundamental for our purposes, divided the public sphere from the private realm” (ibid: 30). However, one might say instead that elements of civil society had long been striving to depersonalise the state and that the division of public and private did not follow so neatly the division between state and “society”.

Similarly, Habermas appears to make categorical distinctions which are premature, applying them to an historical period in which the social contradictions that comprise the basis for such distinctions, were not yet fully formed. Conversely, in Habermas’ analysis, the role that the family economy began to have in home manufacture and trading becomes an argument that “the private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say the realm of commodity exchange and of social labour; embedded in it was the family with its interior domain” (ibid: 30). Because private life, intimacy and commodity production often happened in the same place and at that stage seemed so closely tied together, Habermas does not adequately distinguish between the domestic, private sphere and the market demanding greater private independence as the corollary of profitable, public interaction. It seems there are fundamental limitations to generalising Habermas’ “idealisation of historical processes” (Hardy, 2009: 29) in the analysis of public and private within market economies.

The Recent Past

It might be said that his concern with the eighteenth century only partly explains why Habermas’ model of the public sphere has become so influential. The second half of the book, which compares the earlier Golden Age of public life with the commercialisation of public life that seems to have followed, is perhaps more pertinent to its popularity. When Habermas, writing in 1962 in West Germany, castigated the market for undermining public life, he was implicitly excusing the Left in Germany for being unable to make much of a mark even against the deadly dull establishment politics of the day. Similarly, when in 1987 Margaret Thatcher won a third term of office, thereby confirming the reconfiguration of UK politics (Jenkins, 2007), the Left in Britain, it could be argued, set about blaming the media, or else structural changes in society – anything rather than address the problems with its own politics. Habermas’ book arrived in English to order, and it chimed in with the expansion of Media Studies as an academic discipline in the UK. Unfortunately, current complaints against Fox News in the USA seem set to repeat the scapegoating of media for the problems of the public sphere, and the public failure of the Left in particular.

For our purposes, what is perhaps most striking about the public sphere of the eighteenth century, even with its revolutionary class on the up, is that the interests of the individuals meeting together by no means readily coalesce. As Habermas argues, existing institutions were subjected to a rational critique (1989: 28). This infused the bourgeoisie with clarity and belief in the idea that their material, class interests were the best for society; the use of rationality could put their opponents on the defensive; and this presentation, using the “liberty, equality, rights” ideas that had spontaneous expression in material relations, could be used to garner support among other sections of society. It seems, however, that common interests were unevenly felt. Long clarification from argument, debates and political organisation was required to establish a sense of collective interests. And the political was not the only important constituent in this process. Manners, morals and attitudes were established and came to be held in common by means of literature and journalism, not least through the good offices of magazines such as the Tatler and Spectator. Here, identification of self with class, occurred via the “delightful exercise in taste and reason” – regarded as a goal in itself by those with the wealth, leisure and discernment to aim for it. Thus the consumption of culture shown in the “very form of the discursive community itself” became an identifiable, cohering form of bourgeois existence (Eagleton, 2005:27).

Essentially Related: the Commercial, Cultural and Political

Where some see the commercialisation of public life as a major problem, my analysis shows that the modern public sphere is inextricably linked with commercial exchange and private individuals taking part in the market. Understandably, this creates a demand for goods to satisfy the rest, recuperation and character-formation which tend to be achieved in private. Moreover, as people in their free time enter into the public domain, they express their material interests often through ideas that in many ways are coloured by the organisation of society around exchange and its division into classes. Through interaction in the public sphere – in the various forms of politics, culture, morals and ideas – there can be a solidifying of collective identities. In this arena the state and other institutions are fought over and reformed, and new institutions created. This is done around programmes reflecting these interests and ideas, and often through the familiar prism of freedom and equality. Rather than the commercial form of the provision of cultural goods, it is issues of ideas, programme and agency and their ability to satisfy the interests and aspirations of private individuals as they bring their interests into the public, that seem to be the pertinent issues.

Moving to today, there seems to be a qualitively different problem in expressing private concerns in the public sphere. The shift towards a more individualistic society and the parlous state of the public sphere, have been identified as long term trends by various commentators. For example, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone identifies a decline in public participation in the USA, arguing that “we need to create new structures (public and private) to facilitate renewed civic engagement” (2000: 403). Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man notes the historical specificity of public and private, and argues that we have a “tyranny of intimacy” stemming from a fear of any impersonal life (1992: 335). Christopher Lasch noted that the classical obsessive-compulsive mental problems of modernity have been supplanted by problems of narcissism signalling a new age (1979). Lasch and latterly Bauman argue that the default position of elites is to avoid taking responsibility for society (Lasch, 1994; Bauman, 2000:10).

While some of these writers have traced such trends back to the 1970s and even earlier – depending on the precise topic of their enquiries – it was only during the 1980s that they became so widely apparent. Zygmunt Bauman notes that in this period a series of new theories emerged – post-modernity, the end of history, second modernity and surmodernity – all of which “articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted” (2000: 10). One possibility is that the problems these authors variously identify, as subsequently synthesised by Bauman, were held in check by the Cold War which acted to cohere meaning and purpose under threat of extinction, thus partly energising otherwise exhausted institutions. An account of international politics A World Without Meaning by Zaki Laïdi offers a view of the Cold War as just such a “battle for the appropriation of meaning” (1998: 15). With the thaw there was a “divorce of meaning and power” (Laidi 1998: 14) and “[p]ower is nothing when it has lost meaning” (ibid: 16).

While it is beyond the scope of this essay to fully explore today’s public sphere, its renewal would seem difficult in the absence of frameworks of meaning that point to the future. With wider views of progress under question – indeed sometimes in the face of hostility to progress itself – spontaneous notions of rights, freedom and equality seem to lose their purchase. Support has ebbed away from the ideological forms that emerged alongside commodity exchange as guides to collective interests. Thus an erstwhile liberal political programme cedes all responsibility to individuals tightly regulated by the state. Meanwhile what might be called left-wing politics has difficulty in relating to contemporary individual problems or posing any relevant collective solutions. Among left-wingers, there is a widespread desire to recoup old forms of collectivity in what Ulrich Beck refers to as “zombie” institutions (Bauman, 2000: 6) – or even in the use of new communication technologies. In this context, however, institutions created by previous activity in the public sphere, and often now subsidised by the state, might even act as barriers to new initiatives.

An important part of reinvigorating the public sphere might be to take seriously the notion of the autonomous individual that comes with it. The close link between the public sphere and the development of the free autonomous individual suggests that attempts to protect, regulate and set controls on individual behaviour may get in the way of the re-building of a public sphere. On the other hand, a concerted effort to defend and expand this distinctively modern, human figure may serve in its reconstruction. Perhaps it is through the defence of the freedom for individuals to govern themselves without regulation that a public sphere is best renewed today. For example, some opposition to the “personal safety state” (2006: 154) that seeks often through law to guarantee happiness or safety, may be given in how people continue to experience the world through rights, liberty and equality. Similarly, the defence of individual autonomy might provide the groundwork for cohering common interests and renewing the public sphere.

Mark Beachill recently graduated from UEL with First Class Honours in Journalism. He is now reading for a PhD.

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Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

The essays in the first set of Proof 2010 seem to subscribe to one of two arguments: either the future of journalism will be dominated by unprofessional forms of citizen journalism; or professional journalism needs to up its game in order to be sure of having a future. My contribution sets out a third way for the future of journalism, in which citizen journalism and professional standards are combined. In discussing the changing orientation of citizen journalism or user generated content (UGC) towards a professional style of production, I will draw on the recent shift by environmental activists, who have begun to combine citizen journalism with professional journalistic content. This is especially interesting in that the move from social media towards professional media, which entails the conflation of citizen and professional journalistic practices, also raises an interesting question over the future of political activism. If activists are becoming increasingly professional media operators, can they also be offering an ‘alternative’ source of news? Indeed, how can there be any kind of alternative if even ‘alternative media’ are using standardised journalistic techniques and expectations in order to ensure mainstream coverage? It seems plausible to suggest that convergence between citizen and professional is likely to benefit journalism, but there may be negative consequences for politics. Media compromise will surely result in a compromised message.

Framed as a Pyramid

When referring to ‘citizen journalism’, I mean journalism without professional markers. Citizen journalism has been characterised by arbitrary angles and shaky footage of the incidents it depicts. The material has often looked more like a sea of mobile phones held aloft than a clear depiction of important events. Most instances of citizen journalism will have been generated from mobile phones and handheld camcorders, and it is this kind of technology that activists are utilising more and more. But without professional journalistic standards, the footage produced tends to be less appropriate for serious news broadcasts and more suited to comedy television shows such as You’ve Been Framed.

Occasionally some user generated footage has made it onto national news channels, where it is shown repeatedly, e.g. film of the Glasgow airport attack (2007), or of newspaper vendor Iain Tomlinson being pushed over by a riot police officer during the aftermath of G20 protests in London (2009). But such footage is repeated (and repeatable) only, I suggest, because it exhibits some familiar journalistic patterns. In footage of both Glasgow and the G20 incident, the images are framed well. A narrative is at least implied in shots of the car which is seen to explode at the entrance to Glasgow airport. Footage of a riot cop pushing a man over in the street, juxtaposed to other officers in riot gear set against G20 protesters, offers a framework which resembles the classic journalistic structure of the inverted pyramid.

Thus it seems that the UGCs with the greatest chance of being picked up are those which follow or at least acknowledge the simple inverted pyramid framework, largely in line with established journalistic practice. Campbell (2009) suggests that the inverted pyramid is an approach now favoured by radical political movements in their attempt to gain greater coverage of their cause. If so, and if this approach is adopted more widely, it would suggest that the days of shambolic amateurism are already numbered – as outdated as the calls people used to make to show that they had a mobile phone to make the call with; instead the user is now expected to generate content that is considered presentable and watchable according to professional or semi-professional criteria.

Doing Our Own Thing

The most prominent example of citizen journalism meeting professional journalism is the coverage of climate camp protests (2006 – present). The Camp for Climate Action (August 2009) was a week-long camp aimed at raising awareness of climate change. Significantly, the camps house a ‘media tent’, where fellow activists are encouraged to attend workshops on producing a one-minute piece of journalism. Activists are then given three different pamphlets, each setting out how to record a one-minute news item following the inverted pyramid structure. Not only do the templates prove that activists are adopting professional journalistic standards, as opposed to relying on shaky footage, but they also signal a shift in the relationships between radical protest movements and mainstream media houses. Traditionally, radical activists’ movements have had a limited relationship with media houses, preferring to engage with alternative, independent media. Yet in a mediatised world, Web 2.0 technology has led to some activists engaging with both alternative and mainstream journalism.

Previously, the relationship between activists and the mainstream media has been tempestuous, partially because of their differing ideological approaches. The ideological foundation of many activist movements rejects forms of mainstream media and politics which involve working with institutions. The collectives and individuals of UK activist movements reject the formal, hierarchical organisation of politics, in preference to an ‘informal network and grass roots’ politics (Martell, 1994). Activist groups prefer instead to take direct action and adhere (if they adhere to anything) to a form of cultural politics (Martell, 1994). National newspaper journalists and broadcast news editors have been seen as representing the hegemonic position of major institutions up to and including national government, and, accordingly, protest movements have previously tended to reject them. Moreover, many protesters further rejected the mainstream media because of a continual framing of protest movements (1968 to present) in negative discourses (Halloran et al., 1971), in which activists are often labeled as aggressors, violent and deviant (Hall, 1968; Newlands, 2009). However, one-sidedness on the part of mainstream media has been matched by that of activists, whose relationship to journalists is often prejudiced by their outright dismissal of all formal structures.

Many collectives lack formal cohesion, partly because of the “social movement perspective [which] emphasises a lack of hierarchy and formal organisation” (Jordan and Maloney, 1997:47). The lack of cohesion often results in a conflict of practice between journalists and activists. Without a formal hierarchical structure there is no spokesperson, no single representative, no sound-bites or figurehead to speak on behalf of the activists. The autonomous nature of such endogenous groups means that no spokesperson or individual is representing the whole. There is no singular voice; instead, to quote Paul Kingsnorth’s book title, there are One No, Many Yeses (2004); and this kind of plurality does not lend itself to the exclusive and excluding idea which news reporters have been trained to identify in their stories. Given the incompatibility of their working methods, it’s perhaps not surprising that journalists have displayed a tendency to frame radical protest groups in unfavourable terms. Coupled with competing ideological pressures, the lack of engagement between the mainstream media and each cycle of protest formulated a media framework which relied on deviance and violence in representing radical protesters – at least, until recently. This historic framework has led to many collectives refusing to co-operate with journalists. However, in a mediatised society, today’s protest collectives understand that a conscious lack of engagement with professional journalists is detrimental to representation of their own activism.

