The toothless pack
Wales Business — By Mat Davies on August 12, 2009 6:00 am
The news hounds are losing their bite
A SUCCESSFUL British company announced its half year results last week. They were very good, ensuring that its many thousands of employees would continue to be employed and the thousands of customers that rely on their services to run their own businesses could rest easy in the knowledge that these services would continue to run efficiently and effectively. During the worst recession since the 1930s, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was a silver lining in a dark cloud, wouldn’t you?
Sadly, if you had read a newspaper or watched a television news bulletin, you wouldn’t. Why not? Well, the company in question was Barclays Bank and, as you should have learned by now from reading the papers or watching TV, banks are the new evil and this was not a good news story at all. Apparently, making a profit suddenly became another “scandal” about banker’s bonuses. Was it really? Well, no, but that’s what some journalists decided the story was, so that’s what we got.
This is not about defending banks. The banking crisis, the greed of bankers and the current recession have been discussed at length. This is however, about lazy, agenda-serving, press release journalism. Despite the fact that we have thousands of newspapers, rolling 24 hour news, the internet and millions of blogs, journalism is becoming so lazy, so clichéd and so predictable that it runs a risk of becoming at best ignorable, at worst, irrelevant. The once fine vocation of The Fourth Estate is rapidly turning into PR – and bad PR at that.
This summer you have heard, in nauseating detail, the daily sunbathing habits of a young British woman. This will be “Jordan taunts Peter” or “Jordan is at it again.” Stories based on rumour, where there is no actual evidence of said taunting or any clarity over what the offending “it” actually is.
Likewise, during lazy August you will read more “scandals” about how easy GCSEs and A-levels have become. In virtually the same breath we will hear the “scandal” of how schools are failing our children because they haven’t got the requisite five GCSE passes. It is the same story that has been churned out for decades now, with just the Daily Telegraph’s image of the “fruity young lady receiving her results” (as Private Eye describes it on an annual basis) being updated. Perhaps the truth is somewhat more banal. Some kids pass exams and some don’t. That’s the purpose of exams. The content isn’t really a “scandal” at all.
Journalists, often quite rightly, reflect the public concern that politics has been turned into the cult of personality. It is therefore galling they then give extensive coverage of whether Gordon Brown smiles at inappropriate moments or whether David Cameron buys his swimming trunks at Villebriquin. All political stories are, invariably, “scandals” or “-gates”, irrespective of whether there really is a scandal or not. This is not to say that there are no scandals. But if everything is a scandal, then we run a real risk that proper corruption. Proper scandalous activity will be treated at a superficial, headline-only level. This is not good for democracy, for journalism or for our collective moral health. Just how many “worst weeks since coming to power” can the Prime Minister actually have? How many times can the imminent total collapse of the National Assembly’s legislative system be predicted?
Likewise, Treasury stories are always, but always, written as if they were analogous to household budgets even when they palpably aren’t. Since when did anyone do a little bit of quantitative easing when they were last in Asda? Defence-spending stories are invariably “battlefields”, where there are always “bloody battles in Whitehall”. Health stories are always “scares” even if no one is actually frightened – unless you purchase certain mid-brows to become scared for the same reasons a young teenager obtains a video nasty while their parents are away.
It doesn’t end there. It’s now a rule that human interest stories must be “journeys” or “odysseys”, irrespective of whether any journey, literal or metaphorical, actually took place. All new films are “instant classics” or “masterpieces” when they, really, are merely nothing more than decent or adequate. Hype and hyperbole are too often replacing insight and intelligence.
And much as many of us like Twittering, the level of journalistic interest in individual Tweets is getting quite ridiculous. If someone has created a fake account in the name of a famous person and posted something ribald, that is not a story. If a famous person has actually opened a Twitter account, that is not a story either. Nor is it if politicians criticise each other or each other’s politics on Twitter. Politicians do that in public in the Assembly or Parliament every day, it’s just that so often journalists don’t properly report it.
Trivia has been accorded the same importance and same level of coverage as genuinely newsworthy, important stories, thereby inappropriately diminishing one and overcooking the other. This is knuckle-gnawingly awful. And it has to stop.
Mercifully, it isn’t all doom and gloom. There might just be some glimmers of hope out there. Earlier this year, The Daily Telegraph investigation into MPs’ expenses not only reported brilliantly, it provided insight, reflection, comment and acute observation. It set the agenda. And the result? The public could not get enough: The Daily Telegraph sees the highest surge in its sales in years and is a shoo-in for Newspaper of the Year 2009.
