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

Introduction: Under Fire

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

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

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

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

Battle Of Ideas

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

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

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

Holding The Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economy of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time and Time Again

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

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

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

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

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

The Social Role of Journalism

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

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

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

Retrospective Standards

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

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

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

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

The Money Shot

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

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

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

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

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

Greatly Exaggerated

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Recovering Our Nerve

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Introduction: Indispensable, But Not Guaranteed (Financially)

Andrew Calcutt’s defence of professional journalism in the face of the perceived threat of user-generated content (UGC) is cogent and timely; I want to enlarge upon it.

Journalism, especially online, is said to be writing itself out of the social, cultural and democratic processes it helped to create, maintain and develop. Journalists are supposed to be an endangered species caught between apparently incontrovertible truths: (1) everybody is a media outlet; and (2) everybody has a free view of everybody else’s content. If this were really the case, it would mean that journalists are now a professional class which no one needs. When everybody else can do journalism they don’t need specialists like us and, even if they did, they wouldn’t pay us for it.

Journalists and professional journalism are indeed threatened by many things: the restructuring of the television and newspaper industries that carry our stories and employ us; the migration of news (like most information) to the internet; and most threatening of all, journalism’s openly suicidal response to these problems. Andrew Calcutt’s manifesto for the defence of journalism is, hopefully, just in time. But in his emphasis on therelationship between the social role of journalism and its economic prospects, Calcutt comes close to losing sight of the essential distinction between them.

It is true that journalism developed as a commodity in an era of centralised mass production; and it is frequently pointed out that now, in the new era characterised by networked, non-hierarchical organisations sharing information freely, the business models of commodity journalism are bust. But the job journalism does, and especially the role it has played and continues to play in the public sphere, are not the same thing as the business model hitherto employed to distribute it.

Similarly, while it is the case that milking advertisers has been key to financing journalism and consequently to the practice of journalism, and it is also true that nowadays there are fewer advertisers standing around waiting to be milked, nonetheless the sum of journalism’s parts is not reducible to the sums of advertising revenue (whether or not they can be made to add up). Leaving aside the mechanisms of how it is paid for, there is something about the way we live which requires that people get to know how other people are living and what’s happening to them. And that’s journalism.

Where there is modern life, in other words, there is going to something like journalism. It is a basic requirement of modern society. Of course the fulfilment of this requirement is not to be taken for granted. People have to work to meet this demand, and at times like these we are also obliged to find new ways of working. But like the banks that suddenly became insolvent, journalism is simply too important to society to be let go. Put another way, lives led without journalism cannot not be part of modern society; if such lives were to exist, they would have to be of an altogether different order.

No Guarantee of Democracy

Professional journalism once enjoyed an exclusive relationship with the hardware of media production, from printing presses to transmitters. Journalism all but monopolised the origination of news through purpose-built channels that comprised the mass media. Now the process of origination has been democratised in a technical sense; the many can engage directly with the many, and that is a good thing because it opens up so many democratic possibilities. But just as it is misleading to conflate the business model that created journalism and influenced its practices with its democratic role, it is also incorrect to assume that the role played by many-to-many publishing is necessarily, in and of itself, the realisation of democracy.

Democracy requires not only popular participation but also popular orientation to questions of power and the exercise of it. Were Roman circuses democratic simply because crowds of people applauded the gladiators? Not while the power of life and death was unquestioningly reserved for the emperor or his representative. Similarly, the facility for self-expression offered by digital media, and the increasing take-up of this provision, do not guarantee that the ensuing media content will assume a political character, whether democratic or authoritarian. Just as journalism is not reducible to the economics of distributing new information, so the new facility for self-interested self-expression is not identical to the continuation of democratic politics by other means. The absence of guarantees works both ways.

Their Business Model; Our Journalism

When all media technology was expensive so, too, was access to it. Consequently, (professional) journalism produced by accessing (expensive) media technology commanded a relatively high price that could be offset by advertisers’ readiness to pay for that access. In the age of internet, however, professional journalism’s access to print distribution and broadcast ceases to be such an advantage either to its practitioners or to advertisers. Unsurprisingly, businesses modelled on the assumption that information will be produced and owned by a few are proving to be less successful in a period of many-to-many communication.

That’s business, the business of journalism as was and will be no more; but that is not the future of journalism per se. Yet, in response to the loss of our employers’ business model and their loss of revenue, we journalists seem to have collectively decided that anybody (or everybody) can do our jobs better than us. In the short term it may seem to be in the publishers’ interests to identify the failings of the business model that financed journalism with the failure of journalism itself; but it is not in our interests to do so. In the long term, it is not in their interests either.

Seeing the writing on the digital wall, the more sanguine among us declare that journalism is just going through a period of adjustment from one media platform to another. But those who hold this view too often take it that advertising revenue will simply migrate online also, in sufficient quantity to compensate publishers for the provision of free content. But this view is more rosy than realistic.

Advertisers are spending less money overall. The advertising industry developed as the reciprocal partner of the traditional media which have been pronounced terminally ill. Why should advertisers continue to use the Mad Men’s specialised skills any more than those of journalists, if they can find ways to place their products in the public domain without paying anyone?

Then there is the prospect of pay-per-view. Rupert Murdoch has announced that the Times and other titles will stop distributing so much of their content freely and make users pay for it online. The technical (but crucial) difficulty is that an effective micro-payment system for news has not yet been invented. The Financial Times and the New York Times have managed to extract some payment from users for specialised products at the high-end of the market, and the latter recently launched an online subscription package for the general reader, but it is not proven that the public can be made to pay for non-specific news.