Activating Promotional Culture

By engaging with professional journalistic practices, the internet and associated technologies offer a way of altering mainstream media representation of radical protests. Today, activists are utilising the internet and Web 2.0 technology to play the role of gate-keepers and produce their own news reports through citizen journalism. Since the late 1990s the internet has offered the opportunity to produce ‘alternative’ news sites, away from the mainstream media. The internet and Web 2.0 technology can circumvent traditional gate-keeping routes. Hutchins and Lester show that rather than challenging the protesters’ need for access to traditional forms of news media, the internet provides an opportunity to “bypass corporate, multinational media” and to “become another device in the strategic toolbox of the environmental movement for gaining mainstream news media access” (2009: 580-581). The rhizomatic nature of the internet and new technological developments in modes of communication, I suggest, opens up a gap between mainstream and alternative media forms. The correlation between the ‘non-hierarchical’ (Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2004) and the ‘hyper-textual architecture’ (Kahn and Kelner, 2003) of the internet and new social movements makes for a symbiotic relationship between new forms of communication. The most obvious example is Indy Media, an autonomous internet site where users are both producers and consumers of news and events. Websites such as Indy Media act as “communication nodes for political resistance on both local and international issues” (Downing, 2003:243).

From the early days of Indy Media (1999) until the mid-2000s, collectives have used the internet as their main source for publishing news stories. IMC reports and footage of the Seattle protests (1999) came from around “100 independent videographers [who] roamed the streets during the confrontations… and so were able to capture the reasons people were there in their own words… not the ‘violent anti-trade flat-earthers’ story that widely circulated in mainstream accounts” (Downing, 2003:251).

However, the recent combination of the internet, Web 2.0 technology, and the adoption of professional journalistic standards on the part of activists, suggests yet another field for activism alongside some possibilities for the future of journalism. As Martin Sims notes in the first set of Proof 2010, every generation seeks alternative ways of communicating. The favoured form of the new generation of activists may turn out to be not so much its own independent channels, separate from the mainstream, but the deployment of new media technology and the adoption of newly professionalised techniques in order to engage more closely with mainstream media outlets.

Climate Camp activists seem to have experienced a ‘bolt moment’ (to steal a term from another Proof-er, Richard Sharpe) during the anti-G8 protests (2005) at Gleneagles, Scotland. The activists moved away from only using the internet and flyers to communicate, and began inviting journalists to engage with activists. Activists felt that ignoring the mainstream media was a “luxury that we [activists] could not collectively afford” ” (CSC, 2005:322). The Camp[s] for Climate Action makes full use of social media by organising its protests through social networking sites, (Facebook, Twitter and SMS messages). At the Camp for Climate Action (2009) in Blackheath, South London, text messaging was used to co-ordinate a ‘swoop’. Prior to the camp, interested parties signed up to an emailing list and were requested to give their mobile phone numbers. Activists were encouraged to gather outside pre-determined companies around London, who were targeted for their environmental record. Activists were then told to await instructions for the location of the camp, via text messaging and the social networking site Twitter. Using mobile phones and a social networking site opened up the event, enabling anyone with an interest to be part of the ‘swoop’, either physically or at a virtual level. Not only interested individuals utilised Twitter, ‘Tweets’ weren’t just coming from camp participants; news organisations, local politicians, local residents and the Metropolitan Police were all using Twitter as a communication tool. The Guardian and The Times newspapers ran with live commentaries and blogs as events unfolded. The Sky News website had an overall view of different ‘Tweets’ on their front page.

The success of the ‘swoop’ shows how new technologies can offer a wider range of news sources. Technological developments and the internet are easily adaptable by both mainstream news agencies and protest movements. Television news footage of the Heathrow Climate Camp (August 2008) and the G20 Meltdown protest (April 2009) were sourced by the mainstream media from traditional pieces to camera and also mobile phone footage. Satellite news channels, Sky News and the BBC News reports were backed up with footage from protesters’ mobile phones or Twitter. Web 2.0 and the internet signal a major shift by giving the activists a media voice. This form of “tactical media – an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other” (Lovink, 2002:254) is a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ means of communicating, which means that activists can flourish in the “public part of cyberspace” (ibid.). This position, between the state and the market, is currently demonstrated as the point where workshops on citizen journalism and editing mobile phone footage became prominent features of the Camp for Climate Action’s media tent. Environmental activists have attempted to change the representation of the movement by engaging with journalists and appropriating professional journalistic standards. The Camp for Climate Action marks an engagement with new technologies and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as an alternative to other forms of social media (e.g., Indy Media). Activists have also adopted the PR stalwart of a ‘press centre’, but presented as a ‘media tent’. The Climate Camp also took on the role of gate-keepers by restricting the source of information, and by advising fellow activists and participants at the camp on how to produce citizen journalism that is likely to be picked up by the mainstream.

The most explicit representation of the shift on the activists’ part remains their leaflet recommending adoption of the inverted pyramid form in order to maximise the chances of radical content being aired in mainstream media. However, this shift comes at a price: it may also entail the loss of an autonomous, alternative form of journalism.

If the ‘media tent’ is designed to act as a form of gate-keeping and the camp participants are encouraged to follow the inverted pyramid, what happens to the autonomous nature of such protests which claim to adhere to the new social movement paradigm of endogenous, informal, non-hierarchical cultural politics?

I want to make it clear that I accept that protest groups have to somehow find a voice or, as suggested, mainstream journalists will continue to position environmental protest in a negative framework. However, the introduction of a series of spokespersons and commentators speaking on behalf of the entire activist movement necessarily negates the idea of the alternative, individualised nature of radical protest collectives. They are referred to as collectives precisely because they are a collection of like-minded people with similar interests, who reject relations with the mainstream media or political parties in favour of an autonomous and alternative approach. The media tent, whilst signalling a change in the relationship between activists and professional journalists, also negates the idea of alternative media, and even, perhaps, the very idea of the alternative that activists have been trying to mediate.

The media team were advising that “TV crews and press photographers are allowed in the camp between 10am and 7pm, so long as they have a friendly guide from the media team” (Campbell, 2009:12). Media spots can be arranged outside of these hours providing “[journalists] are accompanied on and off the site” (ibid). This form of gate-keeping focuses around a nine page handbook (ibid.), which covers the “key message and general guidelines” and advises activists on questions about “the Camp”, “the economy and workers”, “policing” and “solutions”. Activists, when speaking to journalists, are advised to “take control of the interview by bridging the key message”, which links political economy with climate change. The adoption of professional journalistic standards, through a media tent, or ‘press centre’, and the controlling of journalists’ movement around the camp, or ‘gate-keeping’, suggests there is no escape from promotional culture (‘spin’), and no alternative way of producing and disseminating media content. Although on one level I can see the logic underlying the convergence between radical activists and professional journalists, politically I find this problematic.

I agree that a media strategy is needed to try and prevent news reports of protest falling into a negative representation. There is a sense that Climate Camps, for example, must engage with the mainstream media in order to prevent negative reporting. Yet taking the gate-keeping approach can only be to withdraw from the new social movement paradigm of non-hierarchical, no spokesperson, no one voice speaking for all etc. Moreover, once a journalist leaves the camp, members of the media tent have no control over which ‘preferred meaning’ (Hall, 1990) is given by the journalist. It seems short-sighted to sacrifice the autonomy of protest for temporary, totally reversible gains in gate-keeping.

It is clear there has to be some form of voice to counter the negative discourse, and citizen journalism combined with professional standards gives this opportunity. However, activists lack the same resources as large media houses and so there is no guarantee the appropriation of professional journalistic standards will change the mainstream representation of activists’ movements. As the pamphlets say: ‘Stick to the Template’ (Campbell, 2009); not the template for DIY spin, but the principle of autonomous protest.

Maxine Newlands is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London. Her research focuses on media coverage of environmental activism, and she is an active participant in the environmental movement Critical Mass.

Bibliography

Burstein, P. (1995). “What do interest groups, social movements and political parties do? A synthesis”, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago.

Campbell, H. (2009). “Media Q&As: Camp for Climate Action Leaflet”. Available on-line at http://visionon.tv/mobile, accessed August 2009.

Downing, J. (2003). “The independent media centre movement and the anarchist social tradition”. In: Couldry, N. (2003). Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World,Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.243-259.

Counterspin collective (2005) Media, Movement(s) and Public Image(s): Counterspininng in Scotland, in Harvie, D. Milburn, K. Trott, B. & Watts, D. (Eds) Shut them Down! The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the movements of movements, Leeds, Dissent! And Autonomedia.

Grant, W. (2005). “Pressure politics: a politics of collective consumption?”, Parliamentary Affairs, 58(2), 366-379.

Halloran, J., Elliott, P. & Murdock, G. (1970). Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study,Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Hall, S. (1968). “The hippies: an American moment”, occasional paper, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Hutchins, B. & Lester, B. (2009). “Power games: environmental protest, news media and the internet”, Media, Culture and Society, 31, 579-595.

Jordan, G. & Maloney, W. (1997). The Protest Business? Mobilising Campaign Groups, Manchester: University of Manchester.

Kahn, R. & Kellner, D. (2003). “Internet subcultures and oppositional politics”. In: Muggleton, D. & Weinzierl, R. (eds.) (2003). The Post-Subcultures Reader, London: Berg Publishers, pp.294-309.

Kingsnorth, P. (2003). One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement,New York: Free Press.

Lovink, G. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture,Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martell, L. (1994). Ecology and Society: an Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Newlands, M. (2009). Protesters as the new gatekeepers? SNF Research Project, Protest as Medium Culture conference paper, October 2009. Available online at http://www.protestmedia.net/cms/front_content.php

Van Aelst, P. & Walgrave, S. (2004). “New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement”. In: W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon & D. Rucht (eds.) (2004). Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and New Social Movements, London: Routledge, pp.97-122.

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

David Harvey says of postmodernism: “The collapse of time horizons and the preoccupation with instantaneity have in part arisen through the contemporary emphasis in cultural production on events, spectacles, happenings, and media images.” (Harvey 1990: 59) And there can be few subjects more about events, spectacles, happenings, and media images than fashion and celebrities.

There are two iconic editors in fashion and celebrity: Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of the US edition of Vogue, and Mark Frith, ex-editor of Heat and now at Time Out.

Before getting into the details of Frith and Wintour’s lives as editors, let’s take a wider look at the role of the editor in what some have called the postmodern world. This from Roland Barthes, doyen of postmodernism: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” All is text, to be interpreted as we wish, rather than dictated by the Author. If the Author is dead, then, at least in the modern version of their relationship, so must be the Editor. Yet these two editors , as all editors of magazines do, spend a lot of their time in the act of selection, with behind that selection implicitly or explicitly, meaning and purpose. After all, the pages have to be in some order.

Take the selection of magazine cover content. Here, if ever there was one, is a hierarchy, constructed and maintained by the Editor throughout the process of deliberate selection and prioritisation in the attempt to appeal to the reader and to project values to the reader. Now, the most influential postmodernists say “the text” lacks ultimate meaning, since meaning is perpetually deferred; there can be no privileged interpretation of “the text”. But privileged interpretation there is in the day-to-day, issue-to-issue performance of the editor’s job, notably in the selection of the cover, in the order of the pages, in saying what’s in and what’s out of the publication.

For postmodernists, the meaning of “the text” has, in the past, been tyrannically centred on the author, their person, their history, their tastes and their passions. Frith and Wintour are such tyrants. Their persons, their histories, their tastes and their passions flow through their work. Day in and day out they did not say “I don’t know”; they have said “do it this way” and “this in and that out”.

Wintour has become a celebrity beyond the realm of fashion through the September Issue documentary and the feature film The Devil Wears Prada, said to be based on her personality. She has been interviewed widely. And when interviewed we see her person, her history, her taste and her passions, even if the passions are kept under a glacial demeanour. There is a US TV interview with her where she is asked if she makes all the decisions about the coverage in Vogue. Yes, she says and turns her head away from the camera. She is, I think, a fundamentally shy person who uses self-control to overcome her shyness. Self-control is not in the postmodernism handbook.

