Swiss-born philosopher Alain de Botton takes a fresh look at journalism in his The News: A User’s Manual. He seems to think that journalism – as it should be, is closer to art than we have previously allowed for.

The book is divided into eight chapters: each one focuses on a problem that the news industry is facing, what that means for society, and what journalism should do about it.  

De Botton starts by showing why the audience might get bored reading the news as it is today. “We are standing far too close”, he explains, where instead “we need news organisations to help our curiosity by signalling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends.”

De Botton goes on to compare a news piece to a small patch of paint which you would not be able to appreciate in isolation. Without the bigger picture, he warns, you won’t see the point. Accordingly, De Botton believes journalism should not only be “collect[ing] facts”, but rather “teasing out their relevance”. 

Too often, he says, journalism tries to offer a quick fix which only makes people angry and dissatisfied when it doesn’t solve anything: “News should make us angry for the right reasons and as a part of a constructive project”.

He warns against the stilted character and stultifying effect of most media coverage: “news stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even our capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways”.  If he’s right, too much of today’s journalism is instilling un-think rather than opening up the outside world to our intervention.

De Botton doesn’t quite say that money is the root of all evil; but he does think that journalism suffers when commercial considerations take top priority. Without identifying how journalism can actually pay its way, he reckons that news organisations which don’t invest in anything new for fear of losing their audience, run the risk of losing journalism’s future altogether.

He’s not, as far as I know, a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but he does appear to adhere to their motto: audere est facere; to dare is to do.