The Guardian, online in the USA, and the Times, online in India, have built their brands in those markets, and their efforts to generate revenue will be significant, but not necessarily sufficient to establish a pattern for other news organisations. The BBC is a unique broadcaster and publisher and it may play a very significant role in distributing many kinds of content, but its singularity means it cannot be a business model for others. To the contrary, there is a growing volume of complaints from the others, to the effect that news coverage put out by the BBC and paid-for indirectly by UK license-payers, is skewing the market and spoiling the development of pay-per-news.

Simon Jenkins has suggested that newspapers could go to market with a ‘long tail’ of businesses such as conferences and other live events that generate revenue by building on the brand. Thus the Guardian becomes the Guardian Experience (‘Goodbye Guardian. Hello Guardian Experience’, Jenkins, S, p25, the Guardian, international edition, 11/08/09).

I don’t buy this. I’ll buy the Guardian and pay to read what it says but I don’t want to join a Guardian ‘lifestyle’ or ‘affinity club’. Newspapers will migrate to digital forms and will continue develop subsidiary revenue streams (as the trade press has with industry awards), but they can’t just become something else entirely. Why do news if you’re a promotions company? And if the brand you’re building is becoming less closely associated with news, whatever it is that’s being branded, it can hardly be a news organisation, first and foremost.

Hacks all, folks!

As Calcutt points out, embracing digital journalism, according to much of the currently received wisdom, means that publishers have put great emphasis on creating special relationships with users online. In an uncertain and dramatically changing situation, the consensus (more or less) has been to build what Calcutt calls an inclusive community of ‘citizen journalists’ who will called upon to help create a whole new world of content possibilities. But as Calcutt also points out, there’s no reason to assume that even the successful use of quasi-journalism for ‘engineering inward-facing, small scale societies into short-term existence’ can somehow be monetised or otherwise exploited commercially.

Journalism faces problems right across the board, regardless of the medium of its distribution or the business model that funds it. Some of us may like to envisage some special, so far undiscovered content that somehow encourages people to spend money on it. But no one is really sure about this because the distribution of loads of content, by click or by truck, does not seem to make enough money unless advertisers are prepared to pay heavily to occupy the space right next door to it. As I write, and as others have been writing since the first wave of internet advertising failed to materialise more than a decade ago, advertisers are turning out to be stubbornly unwilling to do this.

The Shock of the Nearly-New

Old local newspaper hacks (like me) recognise the value of freely collected and cheaply processed reader-generated content. We learnt this in the days of manually typewriting our copy onto little strips of paper, back when the word ‘web’ was usually preceded by ‘spider’. We have exploited community correspondents, sports and society reports, amateur dramatics and entertainments reviews, teen reporters, work experience seekers, events listings and all kinds of stuff both online and off. When we opened the gates around our content so that this kind of stuff could get in, did we make our papers more democratic? Well, maybe a little bit.

The point is that there has been a series of attempts to incorporate UGC, many of them pre-dating desk-top publishing let alone the internet, but none has managed to halt the long, long decline in local newspaper readership; and there’s no reason to assume that a new version of this second hand tactic will arrest the commercial decline of this or any other print sector. The internet makes possible an instant interaction not conceivable with any other medium; but if the content is more snow pictures, now reproduced digitally, then all we have gained is more slush; and slushy content is not going to unfreeze the cash needed to pay for the production of the whole (paperless) paper.

New technology is, of course, the future of everything (except for costumes in competitive swimming!). But just because content can now be generated and distributed by mobilising the good old general public, it doesn’t mean that anyone is going to pay to read it, or pay us to edit it for them.

Chancing It

Calcutt established that seeking to emulate non-journalistic content can obscure the special qualities of professional reporting, and thus undermine the basis of the very media brands which are in a position to offer such quality and even exploit it commercially. He is surely right to emphasise the uniquely comparative character of professional reporting, which is brought into play whenever reporters compare and evaluate what they are witnessing with what has been witnessed and evaluated before, i.e. each time they do their job. This is a quality of observation, cognition and mental reconstruction, by whatever medium the latter is subsequently disseminated. Even if new media kit has levelled the technological playing-field, the distinctly comparative, evaluative process of professional reporting constitutes a different ballgame.

Thus there’s nothing wrong with a bit of Tweeting by professional journalists. Done well, Twitter is a useful device for taking a snapshot of what’s happening as it happens. But while professional journalists may use Twitter to capture fragments of an event outside themselves, most Tweeters are holding up a tiny mirror to their own miniscule actions. They are engaged in an essentially different process.

For the majority of participants, the news function of Twitter is secondary to its existential role: it tells me and my friends (me and the extension of me) that I must exist because right now I am doing x,y or z and you can confirm I am doing it because I have just used Twitter to tell you that I am.

Twitter, like most UGC, serves primarily to confirm the existence of the people who generated it. Depending on what’s happening to these people at the moment of content origination, what they generate may or may not contain something that qualifies as news to the rest of us. Accordingly, the news content in UGC is likely to be either negligible or of a lesser order, not least because news is not first in the order of priorities for UGC. If it so happens that newsworthy content has been generated in this way, this can only have come about because the content generator happened to be in a place where something significant happened to be happening. With UGC, it all comes down to happenstance.