It’s all about surface

Yet, fashion is a classic postmodern subject: it’s all about surface. It’s not what you do; but what you select to put on your body. It’s not what you achieve; but how you present yourself. In the world according to fashion, as in the world according to postmodernism, there is no metanarrative giving consistent meaning to the entirety. But is not fashion a construction of the person through selection. And the postmodern stance is, surely: “how does the world construct me?” But fashion is construction of the self by conscious action. And that conscious action has a privileged interpretation of the world: fashion is, after all, a privileged interpretation of selection. This is right, that wrong. These go together; those do not. Watch Wintour in the documentary, making her selections: it is done with deliberation, with a certain knowledge (even though the criteria are rarely revealed).

Similarly, Frith had the know-how to turn round the ailing Heat, which he has written about in his memoir The Celeb Diaries. And celebrity is another, classic post-modern subject. It’s not who you are but who they are and how you relate to them. And, in Heat’s case, it is not aspirational as in OK! and Hello, but ironic. And celebrities are, by definition, known people. They are not on the margins but in the centre. This creates another contradiction in the stance of the editor. Postmodernism is supposed to be concerned with the margins, not restricted to known quantities. Allegedly, the known is blasé, is already selected for us, carries too much of a hierarchy for us to contemplate in a postmodern world which rejects hierarchy. Yet the world of Heat and other such magazines depends on the identification of those who are celebrities because they are known, and again on the identification of those A-list celebs who are more widely known than the others.

Wintour welds the two subjects of fashion and celebrity together by putting celebrities on the cover of Vogue. She gets clothes from labels onto the backs of celebs, into Vogue and into the other publications covering celebs as they wear these clothes. Here she is working with two hierarchies at the same time: the celebrity hierarchy and the fashion hierarchy. This is indeed a privileged interpretation of the world. She knows who is B-list and who is on the A-list. And she’s not using the B-list for her covers.

Wintour claims to laud women for what they’ve accomplished. Neither, she says, does she exploit women: it’s all about ambition not insecurity. They’ve accomplished something, these women, inferring a set of criteria for what should be achieved. There never was a more modernist statement.

Missing

Yet what’s missing from Vogue is what we would expect to be missing from a postmodern publication. There is no actual criticism of designers: we are not told why some people are not in the magazine; they are just left out. The reason for the hierarchy, the criteria which drive it, are not shown: why this and not that is not discussed, just assumed. And there’s no examination of the fashion scene; there’s no debate about the role of fashion or of the working conditions of the thousands who toil to make the fashion statements on our backs. That would be too much like a metanarrative for it to be told in the pages of Vogue. There’s just the fashion. The statement. The image. The symbol. “The text”.

But at the centre of Vogue and Wintour’s role there is yet another contradiction which further unpicks the postmodernist stance. This is, after all, “high” fashion. It is not public fashion available to all. There can be no discussion of the real prices of this fashion, so there is no need to raise the issue. Yet the focus is on high fashion. And this high fashion is a matter of taste, not only of choice and spending power. So the selection is again hierarchical.

Rubble of taste

Postmodernism is built on the rubble of modernism: the rubble of a society in which taste was an arbiter. The rubble of a society in which things could be known, meanings transmitted with authority, struggles undertaken to make the world meaningful, even in its chaos. Postmodernism surely lauds the lack of taste; it undermines the role of an elite which will state what taste is for the rest of us.

Yet this is precisely Wintour’s role: to tell the rest of us what taste is. Not by revealing the criteria but by revealing her selection; not to tell us the criteria of taste, only to choose by a set of criteria which are not revealed to the rest of us. Just look at the September Issue documentary. Can you discern her criteria for choosing one fashion item over another? I don’t doubt her taste: she would not be able to edit for so long such as successful magazine without taste. But what are the criteria? They are shielded from us all. We would have to look at all of her decisions to discern what her criteria are, and even then we may get it wrong.

Some wrong and some right

In short, unlike the idea of the postmodern world where all is relative, in the Vogue world all is not equal. Some decisions about fashion are wrong and some are right. It’s Anna Wintour’s job to decide which is which.

Harvey has something to say about the role of celebrity: “The acquisition of an image becomes the presentation of self in individual identity, self-realisation and meaning.” (Harvey 1990: 288) A central part of this is a focus on celebrity, the self-realisation of others which informs our self realisation.

It is revealing that Frith had chosen his top 10 moments as editor of Heat. That, if you missed the point, is a hierarchy again. These top 10 are recorded in an interview for The Mirror ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2008/09/03/video-exclusive-ex-heat-editor-mark-frith-reveals-all-about-victoria-beckham-george-michael-elton-john-more-115875-20722734/) Although we should not judge Frith’s statements about these events at face value: he is, after all, a postmodernist.

Literally

When he says that Posh and Beck’s wedding in July 1999 was “A reality wedding…people felt part of it”, we need to understand that this fantasy event was far from reality and we were decidedly excluded on the grounds that more money could be made by the happy couple through selective coverage. This is a classic postmodern method: the inversion of binaries. Cool is hot; hot is cool. What was at the centre shall be put on the margins, and what on the margins at the centre. So literal interpretation is shed in favour of statements whose meanings are perpetually deferred. When Frith later says that the alleged affair between Becks and Rebecca Loos was “literally what everybody was talking about in Britain”, again we should not take that literally. But he does mean it, there’s the rub. In his world, everybody was talking about the affair. He has, in the postmodern stance, his own world. In the postmodern stance, there is not a singular world out there to be described, grappled with and changed.

Again and again in Frith’s comments about the top 10 events there are statements which have to be taken as postmodern. When two celebrities started to get interested in each other in I’m a celebrity… in 2003 he says the impact of that was “to be there when that was happening.” But he was not there. He was watching TV. Such is the binary nature of postmodernism: to be there is to watch it on a TV screen while not being there.

Attached, involved and beholden

As Frith describes his top 10 he uses the same types of phrases repeatedly: to be there, to be involved, to be empowered, and to be excited. Here is his central contradiction: postmodernism is about detachment and irony. The postmodern world does not have an ultimate meaning; there is no tyranny of choice; the world constructs us and not the other way around; there is no known. And yet he is attached, wants to be involved and is, clearly, beholden to his subjects. He, in short, takes a modernist position with purpose, with choice, and with the construction of the known which he presented to us in the pages of Heat.

Yes, life is a spectacle, a set of actions with no ultimate meaning, the postmodernists would say. So Frith shows us the spectacle. Yet, ruinous to his postmodern position, he is The Spectator, the selector, the person pointing to what the rest of us should take notice of – in other words, a reincarnation of Addison and Steele, the editors who founded the Spectator magazine at the onset of modern times (1711).

It seems that these two iconic, postmodern editors can’t get away from modernism. Just look at the term “postmodernism”. Its advocates could not come up with a term of their own which does not include the very stance they wished to destroy: modernism.

Yet these editors are postmodern in that they are not required to resolve, or even acknowledge such contradictions as such. That would be a modernist stance. That would involve the work of grappling with contradictions and, at the very least, papering over them. Frith and Wintour really are postmodern in that all they have to do is operate with such contradictions rather than struggle to resolve them or make them explicit. The rest of us need to recognise their skill in doing this, at the very least. It is questionable how much any of us are currently capable of engaging with such contradictions in a less reactive, more pro-active manner.

Richard Sharpe is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London, and a partner in ETC, the editorial training consultants.

Bibliography

Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Post-Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

According to Esquire editor Harold Hayes, New Journalism is really ‘literary journalism’ which dates back to the early twentieth century, but ‘New Journalism’ was the name that caught on in the 1960s (Buettler, 1984). Hartsock (1999: 433) lists the various names which have been used for the form besides New Journalism, including literary journalism, literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction. Hartsock also suggests that the multiplicity of terms for this form indicates the ‘fluid nature of its boundaries’. Perhaps the main reason why the term ‘New Journalism’ caught on was its use of the word ‘new’ which, as Bourdieu (1993: 104) claims in his theory of cultural power, is a potent tool in the struggle against established forces.

Connery (1992: 4) defines this ‘genre’ as writing that falls between the traditional categories of fiction and journalism. However, Hartsock (2001: 17) seems to be more perceptive about the inability of the existing modernist categories to define the ‘narrative spectrum’ of the form since it not only blurs the line between the two genres mentioned by Connery, but also challenges the appearance of unity in the existing ideologies of practice within those literary genres, thus upsetting their stability and authority.

Hartsock (1999: 433) also describes it as ‘epistemologically fluid’ – like the early novel, a ‘shifting form’ which attempts to mirror a changing reality that combines ‘the interplay of consciousness’ and phenomenal experience. The parallel with early novels, which became the monumental literary creatures that New Journalism claimed to have displaced (Wolfe 1973: 41), is interesting, since it illustrates the ongoing struggle for power between new forms of writing, which dislodge the established forces and then subsequently struggle to preserve their own status quo, which still newer forces try again to displace.

‘New Journalism’, New Authority

It is important to acknowledge the importance of Tom Wolfe’s 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, and to recognise it as a serious claim to legitimacy on behalf of a form of writing which had not been sanctioned by the modernist literary authorities. Wolfe’s declaration that a new form was born in the 1960s which dethroned all other forms and genres (Wolfe and Johnson, 1973: 15), became the rallying cry of its many advocates. Daniel Swift ( 2005) and Ted Conover (Boynton, 2005: 7) both acknowledge that Wolfe’s anthology The New Journalism gave a vocabulary to the methods and techniques practised by the writers of this new form: saturation reporting, attention to detail and status, etc.

Thomas Connery (1992: 3) also surmises that Wolfe’s definition of the new form acted as a departure point for writers like James Murphy, John Hollowell, Ronald Weber and Norman Sims, who expanded and altered it, but stayed within the confines of Wolfe’s major claims about the style, methods and potential of the form. In the fierce contention which exists today as to which texts constitute ‘New Journalism’, and thus which writers can be labelled ‘New Journalists’, most critics first transcribe the list of writers drawn up by Wolfe, albeit extending the list to include some earlier writers also. Furthermore, if this identifies Wolfe’s anthology as the rallying point for advocates, it also suggests that it was the definitive list which defenders of the previous hierarchy felt obliged to respond to.

Robert Boynton, Nicholaus Mills, Norman Sims, Edd Applegate, Arthur Kaul, Paul Many and even Esquire’s editor during ‘New Journalism’s’ peak years, Harold Hayes, are among the many authors who have disputed Wolfe’s claim that the form really was new. Instead they have attempted to show that New Journalism has historical antecedents or can be tied to conventional journalism or literary historiography, thereby securing the continuity of literary authority and safeguarding it from those whose interests lie in rupturing it. Theirs is an attempt to salvage the established literary traditions which Wolfe’s assertion poses a threat to. As Hartsock (2001: 17) points out, ‘the assertion of ‘‘newness’’ could only tend to reduce the earlier versions to mere antecedents and precursors and not the real thing’.

Literary Journalism and the Novel

The novel and literary journalism (or New Journalism) are equally committed to phenomenal reality and the capacity of the author to capture it and portray it in prose. Indeed, literary journalism seems to be a response to an issue raised by the novel in the nineteenth century, namely, the correspondence between literary illustration and the reality that it imitates (Watt and Carnochan, 2001: 11). This supports Wolfe’s rationale for New Journalism as the rightful successor to the novel, which he claims was in a ‘retrograde state’; stagnant for over half a century (cited in Beikhman, 1973: 57).

Both these literary forms also share a deeper, functional similarity. Like narrative literary journalism, the novel dethroned the dominant literary mode preceding it – the literary traditionalism of the heroic epics and legends, which were formulaic and stagnant. Wolfe (1973: 42) mentions ‘the similarity between the early days of the novel and the early days of the New Journalism’: in both instances a group of writers from a genre regarded as Lower Class who were ‘in love with realism for its own sake’, came and sacked the existing literary power structures. Both the journalistic tradition and the novel grew out of epistemic discontinuity which favoured the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ (Rosenberg, 1959, as cited by Carey, 2007: 6). In turn, literary journalism blurs the line again between ‘factual fiction’ and ‘fictional fact’, which, according to Carey (2007: 7), was drawn to separate reporting from social commentary in the advent of realist writing. However, literary journalism rebelled against the objective ideals of modern journalism, and this ties it even closer to the novel.

Status Anxiety

Wolfe (1973: 39), in the introduction to his anthology, celebrates the fact that the new writers are ‘ignoring literary class lines’, hence giving rise to ‘status panic’ in the field. This accounts for the criticisms he had been receiving from both journalistic and literary quarters.

The political divide between the different classes of writers in the 1960s was likened by Wolfe (1973: 39) to the eighteenth century class structure. By the early twentieth century, novelists reigned supreme in the literary field, according to Wolfe. They were followed in the status hierarchy by the literary essayists or critics, whose analytical insights defended the legitimacy of the more ‘creative’, higher class of novelists. Journalists, with their lack of ‘creative’ or subjective license, make up the lowest rung in Wolfe’s rendering of the status hierarchy in the literary field. In his eyes, the feature writers among whom ‘New Journalism’ originated, were even further down the literary scale.

This hierarchy has since been reversed, according to Lewis (n.d., as cited by Boynton, 2005: xii) who says that: ‘Whereas the journalists once felt humbled by the novel, we now live in an age in which the novelist lives in a state of anxiety about nonfiction.’ The reversal of fortunes may have come about because news has become the ‘de facto literature of our times’, which is used by many people for distraction and entertainment as well as information (Hanson, 1997, as cited by Knobloch, et al., 2004: 282).

Macleish (1992: 11) credits ‘literary journalism’ for this accomplishment, claiming that the two ‘separate purposes’ which differentiate ‘poetry’ (literature) and ‘journalism’ are merged by this form. Wolfe (1973: 40) had already suggested that status panic was brought on by the advent of a new form of writing which has taken over the ‘techniques of the novelists’, ‘the insights of the men of letters’, and combined them with investigative reporting; hence the novelists and critics displaced by it were emphatic in denying legitimacy to the new form.

This, however, does not explain why the ‘newspaper people were upset’ (Wolfe, 1973: 39). It’s not as if ‘New Journalism’ threatened their literary status, since they hardly had any. But perhaps by its very relationship with literature, already disputed by the men of letters, New Journalism also undermined the position of journalism as a decidedly non-literary activity, and thus prompted a further dispute with those who identified their journalism, and themselves as journalists, in this non-literary way.

Fazakis (2006: 6) analyses the numerous representations of journalistic ideology and practice which emerged during the Malcolm-Masson trials in 1984, and offered ‘competing definitions of what journalism is and what journalists do.’ She observes that although the journalists univocally talked about journalism as a homogenous and unified field, the image of the field which emerged was not that of a ‘unified static entity with fixed borders’ but ‘composed of several “journalisms”… in which the authority to define what journalism is and what journalists do is at stake’ (Fazakis, 2006: 11).

The ‘agreed upon rules’ (Fazakis, 2006: 11) which helped journalists cohere as a group, were based on the ideology of objectivity (Schudson, 2001: 151). Accordingly, undermining objectivity as the norm in journalism, would threaten the existence of the professional group as a whole. Hence, any action which resulted in the questioning or rejection of the objective ideal would have been opposed by those in the group with an interest in preserving it as the norm.

Feature-writing had been positioned at the lower end of the journalistic field due to its distance from the objective ideal, from which the profession derived its legitimacy. While Wolfe praised feature-writing, because it gave ‘a man a certain amount of room in which to write’ (Wolfe, 1973: 18), thus allowing the subjective opinions and views of the writer to creep in, for the same reason many journalists derided it as ‘soft news’. If Wolfe’s claim that the ‘New Journalists’, the former feature writers, with their ‘new’ form of writing, had ‘dethroned’ the highest echelons of literary power, i.e. the novelists, is to be taken seriously, then such a state of affairs, in which low-status journalists were celebrating the role of the subjective in news writing, and their own success in raising the status of the subjective, will also have threatened the ‘hard news’ group whose power in the journalistic field depended on the authority of the objective norm. This is what prompted the ‘newspaper men’ to oppose the legitimacy claim of the ‘New Journalists’, just as vehemently as the literary types.

Epistemological Gap

Boynton (2005: xxix) observes that ‘we are currently experiencing the fascination with “true stories”’, which he says is ‘common during the times of unrest and turmoil’. Hartsock (2001: 12) refers to the ‘unrest and turmoil’ as resulting from an epistemological crisis, beginning in the 1890s, which was ‘fuelled by a cultural need to know and understand the real world’ through prose (Connery, 1992, as cited by Hartsock, 2001: 12). As shown above, in the nineteenth century there was a rift between (fictional) novels and (facts-based) journalism, which later resulted in the rise of ‘literary journalism’. However, Hartsock (2001: 12) suggests that there was also a rift in the journalistic tradition itself, which proved a further factor in the subsequent development of this form.

The rift within the ranks of journalists, some of whom were already breaking away from the unified image of an objective ideal, was itself a response to the ‘objectification of news’ (Hartsock, 2001: 12). In short, those disadvantaged by the objective ideal had reason to object to it; and having lodged their objections, they tended to turn to more literary forms. Thus, just as the objective ideal reached its highest level of influence in America, so the USA also played host to the ensuing, literary rebellion.

Schudson (2001, 2005: 97) traces the evolution of the objectivity norm and its status as journalism’s ruling ideology from the 1890s when American newspapers were in revolt against control by political parties. The need for occupational independence and identity intensified as journalists began to emerge as a group with ‘prevalent patterns of behaviour’ and unique professional practices such as the interview (Schudson, 2001: 157). The significance of particular practices associated with journalists – the ‘digging’, ‘hustling’ and ‘low life legwork’, as Wolfe (1973: 40) terms them, is discernible in the tendency to attach the legitimacy and authority of journalism to any form of writing which employs them. This tendency can be observed in the New Journalists’ attempt to claim that their writing is a representation of phenomenal reality (Wolfe: 1973: 43), based on verifiable facts; moreover that this basis it itself verified by the fact that the writers employed journalistic tools and techniques to get their stories. The potency of this claim, and the power accrued in it by reference to journalistic techniques, prompted critics like Dwight Macdonald (as cited in Harvey, 1994), to reverse this powerful flow of associations, and to name New Journalism ‘parajournalism’ or a ‘bastard form’ which only exploits the ‘factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction’ in a spurious attempt to claim legitimacy.

In Europe, by contrast, journalism did not have so many partisan political ties from which to distinguish itself. Journalism evolved from the same melting pot of eighteenth century realist writing from which the novel also emerged; and the isolation of factuality in prose came about only as a result of instrumental measures such as the introduction of libel laws (Carey, 2007: 7). The French word ‘nouvelle’, encompassing both the novel and journalism (Carey, 2007: 7), indicates the shared origins and joint legacy of these two forms. Similarly, European journalism continues to be oriented towards commentary and interpretation and has strong ties to literature, forming something of a ‘secondary sub-brand of a much more prestigious literary profession’ (Schudson, 2005: 101). Since European journalism was not framed as the antithesis of literature, as was the case in the USA, in Europe the coming of New Journalism did not necessitate the overthrown of the literary status quo. Conversely, perhaps its advent has not been the major event that it was in America, where it entailed closure of an important epistemic rift.

Subjectivity in the Postmodern News Environment

Whereas the modernist view of the world considered it possible to determine the nature of reality by the scientific method of detached observation, the development of quantum physics and the introduction of the uncertainty principle by Heisenberg in 1925, together led to a shift from scientific belief in the progressive closure of uncertainty and ambiguity, to belief in the indeterminate nature of reality (Hartsock, 1999: 443). Heisenberg (1958, as cited by Hartsock, 1999: 441) comments on the subjective nature of all types of observation, saying: ‘what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our methods of questioning’. This raises doubts about the validity of established, modernist methods of journalism, which do not acknowledge the subjective nature of all observations, up to and including professional reporting,

As essential as it once was for journalists to assume a neutral voice, more recently, the neutral, omniscient voice of the objective ideal has come to be distrusted (Buettler, 1984). Expressing or recognising this distrust is now as obligatory as ‘objectivism’ once was. Moreover, since articles written in the modernist, pyramid style exhibit neutral modal shading, i.e. they consist only of physical description not interrupted by subjective interpretation or evaluation by the narrator, categorical assertions are typical of these texts (Simpson, 2004:127). In today’s climate, however, to write as if one’s writing is neutral, is sufficient to show that the writer is anything but. Instead, there is widespread scepticism towards any theory of practices which does not consider the social conditions of the practices under ‘objective’ observation (Bourdieu, 1990: 33), and equally widespread suspicion that any such ‘independence’ is really an institutional voice steeped in specific ideologies which benefit the news industry.

Narrative literary journalism, says Berger (1982, as cited in Hartsock, 1999: 440), is an attempt to re-establish the fundamentally subjective relationship between ‘teller, listener, protagonist’. This, according to Bourdieu (1990: 33), is the issue objectivism ignores whenever it claims to operate in the break between observer and society.

Besides the needs of the audience, what pushed subjectivity to the forefront of a field previously ruled by objectivity norms, were the concerns of the professionals working in it. They found themselves reduced by the objectivity ideal to mere ‘voyeurs with no sense of participation in life’ (Knoblauch, n.d., as cited by Buettler, 1984). Fazakis’ (2006: 14, 18), in describing the professional the Malcom-Masson case, mentions that that the journalists who first vehemently opposed Malcolm’s methods (compression and conversion of spoken discourse from interviews into readable text), and denied that these were standard journalistic practices, later shifted their support to Malcolm. She says they did this because they did not ‘want to be reduced to machines, mechanically reproducing reality.’

The objectivity ideal had forced journalists to seek prestige in the field by adhering to it. Or, in the case of those ‘feature writers’ as described by Wolfe (1973: 18), they were granted (limited) freedom to be subjective and interpretive, but only if they withdrew any claim to the authority of the field, which was inextricably tied in with objectivity. As the influence of the objectivity ideal has waned, however, so more journalists have been attracted to the subjective, and intrigued, to say the least, by forms in which it finds expression. Hence even the most hardened ‘newsmen’ have moved towards styles of writing which allow them to be central to their own writing, and to gain legitimacy from their personalities rather than the constricted ideology of objectivism.

Objectivism also evolved as a form of Weberian discipline ‘to keep the lowly reporters in check’. It was a means through which the older journalists exalted themselves by passing onto the younger members of the fold an ethic which was self celebratory. The younger journalists, who were kept under control by the journalistic canon and the prescriptive norms devised by their predecessors, sought to break free by devising a new set of norms based on subjectivity. Thus the New Journalists’ techniques, according to Wolfe (1973: 46), were not based on any established journalistic theory, but discovered by ‘instinct’ and ‘trial and error’.

New Journalism as Alternative Norm

Swift (2005) claims that the early writers of the new form had ‘insufficient shared interests to cohere as a group’. Wolfe’s anthology was successful in providing a shared vocabulary that encompassed the methods practised by the dispersed writers of the new form. This might be seen as an attempt to foster horizontal solidarity and group identity.

Schudson (2001: 152) discusses the acceptance of objectivity as a norm which thereby succeeded in cohering and disciplining a new occupational group, namely, journalists in America. Similarly, Wolfe’s anthology might be seen as an effort to formalise a new norm that was distinctively different from the previously established one.

The inverted pyramid style has been characteristic of mainstream American journalism for more than 100 years. It replaced the narrative form in the second half of the nineteenth century. As recently as five years ago, it was still the most commonly used format in American newspapers (Yaros, 2006: 287). It arranges information on the basis of relative importance in the story, thus letting the writer rank the information in the article in order of importance, and introducing writer’s (or rather institutional) news-value judgements into otherwise ‘neutral’ language. The accompanying rationale for the inverted pyramid emphasises its usefulness in offering the reader quick access to the ‘more important’ facts.

Yet Yaros (2006: 287) believes that this arrangement of news is outdated. Even though the form aids speedy writing (as well as quick reading) by providing the means to ‘critical closure’ (Hartsock, 1999: 438), it seems it is failing to please new generations of news consumers. The audience’s consumption patterns have been moving more in the direction of narrative based literary forms, prompting newspapers, facing a widening rage of competitors, to turn towards this kind of writing. Harvey suggests that they started to move in this direction as far back as the middle of the twentieth century (Harvey, 1994), around the time that New Journalism made its debut.

Knobloch et al. (2004) have analysed the effects of linear, reversal and inverted discourse structures on the suspense, curiosity and reading enjoyment levels of audiences, using Brewer and Lichtenstein’s (1981, 1982, cited by Knobloch et al, 2004: 262) structural affect theory. This theory proposes that certain discourse structures lead to ‘affective reactions’, such as suspense or curiosity, which are engendered while the reader is following the narrative. The Knobloch study revealed that linear type narratives evoked more suspense; reversal types engendered maximum curiosity; and the reading enjoyment levels in both linear and reversal types were higher than those for the inverted pyramid style, regardless of whether the content of the reading material was factual or fictional.