Professional journalism, on the other hand, is a concerted, conscious effort to deploy people trained to find significant events and to find out what is significant about them. Of course it is easy to pick holes in the track record of professional coverage: less than comprehensive, inadequate, misleading, just plain wrong etc, etc. But for all the examples of journalists behaving badly, journalism’s redeeming quality is that human beings have developed it over time and by design as their chief means of getting to know what’s going on. To abandon this tradition, to declare, as even some journalists are now inclined to do, that UGC is something equivalent or even superior to professional journalism, is not only an act of professional suicide; it amounts to the rejection of purposeful human activity in pursuit of information about the world we live in. It means leaving news to chance.

Journalism Is Not Dying From a Surfeit of Journalism

Falling viewing figures, shrinking circulations and diminished revenues did not afflict media brands because they spent too much on developing good journalism. Rotary printing and desktop publishing aside, newspapers at the end of the twentieth century were pretty much as they were when invented in the nineteenth. Local papers saw their revenues decline when the recruitment, car and property ads went elsewhere. Way before the internet, the distribution of free admags had already damaged their revenue streams. The locals’ response was to cut staff and streamline their titles and editions, thereby cutting back on the journalism that should have been their strongest selling point. And what’s made the situation worse is that journalism has not responded in terms of its use to society as journalism, but in terms of its industry’s uselessness as a profitable system for information distribution.

Having conceded more than half the battle, both journalists and publishers are turning to UGC. But this does little to confirm the significance of journalism. The identification of UGC as an especially important connection with the potential audience is partly encouraged by the success of social networking, and partly prompted by the desperate desire to recover a relationship with readers/viewers/listeners which the old media assume they have lost. Such is our anxiety about being left behind that fellow-journalists have jumped on every bandwagon setting off on the trail.

I can now watch a local reporter read me a story on my local paper’s website (the BrightonArgus), and scroll through pictures and video footage. But why would I do any of this if I’m not interested in the story? Supposing I am interested, and I am not visually impaired, why shouldn’t I simply read it? And if I don’t want to read it, putting it out like this with bells and knobs on, is not going to make me any more interested in it.

Away From ‘Old Media’, Inside the Other Camp

The democratic impulse implicit in accessible digital technology is wasted if we assume that communicating for public consumption is the same as chatting with friends. Most of the content of blogs, Tweets and the social networking sites is not crafted for wide public consumption, but aimed at networks of friends.

It is good that anyone can publish, no question, but the potential for greater democracy is not realised by everybody publishing just anything; all this does is cast more shadows of doubt over the significance of news as a public service. In this context it is especially important for the experts in news, professional journalists, to show how it is done best.

Because of the importance of blogging and Tweeting to the opposition movements in Iran, Burma and elsewhere, some bloggers in Britain correlate their eponymous activities with those of freedom fighters, regardless of the content of their blogs. Whether naive or cynical, this is gross over-estimation. NightJack was not a whistleblower. Belle de Jour may have something to say, but the fact that the account of the sex work she performs is blogged, does not in itself challenge the political system.

Blogging, or something like it, is surely part of the future. It’s clear that there are many possibilities, especially where the specific expertise of the blogger, combined with the expertise of many others, can achieve unprecedented effects for the public good. An outstanding example is the online network that has arisen to support Simon Singh in his resistance to a legal suit by the British Chiropractic Association, as has been described by the Guardian’s Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre (‘An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers’, p28, Goldacre, B, the Guardian, 30/07/09). But this network is a temporary one that relies on more permanent networks of scientific media watchers. The ongoing efforts of those networks are maintained by a common desire to take group action on particular issues defined by specific scientific fields and prompted by the recognition of the poor job that the traditional media have made of reporting them.

This user-co-ordinated scrutiny would be immediately devalued by close involvement with a news organisation, even if the people who organise and co-ordinate it allowed such a thing to happen. The journalist’s job is something altogether different.

YouTube, Facebook and the rest seem to suggest that the public is colonising everything, along with the news. However, as the philosopher of science and mind Dr Robert Clowes has pointed out, these technologies are themselves consistently repurposed and redeveloped by public interaction with them, which in turn facilitates further interactions between people that are enabled by the repurposed technologies.

These new kinds of social interaction have both public and private uses, hence the difficulties in recognising where journalism ends and more private discussion begins. Journalists and journalism specialise in the public, regardless of which bit of the public you’re aiming at. News itself is both a component of the public consciousness and an interactive tool freely available for use between different fields of that general consciousness.

Facebook was once an electronic Harvard yearbook. At last count, as I write, it has 250 million users after a little more than five years of redesign, repurposing and application adding as its user numbers grew. Similarly, blogs were once in the vanguard of citizen journalism but many millions of them have now become dormant. Increasingly, the best blogs are transforming themselves into media brands that bear no relation to private and individual practice; or they are places where the collective actions of many people are co-ordinated by people with social authority.

Mercurial Networking and Established Authority

Twitter is booming, but for how long? The big media that bought into Bebo, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace and the rest may yet seriously regret it. Young people have fled the colonisation of Facebook that older people undertook two years ago, again changing both the purpose of Facebook and the uses to which it is put. The time spent on Second Life is falling across its usership. To maintain a serious presence on any of these platforms becomes more and more time-consuming for the individual. When the fad slows, people spend less time in those spaces that have been established; the search for the public and the spaces it inhabits moves on to the next place, and the next.

IT industry insiders tell me the next big thing is less likely to be the new killer platform, application or device. They predict a concentration and rationalisation of the many platforms that people use, according to their individual needs and tastes. Although insiders have said this before, it seems likely that user-customisable reception of newly integrated networks and services will offer even more uncertainties and opportunities within our wired (and constantly rewired) world.

Media organisations and journalists signalled something of this possibility when they commenced multi-platform production of their content, regardless of whether they started from a broadcast, print or internet base. But fiddling with the form of transmission of information, simply making sure it can be carried by whatever device or application is being used by your target audience, has a limited effect on the relevance of the information to its receiver.

The Huffington Post is successful because it explicitly challenged the political position of established media without having to raise the cash needed to launch in print. It offered different content, much of it written by professional journalists, to an audience it could see was dissatisfied with the venerable print titles that it may now outlive. The internet allowed it to come into existence financially but its continued success is the result of its content. Distinguished by its journalism, it has carved out a loyal readership and a position of authority across the whole news ‘ecosystem’. Technology allowed the Post to be born but a political, motivated approach to journalism has seen it thrive.

When talent show contestant Susan Boyle got 120 million hits on YouTube, it wasn’t simply because of YouTube’s ability to share video. She had already appeared on the most popular weekend programme on British TV, which is closely followed by Fleet Street, from red-tops through to broadsheets. Wide reporting of her first 60 million hits, and good old word of mouth, doubled the numbers.

What people look at on YouTube and other sites doesn’t acquire significance in itself, however many people view something, because the discussion, the buzz, is not generated on the comment boards of those particular sites. This kind of news only becomes news when other, more authoritative organisations imbue it with significance and/or controversy.

Equally, when any item, however generated, becomes real news it ceases to be simply the video on YouTube or the photo on Flickr; it is the starting point for a general discussion of its significance, because it has migrated from its origins to the rest of the media. Flickr and YouTube have commentary facilities, but they cannot support the cultural exchange that characterises authoritative journalism.

Bringing the Two Camps Together?

Jeff Jarvis, writing in the media section of the Guardian, quoted the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to the effect that collaboration with its readers amounted to the ‘mutualisation of news’ (‘User-generated content is only the beginning’, Jarvis, J, p4, MediaGuardian, 08/06/09). Rusbridger has told staff that the separation between reporter and reader is blurring, and that this is both the future and the ‘natural state’ of media.

But it is misleading to assert an equal partnership between the Guardian and the users who generate content for it. For example, in the event that the Guardian took some interest in my local group (as in the past have the Brighton Argus, the Publican, the Telegraph, BBC-online, BBC1, Radio Four and a few Australian newspapers), who would be the senior ‘partner’ in this relationship? I don’t think it would be me and the Brighton Salon. And quite right too.

The Guardian has won its authority and with it the discretion to select and therefore elevate any old stuff that falls out of the blogosphere, if it chooses to do so. I read it in old-fashioned, paid-for-by-me, print form every day. It retains its authority because it generally has not, so far, transformed itself into a blurry partnership of newspaper and citizen journalists. If a news organisation lends its authority to content that is little different from an old-fashioned reader’s letter, Rusbridger’s ‘mutualisation’ may come true, but painfully so. It is not UGC itself but its presentation as something else that reduces the separation of reader and reporter in a way that now threatens the very concept of the reporter and, eventually, that of the reader, too.

I’m all for UGC being used imaginatively, but mostly it’s the result of a bunch of amateurs getting hold of media equipment. I have a camera but that doesn’t make me a photographer unless I happen to be standing close enough to something worth photographing. If you have blog, that doesn’t make you a journalist unless you have a story; and even then, unless you adopt a consciously impersonal stance in the way you tell it, having a story makes you a source, not a reporter.

It is striking that when reading popular books that try to rethink the future of the world in the age of the internet, such as Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, the same few examples of what is possible crop up again and again. While the views of these are thought-provoking, they feed off rare successes extracted from a vast pool of failure. Shirky might say that this is a good thing and that only mass-participation in a constantly recurring process of trial and mostly error, can create the future. He is right to maintain that democracy is necessarily experimental; but this is not the same as simply standing by and allowing people to ‘crowd source’ the news. In order to minimise error (and maximise the democratic content of the experiment), news must be accountable not only to a self-selecting group of users but also to its own industry standards; and it doesn’t help democracy if the standard bearers (the professionals) have already walked off the job.

The sweeping view in which hierarchical organisation can only ever stand in the way of innovation, assumes we can learn little from the past, simply because its forms of organisation are expensive and its revenue streams defunct. But this is another case of the mistaken identity referred to above. Journalism as a practice, and a hierarchical practice at that, has been much more like the professional end of the open-source operating system, Linux, that web gurus worship.

Conclusion: Journalists and Users Should Keep Their Distance

Journalism, even before its current crisis, was said to be the least trustworthy occupation, with journalists roughly on a par with estate agents. But members of the public also trusted journalists to provide most of their news, most of the time.

It’s not generally talked about in these terms, but what Calcutt came close to describing as the universalisation of experience by professional journalists, is broadly appreciated by members of the public. They feel our objectivity, even as many of us have disavowed it.

However much we may be detested personally, there is a visibility to what we do that distinguishes us from others. We can do things that the anonymous blogger, perpetually undercover, cannot aspire to. Working for a newspaper, TV station or a professional website that has gained authority and recognition, is what allows journalists to comment, doorstep and demand access to investigate. This authority is based on professional and indeed public appreciation of the ability to capture the particulars of experience and at the same time generalise from it; an ability that sets journalists apart from society but also gives us a place in it.

Yes, at the present moment it is hard to see how this ability will thrive commercially; all the same, it is not reducible to the business models which hitherto allowed publishers to make a profit from having us exercise it.

Sean Bell is completing his dissertation for the MA in Journalism & Society at UEL.

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

Introduction: Crisis, What Crisis?