It seems that we have witnessed the return of narrative journalism, with all its incipient, literary tendencies, during the latter half of the twentieth century; moreover, that this development corresponds to the decline of objectivism and the gradual demise of the inverted pyramid which has been its preferred form. In contrast to the difficult, angular shape of the pyramid story, Yaros (2006: 287) suggests that the narrative structure enables an audience with ‘low levels of (background) knowledge’ to process meanings more effectively. It is surely the case that narrative form communicates information better, and is suited to the complex information demands of the postmodern society.

Another factor in the renewal of narrative must have been the epistemic break brought about by the breakdown of modernist authorities and institutions – a rupture of comparable significance to the watershed which occurred during the late nineteenth century when modernist structures established themselves in epistemology, just as they also did in art, architecture and politics.

Thus New Journalism now emerges not only as a short-lived episode; instead we should recognise it as a signpost to the postmodern and a signal of our own reconnection to the continuum of narrative forms.

Maitrayee Basu is a postgraduate student of Culture and Society at the LSE. She gained her first degree at the University of Middlesex in Dubai.

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Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

The consumption of commercially produced culture is still relatively low in Brazil; but it is growing fast. The Brazilian magazine market has been expanding since 2005. Prompted by rising living standards, national and international publishers have invested in existing titles and created new ones. While the magazine industry is facing a decline in circulation and advertising revenue in consolidated markets as the United States, in Brazil the sector is expected to grow further, with new readers coming into the domestic market and new content enabling them to explore a widening range of interests.

New consumers of information

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is widely known in Brazil by the metaphors he uses to explain almost everything. In October 2008, for instance, he used metaphors to play down the impact of global financial crisis on the Brazilian economy: “There in the U.S., it is a tsunami; here, if it arrives, it will be such a small wave that I will not be able to surf it”. This statement, and other, similarly optimistic declarations, provoked widespread outrage among Brazilian voters. Yet in 2009 Brazil did emerge as the eighth largest economy in the world, and its accelerated economic growth is expected to continue into the next decades. According to a study released in January 2010 by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, auditing supremo to the corporate sector, Brazil is likely to become the fifth biggest global economy by 2025.

The consistently strong performance of the domestic economy has contributed to large-scale upward mobility, with 25 million Brazilians entering the middle class between 2002 and 2008, acccording to the Ministry of Finance. The definition of ‘middle class’ is moot, but in any case more people now have some money left to spend on luxury items such as magazines. Issued by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Culture In Numbers: the Cultural Statistics Yearbook 2009, suggests that Brazilians put cultural goods at No 6 in their list of spending priorities, after food, shelter, clothing, health and transportation. Meanwhile, social policies such as “Bolsa Família” (a federal income transfer program to poor families) has helped to increase literacy rates. The new mass of (literate) consumers is already showing its commercial potential.

According to the latest available data from Instituto Verificador de Circulação (IVC, the institute which verifies the circulation of newspapers and magazines in Brazil), magazine circulation has been rising since 2005. In the first quarter of 2009, it increased by 4.1%, in comparison to the same period in 2008. Between 2000 to 2008, the number of periodical publications jumped from 586 to 2,255, due to the emergence of both broad-based popular titles and specialist titles in newly emerging market segments such as food, tourism and men’s health. At the moment when magazine circulation in the United States was reported to have fallen 2.3% in the first half of 2010 (the second consecutive year of overall decline), the Brazilian media reported a joint venture between the publishing houses Globo, from Brazil, and Condé Nast, from the USA. The new company, named Edições Globo-Condé Nast, will launch Condé Nast titles in Brazil. At the press launch Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, clearly relished the opportunities for expansion in what is now the largest magazine market in Latin America: “Globo is the leading media company in South America….it is the ideal partner for Condé Nast, which aims to expand its activities in this key market.”

Another factor which works to the advantage of print magazines, is that only a third of the population has internet access, according to the latest available data. While in the USA the web is already the main source of information, in Brazil that position continues to be occupied by television. As a print journalist, countless times I’ve had editors say “Oh, it doesn’t matter, nobody saw that”, when telling me to write an article very similar to a piece I’ve already read online. Though this is a source of frustration to journalists, as far as print publishers are concerned, the relative absence of the internet as a competing information source, is cause for celebration. Publishing models that have already run their course or are currently declining in the USA still work in Brazil.

Similarly, print magazines do not face much competition here from reading devices like Kindle (Amazon) or iPad (Apple). While it is much harder to keep paper in circulation wherever many people have easy access to these gadgets, taxes make such devices far more expensive in Brazil. The same Kindle on sale for 139 dollars at Amazon costs about three times more in my country.

Brazilians still read very little — but love to read gossip

The circulation of celebrity news magazines is dropping in the United States, but a “new” title has just been released in Brazil, the Spanish Hola! I say “new”, because in 1999, more than a decade ago, Hola! prompted the launch of one of the most popular magazines in Brazil, Caras (average circulation: 312,000). The two publications are very similar. Altogether, there are five popular celebrity magazines. “If the demand now exists, it must be supplied with appropriate products, publications with popular appeal”, says Pedro Silva Martins, CEO of Instituto Verificador de Circulação. “Popular appeal” means both a simpler approach to subjects and also specific matters, such as the life of celebrities (or housekeeping, or the curative power of plants).

Although things are getting better, Brazilians still read very little, not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality. A review released in 2009 by the Brazilian Book Chamber showed that expenditure on reading takes up 0.5% of family income, while spending on TV, video, music and computers amounts to 2% of the average household budget. When spending on print, however, Brazilians prefer magazines to newspapers and non-didactic books. Families spend, on average, 42 reais (around 24 dollars) on magazines per year; on newspapers, 17 reais (9 dollars); on non-didactic books, only 11 reais (6 dollars). Now that more people have more money to spend on “superfluous things” as culture, they look for publications which satisfy their specific needs. That is why the “popular megazines” are best-sellers in Brazil. Among the top ten weekly titles, six are “popular” (2009).

Weekly news magazines are also tracing an upward curve. Although not originally intended for the more “popular” reader, they are now assuming a more popular “tone”. The three main titles, Veja, Época and IstoÉ are full of the so-called lifestyle stories — some of then are really pieces of self-help. At least, that is how I would define a cover story headlined “How to achieve inner peace”.

Published by Editora Abril, Veja is the third largest weekly news magazine in the world. It is also the largest in Brazil, with an average circulation of more than one million copies. Época is a relatively new publication: it was launched in 1998, along the lines of the German Focus. Published by Editora Globo, it benefits from being part of Organizações Globo (the largest media conglomerate in Latin America), and is now overtaking Istoé to become the nearest competitor to Veja. With an average circulation of 417, 000, it is often sent as a “gift” to the subscribers of the newspaper O Globo (also part of Organizações Globo). Boosted by this extra distribution, although it comes only third in sales (averaging 338,000), IstoÉ is considered the second-most influential magazine in the country, immediately after Veja.

Founded less than a decade apart (Veja in 1968, and IstoÉ in 1976), both publications became famous for their political coverage, with scoops that helped to bring down, for example, President Fernando Collor de Mello, impeached in 1992. Since the launch of Época, however, their focus has begun to shift. Época was the first to offer a very colorful summary of the main topics of the week. Now, all three of them do that — even though their respective publishers claim they provide depth alongside succinct analysis. Nowadays scoops and comprehensive, investigative stories are exceptions. Many articles are only a page long, and surveys show that these pieces have the largest readership. Besides, the three magazines were recently redesigned in order to guarantee a more pleasant, less demanding experience for the reader. In short, the photos are bigger and the text, shorter. The pages have more white space, so that the reader can “breathe”.

Shorter, Better?

There has been considerable debate about the ongoing changes in the news weekly magazines and their impact on the quality of journalism. “An article does not need to be long to be good. We can indeed provide reliable information in one page. We deliver the same content, but without much details”, claims Carlos José Marques, editorial director of IstoÉ, which hits the newsstands every Saturday, at the same time as Veja and Época. The intention is to give readers the opportunity to get updated with the most relevant facts during the weekend, when people have more free time. For this same reason, weekly news magazines may seem more appealing to someone who cannot afford (and/or is not willing to have) multiple sources of quality information (TV is generally considered superficial).

Although only one third of the population currently has access to the internet, Brazilians are already demanding more specialized information, in contrast to the general-knowledge provided by the news and popular magazines. Decoration, running, travelling, food, fashion – these are some of the interests that the “new middle class” is developing and, as a consequence, demanding information about. Another relevant example is the “teen” niche. One such teen-oriented title is Gloss, published by Editora Abril. The magazine was released in 2007 and has already reached a circulation of more than 140,000 copies per month. The average circulation of such titles increased by 33% in first quarter of 2009, and the trend is expected to continue.

Conclusion: Promising Future

The demand for special-interest titles will surely rise further, in line with socio-economic growth. After facing hard times in the first half of this decade, media companies are now financially healthy and eager to take opportunities, by themselves or in partnership with international players. There is still much money to be made from magazine content that fills newly identified gaps in the supply of entertainment and information. In the long-term, however, Brazilian publishers might face problems and challenges related to increasing internet usage, as already experienced by the American magazine industry.

Adriana Prado is a Brazilian journalist and writer. She plans to come to London in September 2011 to enrol on the MA Magazines programme at the University of East London.

dricaprado@gmail.com

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

Ironically, to rediscover how important they are, journalists first need to become a bit meeker.

Reading some of the contemporary complaints about the state of journalism, one could be forgiven for thinking that the news profession is being undermined from without; that there is a multitude of bedroom bloggers, evil PR companies and recessionary trends lined up against the world of journalism, throwing intellectual or economic hand grenades in its general direction.

This gets things the wrong way around. Of course it’s true that the recession has hit the newspaper industry hard, and that PR companies – as always – will do anything short of break the law to coax a journalist to write a fluff piece or promote a product. But the idea that journalism’s woes have been brought about by external threats overlooks the key problem of internal corrosion – of news values, of objectivity, of truth – that predates the emergence of the blogosphere and the onset of economic crisis.

Many now argue that the economic downturn is badly affecting the news industry, specifically the ability of the print media to devote resources to the gathering, analysis and dissemination of stories. There are even demands that the state should bail out newspapers in the same way it has bailed out banks. This overlooks the potentially profound problems associated with giving the state a bigger stake in the press; as David Newell of the Newspaper Society rightly observed of demands for local newspapers to be given state funding: ‘The fear is that with subsidy comes content control or regulation – particularly if it comes from the local authority.’

Self-Inflicted Wounds

More fundamentally, however, the notion that recent recessionary trends are primarily to blame for the crisis of newsgathering absolves the media themselves of their responsibility for denigrating the nature and values of news over the past 10 to 15 years. Many concerned commentators are effectively projecting their own inability to ‘do’ serious news on to the spectre of the belt-tightening downturn; they see in the recession a catch-all explanation for the powerful sense of crisis and indirection that was already afflicting much of the newspaper industry.

In truth, a disdain for cool, objective, connective news reporting – or at least a belief that such journalistic activity was no more special or important than publishing personal diaries, lifestyle advice or celebrity interviews – has infused the media for a decade or more. Indeed, the newspaper industry’s own voluntary reallocation of resources away from news and towards the creation of accompanying lifestyle magazines, advice pages and more and more opinion (five pages in The Times today, compared to one in the past) was done without any pressure of recession. Rather it reflected existential issues, a crisis of purpose within the press itself, which increasingly saw itself, less as the maker and breaker of news and informer of the public, and more as a space in which people might mingle, make connections, see their own problems reflected and righted.

The internal, pre-recession crisis of newsgathering can be seen in the media’s own problematisation of ‘old-fashioned news’, by which they meant the ideals of objectivity and truth. In the 1990s in particular (though the crisis predated that decade in various ways), journalists came under attack, and attacked themselves, for being too ‘aloof’, ‘cold’, ‘distant from events’. Kate Adie was chastised for being ‘forensic’ in her reporting on the Dunblane massacre in 1996; Martin Bell called for a new journalism that ‘cares as well as knows’. Behind these arguments there lurked a deeper discomfort with objectivity in news, even a sense that objectivity was not only undesirable, but impossible. As Christopher Dunkley warned, disdain for detachment had the potential to moralise, and thus pollute, the world of news: ‘From [here], it is only a step, and perhaps not a conscious one, to the selection and manipulation of the facts to favour one side.’

The recession has undoubtedly heaped pressure on newspapers; but it will not do to blame the recession for preventing newspapers from carrying out the most costly aspect of their work: local, national and foreign news reporting. A newspaper industry that has a more coherent sense of purpose, and faith in its public role as a disseminator of the truth as it understands it, should be able, even in dire economic circumstances, to reallocate resources to its core purpose. One must ask: is it funds that are lacking, or vision?