Earlier this year, the Journalism Department at the University of Westminster, the oldest in the UK, hosted a conference entitled ‘Journalism in Crisis’. The facts seem clear: after the dot.com disaster and the credit crunch, the crisis of journalism is in full swing.

Indeed, statistics show that newspaper readership is continuously decreasing, while advertisers, coerced by budget cuts, are looking for new, cheaper channels to post their promises of material salvation. At the same time, the young generation in particular is turning to the internet where information is easy and, above all, free. Additionally, citizen journalism and amateur blogging, celebrated as democratic participation in the opinion-making process (in contrast to the hegemonic selection and distribution of information by the traditional media), challenge the traditional channels of news distribution by providing new ways of news reporting and alternative, unfiltered approaches to current affairs.

But is journalism really in crisis or are we witnessing another transformation in the continuously changing history of the public sphere? In his keynote essay, Andrew Calcutt has stated that publishers see user-generated content ‘as an opportunity to cut costs by reducing the number of professional journalists involved in the production of media content.’ In a slight twist of his statement, I would like to emphasise that the technological possibilities of today are many and various, depending on the context in which they are played out.

In the context of neo-liberal hegemony and its cost-cutting consequences, there certainly has been a close association between user-orientation of the media and the de-professionalistion of journalism. But this association is by no means inevitable. In a different political-economic context, user-orientation and its associated technologies may well lend themselves to the re-professionalisation of journalistic content-production. The solely text-oriented hack of old might disappear to a great extent, but the demand for professional, multi-platform journalists will almost certainly rise. After all, UEL’s journalism programme, which offers cross-platform modules, is a wonderful indication of this entirely plausible outcome.

Crisis As A Way Of Life

Historically speaking, crises and ruptures are nothing new to modern journalism. Driven by technological innovation, the presentation of news has traditionally taken place via all communication channels available, forcing journalists to adapt to an ever-changing variety of techniques and technologies. The supremacy of the broadsheet ended with the emergence of the magazine in the late nineteenth century, and the dominance of print journalism received a severe blow with the new visual medium of the newsreel. One of the remedies was the new photojournalism of middle-brow mass magazines such as Life, Look and others.

In the 1950s, television entered the scene, eventually forcing newspaper journalism to go visual and include photography to a much greater degree than before. And then came the worldwide web, prompting publishing houses to establish online versions of their papers. All the time, the profession has reacted to successive challenges with diversification and the development of specialised skills. So far, the co-existence of the various channels for bringing news to the public sphere has not led to the end of journalism but rather to an expansion of the modes of expressing news content. Andrew Calcutt is quite right when he insists that ‘the simple equation of internet expansion with the contraction of professional journalism does not add up’.

However, I have to admit that the digital revolution presents by far the greatest challenge to professional journalism when compared to previous developments. Nevertheless, I would like to challenge some of the seemingly given truths that underlie most assumptions about the present crisis of professional journalism. For this purpose, I will construct my argument around three questions:

1. Is the economic argument as self-evident as its proponents would like us to think it is?

2. How can we rethink the internet in its function and functionality for twenty-first century journalism?

3. What do we see as the function of journalism in contemporary society?

The Economic Argument

Recently, Torsten Meise, executive officer for a network of freelance journalists in Hamburg, Germany, published some observations on the future of journalism. In his blog (agorazein.de/2009/06/08/10-saetze-zur-zukunft-des-journalismus), he argues that, rather than being a crisis of journalists, the crisis of journalism is a crisis of the publishing houses, and he accuses the latter of not having recognised in time the ongoing structural transformation of the media market. In his provocative manifesto, Meise further concludes that the economistic turn of the publishing houses originated in a blatant lack of creativity on their side and in the failure of corporate management to react appropriately to the present problem.

There seems to be an important point in this argument. Western societies have seen the rise of neo-liberalism going hand in hand with a general tendency to argue and perceive societal reality solely in economic terms. Going almost unnoticed, this economic perception has replaced political, social and moral concepts of the character of society, marking a remarkable shift in the superstructure of advanced capitalist societies. In their one-sidedness, the recent arguments against professional journalism belong to the prevailing, general trend to put economic considerations above social, let alone cultural, use-value. It is a tendency that can be seen in all sectors of society related to the public sphere, such as museums, higher education or broadcasting, or other fields formerly deemed essential to ‘civilized’ society. It is important, however, to realize that this economistic response to the structural transformations of post-industrial society is not based on a factual constraint; rather, it is man-made and therefore deliberate, and by definition subject to possible alteration.

In other words, we should not fall victim to a purely ideological argument. Rather, it is our duty as intellectuals to provide for a reframing of this one-sided discourse on journalism by arguing against its biased interest.

The Technological Argument

The oft-mentioned technological subversion of publishing structures by new internet-based media, is usually just an excuse for outdated adherence to old and dearly held publishing practice. In the analogue age, publishing houses or broadcasting companies, public and commercial ones alike, controlled access to news by controlling the means of news production. Without access to radio, television and newspapers, there was no free access to the public sphere. The new media have changed this. In the digital age, reaching the public has become a matter of just a few mouse-clicks. In other words, the old publishing houses have lost their oligopoly and their reaction is sheer panic.

But is it really such a problem to take up the creative challenge of the internet? The problem, so runs the argument, is that nobody is willing to pay for information he or she can get for free on the web. Indeed, newspapers in their printed form may be diminished in number; although, judging from the experience of that past, it is doubtful that they will disappear altogether.

However, is the number of clicks on a webpage not a more reliable indicator of the reader-user’s attention to paid-for advertising than the sales figures of the print edition? Of course, catching the attention of the computer-generation will require new and more creative kinds of advertising than it took to address the traditional reader of a broadsheet or print-magazine, as the American media sociologist Clay Shirky has pointed out in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008). But this is a problem to be solved by creative work, not an insurmountable obstacle which threatens the very future of commercial publishing.

And, please, nobody tell me that there are no new ideas! Walter Isaacson, former managing director of Time magazine and now CEO of the Aspen Institute, has proposed a different approach. He argues that, as the use of the online-editions of newspapers shows, the demand for reliable information is unbroken and newspaper audiences are growing. With advertisers reluctant and subscription rates not yet satisfactory, Isaacson’s hopes rely on an efficient and easy to handle micropayment system allowing readers to access individual articles and other news items or a day’s full edition for the marginal fee of a penny or dime. As evidence, Isaacson quotes the success of iTunes and the digital reading device Kindle (Time, March 2, 2009, p. 25).

New Ways of Functioning

But it is not only the publishing side that has to change course and be creative. Likewise, journalists will have to be prepared to think in terms of new aesthetics. With newspapers and television likely to become just another form of the internet on one digital platform, new and more interactive modes of reception will have to be established, with far-reaching consequences for the aesthetic form as well as narrative structure of journalistic items.

Commercial web-advertising may have given us a clue as to what to expect. In 2007, the French avant-garde fashion label Shaï produced several three-minute, X-rated internet video streams with small green dots appearing near the clothing of the actors. The user could mouse-click these dots in order to purchase a particular piece of clothing while continuing to watch the actors undress and do their thing.

Although Shaï’s sex-packaging failed to sell their merchandise, the technology applied in this experiment may have more to it than meets the eye: it points to a transition from producer-created narrative to a user-produced one. Inter- and intra-textual zapping is likely to become the predominant way of ‘reading’ and receiving online-news. The traditional, coherent mode of reception of a news item (if it ever existed), might be forced to undergo fundamental change.

The potentially random choices of today’s user-viewer-reader tend to undermine rigidly structured programmes as well as the linear narrative structure of the individual news item or documentary film (which is, however short, an exposition followed by an elaboration of the topic and a finalizing conclusion). Broadcasters currently offer ‘segmented’ parts of their schedule for podcasting, in an effort to keep at least remnants of the traditionally planned structure of their programmes. But there’s no telling how long these structures will last; and there is no reason to suppose that the survival of journalism itself is inextricably linked to their longevity.

One of the consequences of new modes of news reception is that the individual exercise of authorship as we know it might become obsolete. Texts or films in multi-media web-environments will no longer be read by the spectator in a predictable order, i.e. the specific sequence as preconceived by the journalistic author. This implies that in the worst of all cases, the interactive mode of digital consumption might produce a diarrhoea of loosely connected eye-catching images and free-floating information, bobbing up and down in the mind of the recipient as it does already in the tabloids. However, this new mode of active reception might also result in a multitude of linked information on the production side. At any given point of a news item, the user-viewer might thus meander to another clickable mixed-media item which provides further information and contains other mixed-media links, before he or she (in the case of a film clip) may or may not return to the original item meanwhile recorded on the electronic device’s hard-disk.

Let me emphasise that I am aware of the ambiguous implications of this vision. It is also an invitation for a total commercialisation of the media. We may well be granted the questionable freedom of ordering the latest trendy product we do not really need, simply by mouse-clicking on the item while watching and at the same time being distracted and diverted from quality documentation or reportage.

In its innocent form, we could be offered a wealth of thematically related documentation; but the same technological facility may also mean the total commercial subversion of journalistic content and thus potential damage to journalistic credibility. Nonetheless, such facilities do suggest sensible ways of creating revenue; once again, the publishers’ dictum that the internet does not pay, is shown to be an absurd excuse for their failure to innovate.

More importantly, all this demands expertise in form, content and technology; expertise which only professional journalists can provide. They will, however, have to consider a much-changed audience taking user-friendliness for granted. But who can prove that the majority of people really read in one go those long articles that once made up the greater part of the more respectable newspapers? And, to counter-act my own tendencies towards cultural pessimism, have there not always been outcries about the demise of the printed text when the new visual technologies (first the movie and then television) were introduced? Printed books themselves were once subject to scepticism, when anxious physicians published long medical treatises about the negative physical consequences of extended motionlessness while reading.

And finally, while the introduction of television eventually diminished the number of movie theatres, nonetheless Hollywood with its thousands of jobs seems to be more alive and kicking than ever. Note for the concerned capitalist: domestic box office revenues of the American motion picture industry amounted to US$ 9.68 billion in 2008, up US$ 2 billion on 2007 (Screen Daily.com, January 7, 2009).

The Societal Function of Professional Journalism

‘All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts.’

So wrote the great American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1920 (Liberty and the News, New York, 1920, p. 11). ‘Trustworthy’ and ‘relevant’ are the key words in his statement. Living up to these keywords requires professional journalists trained the proper way, and with a keen, knowledgeable intellect and analytic mind to look beyond the masquerade of today’s culture of make-believe.

In the economistic framework of today, trustworthiness and relevance often find themselves replaced by ‘authenticity’ and ‘sincerity’. The latter attributes are seemingly guaranteed by audience participation, but even if they are realised, their realisation does not necessarily mean that the participating audience will be well informed; and even a well informed audience is not necessarily connected to analysis of the social and societal implications of an event.

On the other hand, quality of information and depth of connection are just what journalism has to offer. To quote Lippmann again: ‘If truthfulness were simply a matter of sincerity the future would be rather simple. But the modern problem is not solely a question of the newspaperman’s morals. It is […] the intricate result of a civilization too extensive for any man’s personal observation’ (op. cit., p. 13).