The Folk Devils of PR

Likewise, demonising PR companies has become another way for journalists and editors to depict the crisis of the media as a product primarily of external pressures. It is commonly argued now that a combination of ruthlessness on the part of PR companies and opportunism on the part of some reporters is having a detrimental impact on journalism, giving rise to a new breed of journalist more interested in pleasing his publisher’s clients with simplistic black-and-white reporting than in grappling with hard, often uncomfortable facts, and allowing newspapers to become mouthpieces for big corporations, political lobbyists, or celebrity promoters.

In his much-discussed book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies explores, amongst other things, the role of PR in poisoning the modern media. However, the focus on PR tells us only half the story – if that; it might only be an eighth or tenth of the story. A far more decisive factor, and one that it would pay to explore in depth, has been the willingness of journalists to become mouthpieces for campaigns, especially of the good-and-evil, no-room-for-confusion variety.

For example, Davies’ theory that a corrosive relationship between PR and journalism is ruining the media cannot explain why journalists put themselves at the forefront of promoting something like Tony Blair’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no PR company bombarding them with faxes and emails, yet they repeated all of Blair’s claims virtually without question. Nor can it explain the role of journalism in the MMR debacle of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Again, there was no well-oiled PR machine promoting the bogus MMR-autism link, just a group of isolated researchers who made some wild claims in the Lancet. Yet much of the media willingly turned it into a story about brave doctors versus an unfeeling, non-listening establishment: no one forced this script on to their pages; they wrote it themselves.

Similarly, PR played no role in Nick Davies’ own acceptance in the Guardian in 1997 that there had been industrial levels of child abuse at a children’s care home in Bryn Estyn, Wales. Davies, in common with other journalists who have written misleading reports on the threat of widespread paedophilia to the fabric of British society, compared the alleged events at Bryn Estyn with the Holocaust, causing the High Court judge who oversaw a tribunal on the alleged events to condemn the Guardian’s ‘highly coloured reporting’.

A more important factor than the terrier-like determination of PR companies (surely a case of dog bites man) has been the recent increase in the readiness of journalists to promote simplistic morality tales in place of news. As a result of the crisis in public life – the flattening out of political contestation and the decline in public fora in recent years – the media have come to play an increasingly important role as a political agitator, even as a place where morality is defined. It plays this role largely by default (it is the collapse of the political realm that enables it), but it is a role that has been embraced with some relish by many journalists and editors. From the attack on politics for being too rowdy and party-oriented (when in fact it is neither of these things sufficiently) to the largely unquestioning promotion of anti-obesity, anti-climate change manifestoes and other such political agendas, the media have become the moral arbiters of the modern world. This development has been a more decisive and even more destructive phenomenon than the rise and rise of PR companies, helping to transform the media into a political-by-default entity and encouraging journalists to opt for simplicity over objectivity.

Overrating the Blogosphere

The blogosphere, too, is an unconvincing ‘despoiler’ of the traditional news industry. Indeed, if anything, today’s army of bloggers – many of whom merely pick apart or comment on mainstream media stories – can be seen as an unwitting creation of the newspaper industry itself. In their creeping acceptance that objectivity is problematic, and in undermining their own authority to communicate any Truth with a capital T, today’s media implicitly invite others to reanalyse and reassess everything they say. Sometimes the invitation is made explicit, for example when ‘users’ (formerly known as readers or viewers) are asked to comment on stories, contribute their own blogs, and add to the reporter’s perspective, as if the reporter’s perspective were just one of many varied-but-legitimate interpretations of events. Furthermore, those who celebrate this as the arrival of inclusive news, have inadvertently introduced its less attractive twin, which goes by the name of inconclusive news. In this climate, even aiming to be definitive is definitely out of favour.

Journalism should be defended, of course; but sometimes from itself. Journalism plays a key role in society and public life, not only in reporting ‘cold hard facts’ but in giving them some objective, truthful meaning and context. It can, and should, inform, enlighten and enthuse the public. But in order for the importance of news reporting to be preserved, or rather rediscovered, contemporary journalism will need to reassess its priorities and re-establish its sense of purpose. And, ironically, journalists will need to become both more meek and more cocky than they are now, recognising that they are not the makers of morality, the devisers of political behaviour, or the shapers of people’s eating habits, waste-disposal antics and various other peccadilloes, but neither is the journalist’s account of events merely ‘another way of looking at the world’ or little better than the man in the street’s. Rather, journalists can play a unique role in informing our understanding and knowledge of the political and social worlds – if only they live up to this role instead of abdicating from the responsibility of playing it.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked www.spiked-online.com

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

Graham Barnfield
‘With the Internet, everyone with an opinion can have their say and be heard. The poorest squirrel eater out there in the sticks, provided he has a decent Internet provider, can set up his Web page right alongside the rich kid in the suburbs. Technology and entertainment have levelled class distinctions and created a pure form of democracy.’ (Bachelder 2002: 165)

‘When our individual intentions are left to the wisdom of the crowd, our access to information becomes narrowed, and as a result, our view of the world and our perception of truth becomes dangerously distorted … For all their claims to be more democratic and honest, these supposedly editor-free social news sites are actually creating a more oligarchic and corrupt media.’ (Keen 2008: 94)

Introduction: Forgetting Our History
In the heat of the moment, a new trend can appear inevitable, as if it were the only possible answer to the demands of its time. Thus the trendy idea that the tradition of journalistic objectivity is doomed, seems more than a knee-jerk response to the historical decline of traditional, paid-for journalism; in today’s context, it has acquired the status of logical necessity. But the history of journalism tells us that its objectivity (or lack of) is not the inevitable corollary of professionalism (or absence thereof); equally, the current collision course between the idea of objectivity and the concept of the amateur, may turn out to be no more than an accident of history.
The Cult of the Amateur (2007/8) offers an insightful yet one-sided account of the threat to professional standards (more precisely, the standards associated with professionalism). Author Andrew Keen insists that reporting on events in the world should be synonymous with getting paid for doing it. Along pro-am lines, Keen is keen to maintain a division between serious reporting and insidiously, persistently trivial commentary; he predicts disastrous consequences should the line between professional and amateur become any more porous than it already is. True to form, he doesn’t do freebies for anyone.

There is some substance to this argument, as Andrew Calcutt demonstrates elsewhere in Proof. Professional reporters have close to a monopoly on length of time spent reporting. Even when supplying eyewitness accounts, or sifting through documents in an investigative fashion, other citizens – among whom I would number certain types of journalist – may sometimes add to the total of available information, comment and punditry; but only intermittently. That said, noting these real differences – marked out by training, resources and time – does not mean that truth and amateurism should be treated as everlasting enemies, forever locked in a fatal embrace.

History Inverted
In the blogosphere, Keen’s argument is more likely to appear in reverse. According to Media Lens (2009), payment and professionalization together drive the distortion and misrepresentation characteristic of corporate news media. In this claim there is a sense of history, of the same thing happening over and over again over time; but the one-dimensional view expressed here, is hardly less distorting than Keen’s one-sidedness. True, the professional code of ‘due impartiality’ does not guarantee objective reporting; often it has lent credibility to otherwise unbelievable depictions of good versus evil. However, the fact that some professional reporters have filed woefully inaccurate, disgracefully biased copy, does not mean that inaccurate, biased reporting is all we can ever expect to get from the professional reporter. This is what Media Lens sees as the essential trend within professional reporting; but taking professional to mean propensity for distortion, is to misrepresent contingent connections (the coincidence of professional reporting with distorting practices) as necessary relations (as if professional reporting is an inherently distorting process). This is itself a warped view: it is as one-sided as Keen, though looking at professional journalism from the other side.

Taking the long view, it would make sense to treat the Keen-ish linkage between amateur journalism and avoiding the truth as a present-day contingency; the same is true of the obverse position, represented by Media Lens.

‘Objectivity’ and the Pro-Am Debate
Historians of American journalism point to the decades in which objectivity became central to the professional ethics favoured by big city newspapers (Schudson 1978: 77-87). Suspicion is rife (now) that deploying a scientific methodology (then) served to inflate the public standing of journalists, propelling them away from ‘hack’ status towards the scientific reputation enjoyed by medicine. Meanwhile, readers who valued a partisan, biased and entertaining press were making way for those who wanted facts and a journalistic profession trained to supply them (Kaplan 2002).
Whenever a scientific method was propounded, it was usually couched in terms of objectivity. This terminology has been open to too main interpretations: those who see objectivity as a way to approximate closely the natural world, human society and the dynamics of both; and the growing chorus of voices for whom the ‘objective’ approach was merely a rhetorical strategy for boosting one’s own authority and legitimacy.

Some of today’s enthusiasm for user generated content is also an expression of the latter position, while contemporary concerns over UGC being inherently untruthful are redolent with reaction against its ascendancy. In the hard sciences, the shifting balance of power between these two stances led, in part, to the Sokal affair (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), in which a disgruntled, old school scientist successfully hoaxed a group of cultural relativists with a spoof article that was subsequently revealed as a parody of their own worst traits.

In today’s journalism as in academia, the (anti-)epistemology of relativism rules (more or less). Each sector has its own group of radical dissenters from relativism, but in seeking to overthrow the regime which itself overthrew the rule of ‘objectivity’, most of these dissidents can only think of resorting to the status quo ante. Thus the current controversy over professional versus amateur, summarised above as Keen v Media Lens, is also part of an ongoing, epistemological struggle between essentialism and relativism.

The Real History of Pro-Am
The turn to objectivity among the salaried staff of newspapers was partly an attempt on their part to distinguish themselves from a pool of journalists which included wage-earning hacks, jobbing semi-professionals, and unpaid enthusiasts (typically, a gentleman with private income). The latter were ensconced in a publishing industry which barely distinguished the hobbyist from the autodidact, or self-publishing from vanity publishing. The trend towards professionalism can be seen in the hard sciences too, where French civil servant Nicolas Camille Flammarion’s frightening work-rate resulted in countless volumes of popular science and astronomy. Flammarion was so prolific he even found time to invent the sci-fi alien (Stableford 2002).

Thus the man of letters came to be divided into the paid professional on the one hand, and the amateur on the other; though no one felt the need to describe these transformations as a ‘crisis of journalism’. The overlap of science and amateur journalism continued into the twentieth century: weird fiction pioneer HP Lovecraft was among the writers who got into print via this route (Joshi 2002).

Around a century ago, a distinctive cohort of amateurs within publishing thrived alongside a more profitable and prestigious newspaper industry, with objectivity enshrined as its professional ethic. Newsgathering and assembling ‘the facts’, mediated through the idea of journalists having a ‘nose for a story’, was standard practice – and not just in journalism. Techniques associated with the big city newsroom came to play a foundational role in empirical sociology. Former news reporter Robert Park organised University of Chicago researchers around distinctive beats; and the raw material compiled in subsequent monographs came to resemble muckraking accounts of urban hardship and low life (Linder 1996). Thus did US social science present itself as more scientific by emphasising its close proximity to the methods of the professional newspaper reporter.

In the years after the Second World War, US intellectuals moved some distance from this position. In different ways, the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School combined a sceptical approach to claims of scientific objectivity with concern about the potentially totalitarian consequences of mass media. Unease about claims to know the greater truth was fuelled by recent experience of fascism and Stalinism. Fears were focused on industrialised, mainstream media; indeed, the first generation of critical theorists made few direct references to amateur journalism. But in their dual capacity as junior professors and amateur/semi-professional journalists, they were affected by the disappearance of financial advantages such as low rent and plentiful freelance opportunities, which had been enjoyed by the previous generation of Depression-era intellectuals. Perhaps the new generation’s argument that corporate employment sapped the strength of independent journalism, was partly a response to their own experience of newly straitened circumstances.
Note that the trend of the time was to equate professionalism with a propensity for distortion (the Media Lens position), in contrast to that side of today’s debate (Keen and company), which blames the ‘cult of the amateur’.

Encountering Dwight Macdonald
One notable voice was that of Dwight Macdonald. In an Encounter essay published in 1956, he praised London for hosting seven weekly publications – and two dailies – which he ‘continues to marvel at’ (1957: 140). With the exception of The Listener (1929-1991), all seven weeklies remain in circulation to this day. Comparing such titles to what he saw as a moribund US marketplace, Macdonald was full of praise for London’s weekly news magazines, which he described as running on a voluntary basis. In his judgement, the financial position of their writers gave no indication as to the quality of their writing: ‘the amateur is not necessarily inferior in skill to the professional; the difference between them is simply that the former does because he wants to what the latter does for pay.’ (1957: 141)

Many contributors to London-based weeklies were astute observers of British society, just as Macdonald describes them. Some of them had other jobs, not necessarily in journalism, and they will have been writing for the Spectator or New Statesman because they wanted to (and because the editors of these publications wanted them to). But they were also paid for doing so: Macdonald miscalculated this aspect of their financial status. He also appears to have adopted the tone of an anthropologist revealing a subculture previously unknown to American readers. Furthermore, he praised the British weeklies for targeting an intelligent general readership – an ambition widely shared among US intellectuals until Macdonald himself lambasted it as ‘midcult’. But for all his inconsistencies, Macdonald’s point that high quality journalism can result from low budget operations, still stands.