Hence the recurring demand, even in the twenty-first century, for journalism that goes beyond ‘any man’s personal observation’, and for professional journalists to produce it.

Professional Interpreters

To come back to my initial argument: in today’s advanced capitalist society wide areas of public life have submitted to the neo-liberal logic of economic efficiency and control, and society is increasingly administered at a level remote from the input of the ordinary citizen. As the German philosopher of the public sphere Juergen Habermas has noted, the protective boundaries between the public and the private sphere, society and the individual, the system and everyday life, have seriously deteriorated to the point where analysis of the social dynamics at work becomes nearly impossible for the individual citizen.

(I do not want to discredit blogging or visual community activism. But compared to journalism as I understand it, their social function lies more in creating an atmosphere of conviviality, to steal another term from Andrew Calcutt. They have an important part to play in establishing informal networks of resistance against the dissolution of the boundaries between system and personal life; but this not the same as the role of journalism.)

Democratic public life, Habermas concluded, can only thrive where trustworthy institutions enable citizens to take part in the debate on questions of public importance on an informed basis. In other words, a competent democratic self-governance of society rests on the rational discourse of enlightened persons devoid of illusions and self-deception. For such a socially balanced and just society, transparent and accessible discourses of qualified expert cultures are indispensable. Professional journalists as members of one of these expert cultures can provide this transparency by their very training and vocation.

‘In describing one experience the professional journalist also inscribes it with other experiences’, Andrew Calcutt argues in his opening manifesto, ‘so that in making an account of it, journalists render every experience commensurate with all other experiences.’ Here – I am sorry, Andrew – I do not quite agree with you. I do see your point of professional journalists as some kind of licensed special agents of social discourse and of journalism as a privileged practise among other practises of societal discourse of lived experience. I would, however, go beyond this and boldly state that professional journalists in their analytical training (vocational or academic) are mediators between the otherwise hermetic expert cultures and the non-expert public. In other words, by selecting, reporting and presenting newsworthy events they assume the position of translating interpreters who are continuously reversing the obstructive and misleading dissolution of the boundaries between system and lifeworld.

It is in their analysis, which in its form appropriates reality in an amalgam of discursive reasoning and artistic sensuousness, that professional journalists reclaim the meaning of things for the public, so that the ordinary citizen can enter the egalitarian non-expert discourse that counterbalances the hegemony of the various expert discourses in a democratic society. In my career both as a television journalist and producer as well as an academic, I have become very aware of the necessity of intellectual proficiency and theoretical analysis as key skills for this interpretive function of journalism. In our complex societies, the self-made journalist is the exception to the rule; in fact, he is a rapidly vanishing species, and this is necessarily so.

As Andrew Calcutt also observed in his essay, only journalists paid well enough to be able to afford time- and cost-intensive investigation into complex societal matters can fulfil this vital function for society. Journalists’ ability to reflect on both the societal context of their own activities as well as on the social implications of their findings, as a pre-condition for the public to participate in the discourses of civil society, cannot be achieved without considerable prior financial investment in the education of journalists themselves. The interpretive analysis of highly complex matters so that non-experts can comprehend them, has its price in an extended prior period of costly academic or other vocational training for journalists; and it is only legitimate that in compensation for their own personal investment accompanying society’s investment in them, individual journalists should be able to expect a certain lifestyle and level of income.

However, the ultimate gain for the publishing houses or broadcasting companies, and for society as a whole, is the maintenance of journalistic credibility. This is not to deny that news journalism has always had the twofold character of commodity and social communication. But if credibility is sacrificed on the altar of hyperbolical economic greed, this also tears apart the very social fabric which even the news companies are woven into (though they often tend to forget this). It can hardly be called idealistic to be aware of the vital ethical and regulatory function of professional journalism in today’s ever complexifying and increasingly deconsensualizing world.

Conclusion: More, Better Journalism Is Possible And Necessary

All this leads to a paradox: despite the premature announcement of the death of professional journalism, the potential of the new technologies results in a proliferating need for more professional journalists in an increasingly multi-linked digital news environment. The question of the endurance of professional journalism is thus not only a question touching on the survival of journalism worthy of the name; it is also the question of the survival of civil society.

Peter Rodenberg is a former television journalist and producer, and Professor of Media & Communication and American Cultural Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany; he has also served as external examiner for Journalism courses at UEL.

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

Introduction: Deepening Confusion

News journalism has been in flux and its values imploding long before the ‘death of journalism’ heralded by media commentators in the last few years. Accordingly, the problems are more ingrained, and the defence of professional reporting is tougher than sometimes imagined.

Andrew Calcutt is right to present the commercial case for news reporting alongside the social role of news. Correct, also, to show that these are closely related. But there is another job to be done, namely, defending the values of news journalism after 15 years of confused debate about what news is and what it is for. During the course of the past decade-and-a-half, arguments which are implicitly against news journalism have become second nature not only to a wider, celebrity-oriented culture; but also within news journalism itself.

Nobody thinks news reporters are objective. News reporters don’t think they can ever attain objectivity. But the struggle to defend professional reporting cannot be won without a battle to re-take objectivity and reinstate it as the defining characteristic of the professional news reporter.

Corrosion of News Values

Since the mid-1990s, long before the current recession, new kinds of news values have been championed to arrest decline in the number of ‘news consumers’. One example was ‘news you can use’, i.e. news focussed on what consumers need to know – topics such as consumer law and domestic gadgets. This is a functional view of news journalism instead of the essentially democratic idea that news journalism has a value in itself.