Prolonging the Problems with Macdonald
In recent years, bloggers such as Phil Nugent and Yule Heibel have stumbled across Macdonald’s ‘Amateur Journalism’, and have seen themselves reflected in it. Linking one’s output to Macdonald’s essay is risky, since it is heavily flawed. The botched account of who gets paid for doing what is significant since Macdonald starts out by defining his position (and the position of journalism) by reference to the dividing line between amateur and professional. Later on, the question of payment ceases to be his reference point, and he moves to define good journalism as a matter of spirit and sensibility, including ‘freedom with off-the-cuff value judgements’ and ‘jaunty expertise’. He portrays localised pockets of press excellence as a product of class divisions in 1950s Britain: these publishing gems appear causally connected to ‘the degradation of the rest’ (1957: 145-146). Popular newspapers are slotted into the mass culture paradigm. Even the Manchester Guardian seems to have relocated to London almost a decade early!

Macdonald’s biographer notes his extraordinary enthusiasm for London, which he visited in June 1956 (Wreszin 1995: 309-313) and returned to the following summer. Macdonald’s liking for London may have influenced his perceptions of the seven weeklies, which themselves were – according to subsequent critics – corrupted by over-specialism and academia. Indeed, at the very moment when Macdonald was flying away home to the United States of America, Britain’s amateur journalism may already have been on its last legs. At least, this is how it is depicted in a recent, retrospective narrative of catastrophe (Schwarz 2002) which nonetheless pre-empted the current, doom-laden discussion of Web 2.0.

Pro-Am Revisited
The focus has moved to professional journalism, now presented as the victim of UGC. Whereas amateur journalism was only recently an object of mourning, suddenly it is recast as a burgeoning, threatening development. But today’s critics of ‘the cult of the amateur’ are guilty of disconnecting their target from both content and context. No wonder their aim is wide of the mark.

Macdonald praised so-called amateurism, by which he meant literary London’s publications, because it seemed to offer a well-informed and thoughtful account of matters of public interest. Compared to a hastily written tweet or status update, this was undoubtedly the case. Equally, Macdonald’s observations presuppose readers who were both ready and hungry for detailed reviews and long form essays on such matters. Largely absent nowadays, this kind of readership could only be bemused by the highly personal outbursts which comprise so much of today’s internet traffic.
Whether this latter represents the triumph of the trivial or a revised public sphere in which the personal is central, is a question for another day. But using the amateur as the category to explain the pending extinction of the professional, objective reporter seems myopic, to say the least. It means wrenching amateur journalism from the earlier settings in which it survived and thrived, and recasting it as an inherently destructive force. It means presuming that it has nothing good to say, and denying that it may say it well, regardless of any external, social pressures that might be driving more trivial, superficial and untruthful media activities.

While Anglo-American pundits sulk or celebrate, other parts of the world bear witness to more political, outward-facing forms of amateur journalism. In Malaysia, for instance, oppositional blogs played a significant role in recent elections (Tan and Ibrahim 2008). Ultimately we get the Web 2.0, the public sphere and the journalism – whether professional or amateur – we deserve. Blaming the form it’s delivered in won’t change this.

Graham Barnfield co-edited Reconstruction Vol. 8, No. 1: Class, Culture and Public Intellectuals. He is programme leader of BA (Hons) Journalism, UEL.

References
Bachelder, C. (2003) Bear V Shark London: Bloomsbury, OP 2001.
Edwards, D. and David Cromwell (2009) Newspeak in the 21st Century London: Pluto.
Joshi, S.T. (2002) ‘Introduction’ in H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, and Other Weird Stories London: Penguin Modern Classics, vii-xx.
Kaplan, R.L. (2002) Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity Cambridge University Press.
Keen, A. (2008) The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy London: Nicholas Brealey, OP 2007.
Linder, R. (1996) The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School, trans. Adrian Morris et al, Cambridge University Press; OP 1990.
Macdonald, D. (1957) ‘Amateur Journalism’ in The Responsibility of Peoples, and Other Essays in Political Criticism London: Gollancz, pp.140-152 (OP in Encounter, 1956).
Schwarz, B. (2002) ‘Men of Letters: The decline of “amateur journalism”’, The Atlantic, July/August.
Schudson, M. (1978) Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers New York: Basic.
Sokal, A. and Jean Bricmont (1998) Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science London: Profile.
Stableford, B. (2002) ‘Introduction’ in Camille Flammarion, Lumen Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ix-xxxiv.
Tan, J. and Zawawi Ibrahim (2008) Blogging and Democratization in Malaysia: A New Civil Society in the Making Selangor: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Wreszin, M. (1995) A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald New York: Basic.

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

Introduction: No Place For Nostalgia

Traditional print media are in trouble and many have gone on record saying the newspaper industry in its current form is unsustainable. In countries where internet access is good, it is not hard to see why this is. Commuters who pick up a newspaper at the station before their hour-long journey to work, will find that once they have reached their office much of what is in their newspaper will already be out of date. Why, in the age of emails, blackberries, iphones and css feeds would anyone buy a newspaper other than for nostalgic reasons?

There is more: the internet is not like the newspaper which comes to the consumer as a finished product. The internet offers a level of interaction between the consumer and product which can increase the value of that product, and additionally the consumer can create their own products which, though separate from commercial media outlets, may enjoy almost equal status in the search engines’ results list (the newsstand of the virtual world). Furthermore, user-generated content (UGC) in the form of ‘citizen journalism’ offers a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative to professional journalism for editors looking to save money.

A combination of these factors and a dose of recession have combined to put pressure on the journalism industry, which as yet has been unable to come up with an alternative model. At the heart of this issue lie two problems:

i) How can news media make money from online content?

ii) How can professional journalism ‘compete’ with UGC?

Advertising May Pay Its Own Way…..

Theoretically the first problem should be less of a challenge. Newspapers make their main income through the sale of advertising space, and they may continue to do so on their online platforms. Indeed, the internet offers exciting opportunities for advertisers to create more effective marketing strategies. For example, news outlets could incorporate Web 2.0 into their sites allowing consumers to create their own ‘front page’ to suit personal preferences and interests. A more user-friendly and aesthetically imaginative version of Google News is not beyond the realms of possibility.

With increased participation and the capacity to build a platform to suit the individual, consumers reveal more personal information about themselves, albeit sometimes unknowingly. This information (as Facebook has shown) can be used to target advertising at consumers in a more effective way. The email updates and the feeds (which consumers subscribe to) give the advertiser another opportunity to target the consumer. This could act as a large incentive to create more original content: the larger the number of updates, the more opportunities there are for advertisers to make contact with consumers.

…Or It May Not

Of course commercial projections like this depend on a healthy advertising industry, and whilst advertisers are still spending money on new campaigns, they are not immune to the current recession. Like the journalism industry, they need to come up with a sustainable business model to fit the new paradigm; and it’s not yet clear that they will succeed in doing this.

In a recent blog (http://tinyurl.com/d87q2e) on TechCrunch, Professor Eric Clemmons argued that advertising simply will not work in this new medium which ‘is not replacing advertising but shattering it.’ Clemmons sited three main reasons for this: ‘Consumers do not trust advertising. Consumers do not want to view advertising, and Consumers do not need advertising’. His research shows that internet platforms where consumers (who are considered more objective then advertisers) can review products and services, make adverts redundant and unwelcome. Apart from their hostility to advertising, it is important to take into consideration the availability of software which enables consumers to avoid adverts altogether.

Whether this is an accurate prediction of things to come, or simply an apocalyptic exaggeration of the effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Clemons does raise some interesting points and it is hard to deny that, for news media to be successful on the internet, they must find another way to generate revenue besides advertising.

Adapt & Survive

Charging consumers for content is the most obvious way of doing this, and worth considering, especially since the idea was recently mooted by Rupert Murdoch (http://tinyurl.com/co2xqv). For the Financial Times, Lionel Barber also predicted that newspapers will start charging for online content with in a year (http://tinyurl.com/nk8sj7). The new problem therefore, can be summarised as follows:

Is it possible to make people pay for access to something that is currently free of charge, easy to re-produce (albeit illegally), and available from rivals such as the BBC who may have other sources of funding?

A parallel can be drawn with the music industry, which has been facing a similar threat from illegal file sharing but was (eventually) able to adapt to change. Music providers introduced their own legal download services which gave more choice to consumers, who can now download tracks individually rather then having to buy whole albums. Spotify and other streaming services allow users to listen to music for free, while charging a small fee that enables listeners to avoid interruptions from adverts.

In this newly emerging context, instead of the music biz going out of business, classic bands have reformed and recorded new material, and live music is increasingly in demand. There is certainly no lack of new music; if anything it is a lot easier for new bands to promote their own material without the backing of a major record label. New research cited in a recent Guardian article ( http://tinyurl.com/m4f44w) suggested that although it remains a problem, the number of illegal downloads is declining, with more consumers turning to legal services and streaming.

It seems that music consumers are prepared to pay for products and services if they believe the quality is a worthwhile investment. The same is true for journalism, as titles such as the Economist have shown with their growing readership ( http://tinyurl.com/ktk4cp). As long as an equilibrium can be found between what people can afford and the cost of production, there is little reason why journalism of a high standard should be at less of a premium than any other quality product or service.

Breadth Of Coverage, Depth of Quality

The question of quality brings us conveniently to the next issue: how professional journalism can ‘compete’ with user-generated content (UGC). Citizen journalism is often criticised on the grounds of quality, bias, and an inability to provide viewers and readers with a complete picture. Whilst one must recognise the limits of citizen journalism, it is certainly unfair to be so dismissive, since many citizen journalists produce work of a good standard. These charges also fail to acknowledge the collaborative nature of citizen journalism. It is often supported by sites such as Demotix which actively encourage collaborative reports made up entirely of UGC (http://www.demotix.com/page/hubs). This in turn allows for community regulation as well as the pooling of limited resources.

It is important to note that citizen journalism has made its biggest impact when professional reporters have faced practical difficulties preventing them from covering particular events. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 prompted the use of Twitter by residents of the city who uploaded eye witness reports as events took place. Meanwhile mainly for safety reasons, professional journalists were unable to get so close to the fighting.

In the wake of recent protests surrounding the G20 summit in London, coverage by citizen journalists made a large impact, specifically with regard to the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson. In this and other controversial situations, police statements were contradicted by footage taken by citizen reporters. Another good example of the positive effect of citizen journalism is the aftermath of the elections in Iran, when the authorities effectively banned foreign media and subjected Iranian journalists to intimidation. It is important to note that in both these cases reports from citizen journalists did not replace the work of professionals, but for whatever reason the key events were not captured by professional reporters. On the other hand, the limitations of citizen journalism must also be recognised: the footage which did emerge from the G20 and Iran was predominantly the work of activists, and thus questions of objectivity have arisen in relation to it. However, whilst citizen journalism might have limits in both these cases, user-generated reports did complement the work of professionals: the latter provided a valuable context in which to place the relatively raw data originated by the former.

Another interesting development is the recent unrest in China’s Xinjiang province, where the authorities uncharacteristically accommodated the international media by giving tours and holding press conferences (albeit with some restrictions), whilst at the same time blocking the tools commonly used by citizen journalists (internet and mobile phone networks). One wonders if one of the effects of UGC is that it has shown that restrictions on the press can be futile; also that it is in the interests of the state to accommodate respected journalists rather than unknown citizen reporters.

Of course, this could be an exaggeration and time will tell what the true effect of citizen journalism will be on authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, as the above examples have shown, citizen journalism does have a valuable role to play in reporting the news, and regardless of some people’s low opinions, it is hard to see it disappearing. However, it is worth remembering that consumers are unlikely to pay for UGC in the same way that they might for the work of professionals, and it is this that might ensure the limit of its appeal to editors.

Ed Hadfield is a member of the editorial team at Demotix www.demotix.com, a user-generated news outlet and photo-agency. Ed is also preparing to take the MA in Journalism and Society at the University of East London.