Interestingly, the laws on freedom of expression still allow for journalists to defend their stories on the basis of a public interest. Inherent in this legal practice is the idea that journalists work to standards derived from the value which society as a whole places upon journalism. But elsewhere in our culture, particularly within the media industry itself, it’s been a long time since these were the dominant expectations of journalism.

Another idea that has corroded the values of news journalism, is that war reporters cannot be impartial but must take sides. Martin Bell, the former BBC correspondent, advanced this view in his book In Harm’s Way (1996). Bell argued that a reporter could not ‘stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor.’ Famously, hecalled for a ‘journalism of attachment’. Ironically, in 2008 Bell went on to criticise the BBC for wasting money and contributing to the ‘death of news’, after it sent a news anchorman to Portugal to cover the kidnapping of Madeleine McCann, and paid for a helicopter to chart her parents’ movements in the UK. No mention then of the ‘death of news’ arising partly from Bell’s own attack on the tradition of objectivity in news reporting.

Rhetorical Balance

The corrosion of news values is not peculiar to Western countries. Originating from Qatar, Al Jazeera flagged up the emotional side of its news coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. Nor is emotional news reporting confined to wars. Nearly 10 years ago, in an article for the British Journalism Review, I chronicled the new readiness to focus on the emotions of the reporter and of those caught up in domestic news stories – a trend which I dubbed the ‘rise of therapy news’.

Since then, there has been considerable debate within news media about getting the balance right between facts, emotions and analysis. ‘Have emotions gone too far in news reporting?’, is an oft-aired question. Within these debates, objectivity remains an unfashionable concept and arguments in favour of it continue to be sidelined. But until such time as objectivity is taken seriously, such debates can only be rhetorical, and their conclusions will remain insubstantial.

It is not enough to consider the demise of news journalism within the industry’s own terms. Caught up in increasingly desperate attempts to arrest declining profits, and lacking the confidence to put forward objective news values, the industry has indeed lost its nerve. But so too has society. For decades the attack on objectivity has been waged by philosophers and sociologists, not just journalists.

Now, at long last, the relativist school is coming under counter-attack. In Truth (2005), Cambridge philosophy don Simon Blackburn has sought to rally anti-relativist forces, pointing out that: ‘There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes. We must not believe that all opinion is ideology, that reason is only power, that there is no truth to prevail. Without defences against postmodern irony and cynicism, multiculturalism and relativism, we will all go to hell in a handbasket.‘

And in journalism, too, there are real standards of objectivity to be fought for.

News Sells

Within the news business all is not lost. Rupert Murdoch recently announced that News Corporation is to charge readers for online content: he does not buy the idea of free content or the cheapening of journalism that often goes with it. The Sunday Times website has noticeably fewer UCG and social connection portals than most other British newspapers, and it is significantly more successful than many of them. In Spring 2009 the Daily Telegraph paid for information about MPs’ expenses, deployed professional journalists to turn this information into a series of agenda-setting stories, and thus raised its paid-for circulation by a million (publisher’s figures). Who says the public won’t pay for real news?

Media magnates are realising that what sells is original, professionally assembled, news journalism. But it is not enough to rediscover that news can be commercially viable. We still need to argue that news journalism is about telling the truth through fact-checked stories and objective analysis. Without these, news journalism could even be resurrected, only to materialise in the degraded form of journalism-lite.

Society needs better news than that.

Tessa Mayes is an investigative journalist, media commentator and author.

E: info@tessamayes.co.uk

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

Andrew Calcutt’s piece is a much needed laying out of both the requirement for and the context of ‘conventional’ journalism, with some interesting observations on the way the buck is being passed in the argument, if that is the phrase. I ticked in particular the continuous comparison paragraph, identifying the nature of craft professionalism. Also the sheep-like management (late) conversion to a new platform all in a rush, forgetting the (expensive) truth that new technologies do not supplant but exist alongside, thereby compounding the confusion of working out new business methods. And lastly the conviviality paragraph: this nervous and ever changing tension between the truth telling role of journalism and the entertainment role causes profound muddles (especially in broadcasting), without even going into the News as Entertainment confusion.

One thing that might also be worth addressing (because it is difficult) is Dave Winer’s dismissal of conventional journalism because if you know anything about the subject in question you feel shortchanged (as he did on technology) by the way it is reported. That is his main argument for the supremacy of the blogger, and to an audience of early-adopter, tech savvy specialists it is a compelling one. And he did ‘win’ his Long Bet.

[In 2002, Winer and Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, each staked $2000 for and against the proposition that ‘in a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times website’. Five years later Winer took the money, and along with it, evidence to support his conviction that people are finding the information they want not from professional journalists but from trusted amateur writers. More recently the New York Times has re-engineered its reporting for digital consumption: subscribers to Times Reader 2.0 can download it for $3.45 a week.]

I notice that Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who bought a 6.4 per cent stake in the New York Times Company and then followed this with $250m of additional re-financing, has been saying it is the content he is interested in not the printed word. He compared news-papers with transport companies at the turn of the twentieth century: some climbed onto the new platform (the automobile), while those that continued to ride horses were eventually thrown off. Slim did not sound as though he was mouthing adviser’s strategic imperatives, which is what such people often do.

I also notice that Mr Murdoch has been here in London recently, talking to people about charging (micropayments) for online access to his papers other than the Wall Street Journal which already does it. Much depends on whether this works as an emerging model for the news business.

Peter Day is presenter of In Business (BBC Radio 4) and Global Business (BBC World Service)