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

I have been spending a lot of time recently turning specialists into professional journalists. We call this the Bolt course and I now run it for Bauer Media, formerly EMAP, in Peterborough. The aim is to turn keen fishing enthusiasts, gardeners, classic car petrol heads, bikers and steam railway fanatics into journalists. They are already professionals in the sense that they are paid to work on their respective magazines. The aim is to help them become professionals in that other sense: writers who understand that they are communicators; who understand where they are in the river of journalism; and who apply interviewing, reporting and writing standards.

Subject Specialists and Professional Journalists

For almost everybody on the course over the years I’ve run it, there is some defining moment when they turn from being a specialist writer into a professional journalist. For one writer, now on MCN, it happened over one weekend. He had been recruited by an MCN editor who had seen him riding in the street and left a note on his fuel tank asking him if he was interested in writing about biking. He said ‘yes’, so he was on the course. That weekend, he was reading a local paper with his girlfriend and she commented on the lead story – something about a child being molested. ‘That’s shocking,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he told me he replied, ‘Look at the intro. Thirty-seven words. Shocking.’ That was his moment.

Another one in this year’s intake was sent on a trip to Europe to cover a bike launch. Using standard journalism techniques he came back with four stories, not just the one put on the plate by the PRs running the event. Another defining moment. He called it his ‘Bolt moment’.

During the course we take them out of their comfort zone and have them writing stories about police investigations, food scares, holidays for the over 60s – anything but bikes, fishing, gardening, classic cars, and steam railways. They learn to detach themselves from the subject, generate angles for different audiences, write for different media and generally serve the readers, listeners and viewers. Day by day they learn the small things and the large ones: the history of British magazines sits beside the identification of the subordinate clause and the proper use of the semicolon.

Once or twice, it has been too much of a jump. A young fisherman, an amateur champion, was the star of one year because he progressed so far from his starting point. Within two years he was an editor; but two years later he was out of journalism altogether. Writing every day about the sport he had looked forward to practicing each weekend, had undermined his love of fishing. He sacrificed his journalism for his fishing. Our loss.

Three ‘C’s: the holy trinity

Their publishers see them as content generators. The creators of the first ‘C’ in the mantra: Content begets Community begets Cash.

They are not really challenged by the surge in user-generated content (UGC). They see it as part of the conversation with their audience. And they filter it. And they can do it better than those who have not been trained.

Not that training is the key. The key to unlocking their potential is that moment when they realise that professional journalism is different from UGC. Different because it is paid for, and different because it is privileged. Many used to be avid readers of the publications they now work on. They understand the privileged position they are now in.

Some of them will get to be editors and will have to shed much of what they now love doing: writing about their passion. They will become part of the hierarchy, grappling with that old oxymoron, editorial management. I’ve been working closely with two editors in the trade press quite recently, guiding them through the choppy seas of their relationships with staff, publishers, commercial managers and their ‘industries’. Both have relaunched their magazines in tough times. Both have relaunched their websites. They have accepted, indeed embraced, the fact that they need to deliver their content in whatever media at whatever time their audience requires.

Internal Threat

They and other editors are dealing with the fact that many publishers have restructured their organisations into complex matrices with little thought for the consequences. We journos are used to simple, product-oriented structures: editorial teams focus on the generation of those digital page images for repro and print. Most of the skills to do this were within the editorial team. Now editors have to look sideways to a digital production team which does not belong to the editorial team of that particular publication; instead it is embedded in its own technical fiefdom.

The needs of the less prestigious publications within the publishing house will be pushed aside as the privileged publications get the lion’s share of attention from the digital teams. If there is anything which will undermine the position of the professional journalist, it may come from inside publishing houses rather than outside. Not the recession, not UGC, and not digital media themselves. But the almost thoughtless creation of complex organisational structures which require constant negotiation and sophisticated management to make them work. And publishing management has never in my experience been burdened with the description ‘sophisticated’.

In this more complex world the wrong argument is: ‘We need this in editorial’. As long as editors use this argument they will sound like the moaning minnies they are caricatured as. They will look even more like a cost centre. The more they tune what they need in editorial to what publishers want, the more successful they and their publication will be. That is not to advocate that they should give up editorial values: far from it. They should use the fact that the three ‘Cs’ start with what they create, as the lever to get the resources they need.

Or to put it another way, as Andrew Calcutt has done, ‘professional news reporting must be elevated into position as the cornerstone of commercial publishing and the public realm.’ And they are doing this. The editors and the reporters I have written about here, are doing this; and they are not alone in doing so.

Richard Sharpe is a visiting fellow of UEL and the cornerstone of UEL’s MA Magazines. He is also a partner in ETC (editorial training consultants).

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

Introduction: Rose-Tinted Gold

Reports of the death of journalism are exaggerated. The sector is ever-changing and a new generation should welcome the opportunity to fashion the media in its own likeness.

What’s the future of journalism? Near-terminal decline, according to many current commentators. In their doomsday scenario, newspapers are closing or contracting, caught in a perfect storm of a slump-induced decline in advertising revenues and the migration of advertising to the internet. The very profession of journalism is under threat from user generated content. Now that the public can report their experiences directly through ‘citizen journalism’, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and the like, soon there will be no need for professional intermediaries.

It’s a sad story. Once again, heartless capitalists, who only care about making money, are undermining a vital public service. Journalists, those fearless crusaders for truth and justice, the dying breed which holds our politicians and public institutions to account, are close to extinction.

It’s a touch self-serving, isn’t it? Here we have a flattering picture of the journalist as Clark Kent meets Che Guevara, holding out against the inhumanity of big business. Most of these ‘think pieces’ are written by current or former journalists: the profession does not need to think twice about giving itself a good press.

About to enter the dark ages, we are being ejected from a golden time, allegedly. So when was there an ‘ideal’ number of journalists? When was the news industry at its optimal level? That golden time is strangely hard to find.

This reminds me of a journalistic cause célèbre from the previous decade: the ‘decline’ of the Daily Mirror, the left-leaning UK tabloid. Around the turn of the century, there were numerous complaints that it had lost its campaigning roots and become nothing more than a poor imitation of its right-wing rival, the Sun. Then editor Piers Morgan (now one of the ‘X-Factor’ judges) wrote a piece defending his record and pointing out the common trait in the criticisms levelled against him by former colleagues. They all claimed that the ‘golden age’ of the Mirror was, you guessed it, when they worked there!

Addressing The Wrong Question

Isn’t much of the ‘journalism in crisis’ argument either special pleading for a profession or lobbying for a particular industry – in this case news organisations? Job types come and go: domestic servants have largely disappeared during the past century but is the country any the worse for it? Not unless you are Mr Hudson or Mrs Bridges, butler and cook in Upstairs, Downstairs.

How should we assess the eloquent pleading of news publishers, now keen to talk up the public service role of their work as they seek to lobby government for sympathetic policies? We should remember that virtually every industry performs some public service contributing to the jigsaw of Western democracy: the mobility of modern society depends partly on steel makers creating the raw materials for cars and trains; modern medicine relies on the pharmaceutical industry. Tesco’s low margin, high volume operation provides the cheap food on which we depend, etc, etc.

Are news organisations really making a unique contribution to society, or are they just making self-interested efforts to undermine competitors like job search websites which have taken a huge share of their advertising? There is probably no simple answer, but we shouldn’t forget the commercial realities: maybe job seekers find the internet better serves their needs and is easier to use; maybe job advertisers find websites more cost effective.

There is a deeper problem with whole debate about whether journalism is in decline. It is asking the wrong question. The real issue is not whether a particular profession or industry is rising or falling but whether the underlying human needs are being met. And the need here is to communicate – to send and receive information, or as the UN Declaration of Human Rights puts it: ‘…to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media.’

The real issue is that our communicative abilities have been affected by two separate processes: technological changes and the economic downturn.

Taking the last one first, journalism in the commercial sector has always been affected by the economic cycle. Fewer ads mean less revenue so less money to spend on editorial resources. During a boom swollen advertising revenues make papers fatter adding extra pages and sections. Is this a good thing or bad? Doesn’t a larger paper diminish the opportunity to drive readers towards the common concerns identified by journalists? So the journalist’s role in promoting social cohesion and focussing democratic debate is possibly enhanced, not diminished in a recession.

Assessing whether the slump has damaged or enhanced our ability to communicate is a complex question with the answer likely to depend on which of the many aspects of communication you are considering. In some US cities there is now only one newspaper instead of two. Is this lack of competition good or bad? Intense competition is often said to lead to the dumbing down of journalism and, for example, the inflation of crime statistics in an attempt to increase sales. Won’t monopoly lead to higher standards? Maybe; maybe not. But one thing is certain: there is no strict correlation between economic recession and a slump in journalism.

Capitalism And Journalism Are Entwined

Journalism’s relationship to economic circumstances is a field plagued by muddy thinking. It is certainly NOT correct to think of journalists as somehow divorced from society. The media’s ‘fourth estate’ tag with its implicit comparison to the first estate, or priesthood, is misleading because it is based on a supposedly divinely ordained social order. For the media to compare itself to the priesthood, carrying out regular democratic audits just like the church oversees the moral welfare of the populace, is both conceited and confused.

Contemporary capitalism has played a huge role in developing the news media. People were prepared to pay for information partly because of the increasing complexity of business relationships: the eighteenth century insurance market relied on the Lloyd’s List newsletter for accurate information about a risky industry. The local and national press as we know it is the function of the consumer society which first emerged in the nineteenth century. Companies need to advertise products to a mass market: this is what pays the wages of journalists.

Journalism is to a large degree a by-product of our current stage of economic development. It cannot be divorced from it as if it were some neo-priesthood. Local newspaper journalism exists because it gets people to read classified adverts, job adverts, and adverts for other products. When it no longer does that it will cease to exist, in the commercial sector at least. Or it will evolve into another form – a point to which I shall return.

Better Communication Or Worse?

Are technological changes enhancing or diminishing our ability to impart or receive information?

It’s become almost a truism to say that websites, blogging, social networking sites, email, SMS and mobile phones generally have made small-scale communication much easier. Here I am talking about groups of 10,000 or fewer – close to the lower end of the local newspaper market.

What about mass communication, the province of the ‘traditional’ media? There have certainly been some achievements with people using websites to break into traditional media markets. The success of the online-only news site The Register in the highly competitive IT trade press sector is one example.

The influence of political bloggers is another.

In theory technological change has made mass communication easier, in practice the need for expensive marketing and higher staffing levels means it usually remains the preserve of well-funded organisations.

So let’s put the question in a way which can be answered: have the prospects for communication improved or declined in the past decade? Depending which sector you’re considering the answers may vary, but in general there has surely been an improvement.

More people than ever before now have the possibility of making themselves heard. Small-scale communication has been opened up as never before. Chinks are starting to appear in the monolith of mass communication: an edifice which both denied the variety of human life and brought together communities as political entities.

It’s Over To You…

It is true that some journalists are losing their jobs; but the field has always evolved, and some jobs have always been ploughed in with these changes. The commercial sector must always respond to changing circumstances: some churn is inevitable, but so are new opportunities. Indeed there was recently a suggestion that the number of journalistic jobs in the UK is going up not down.[i]

The exciting challenge for the next generation of journalists is to look at where those new opportunities lie. If local newspapers are beaten out of the jobs market, what sort of new editorial style could accompany the websites to which this type of advertising migrates? Perhaps the new context calls for a whole new genre of journalism, more orientated towards the personal psychology of the working world.

The MPs’ expenses scandal reveals the public’s disenchantment with politics as it is currently practised. But politics is nothing more than our desire to improve our own lives, that of our families and that of our communities. These aspirations have not gone away, but how can political debate be re-invigorated by re-connecting with the public’s concerns? It’s a project that cries out for Web 2.0 style interaction, and only people with journalistic skills can bring it off.

The list of possibilities is endless, but I would like to end with a plea to aspiring hacks: ignore the old lags bemoaning the decline of journalism. Each generation sees the world in a different way and tends to have its preferred method of communication. The baby-boomers had TV and an expanding print media which they shaped into new formats and styles. Forty-somethings had the multi-channel revolution. Thirty somethings had the internet mark one. You have Web 2.0; social networking; interactivity; social media; the long awaited arrival of IPTV; the rise of small-scale media; mobile platforms and their inter-relation with the internet.

There are endless possibilities for new services and new ways to reflect the unique experience of a new generation. It’s time for you to make your mark on the ever-changing project that is journalism.

Former radio reporter Martin Sims now lectures at the University of East London and publishes a newsletter on European media policy.