News matters, and journalism matters. It’s our daily discussion with one another: it aids democracy and debate; it can stimulate, infuriate and challenge. However, if we don’t demand more and fight back against this current soporific, everything-is-beige laziness from The Fourth Estate then a blanket of base, crass and patronising PR masquerading as journalism will become our norm. And we will all be the poorer for it.
Tags: journalism, social media
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4 Comments
It’s interesting to have a reader’s perception on the current state of UK journalism, as the media endlessly debates the issue and sometimes it’s hard to escape the feeling that it is not best qualified to do so.
However, if it is accepted that standards of reporting and writing have fallen, then blame has to be apportioned so that the problem can be rectified.
It is not fair to conclude that reporters and, to a lesser extent, editors are responsible, even though they oversee day-to-day output. They are frequently rewarded for their low-paid loyalty with yet another round of redundancies, although this is certainly more understandable now than it was some two years ago, following the near-collapse of the advertising markets.
The blame for any decline in standards need to be laid fair square and full at the feet of newspaper group boards, who have ignored their responsibilities in favour of personal advancement. The consequences for failing to correctly assess the threat from online content (even though much of that doesn’t challenge in terms of quality), with directors choosing instead to focus on short-term improvement of returns via asset stripping, could prove disastrous for the industry.
Such a calamitous oversight should have led to the wholesale clear-out of boards, but the problem is systemic rather than individual. A lot of this has to do with executive recruitment and other practices adopted from the City. Many board members work on two-year cycles, planning to make the most impact in that time so that they may move on, smelling of roses, to the next top job. The characteristics of the sector they are partly overseeing takes second place to the implementation of techniques designed solely to please shareholders.
The contrast with Auntie could not be greater. I recently met with the head of online for BBC Wales. He was able to give some idea of the level of resources, staff, investment and commitment that the Corporation has devoted to maintaining its reputation as the gold standard. It now stands to inherit the earth.
Meanwhile, having finally woken to this new world, newspapers and magazines are now scrambling around trying to catch up. Instead of trying to innovate and recognise that online media requires a totally separate approach, most have either gone for dumping their content online – making future monetisation extremely difficult – or they have chosen to challenge the BBC shark. An increasingly sophisticated visitorship has chosen accordingly.
Sooner or later, I believe, most media organisations will have to face up to the fact that they are going into the online age not only out-thought but over-staffed. There may come a time when visitors will want very local news once more (and The Economist recently highlighted examples of local papers that continue to prosper, including the interested Tindle Group model). Until then, these titles will simply have too many staff to compete, while all the indications are that this situation will continue to tighten for them. When Mark Zuckerberg remains vague on how money can be made from social media, what hope is there for newspapers whose leaders have only ever put themselves first?
Like chefs, reporters down the years have been expected to work very long hours for less and less gain (with even the freebies that once made it more worthwhile now scarce). To my mind, this increases responsibility on directors, who should have repaid this dedication by securing the viability of the industry. Instead, they have stripped it out, often for little more than personal gain, increasing workloads on individual members of reporting teams, and inevitably denuding quality as a result.
This betrayal is bad enough in itself, but what makes me mad to my bloody boots is how they’ve completely wasted the talent at their disposal. Everybody – reporters, editors, readers, even democracy – but them are the losers.
When Ducan Higgitt (comment above) says “There may come a time when visitors will want very local news once more” he raises a very good point.
Hyperlocal news is certainly the way forward with the engagement of the readers. But, how do we make any money from it?
The only way I can see it, Dom, is if expectations are lowered. This means an end to 35% profits on turnover, and it also means an end to big newsrooms. It may well be that local websites don’t have a newsroom at all, with contributors working remotely.
It means a cottage industry, and this raises all kinds of questions about quality and, more important, accuracy. But Darwinian principles (and libel action) should trim out the rubbish.
the real debate, as I see it, revolves around the monetisation model. What is best – advertising (and the so-called long tail), or subscription? Fortunately, that’s a question that the big boys will have to work out, and it would be possible to accrue some grim satisfaction from watching the most narrow-shouldered among the boardroom wreckers get it wrong, were it not for the fact that journalists will feel the consequences of failure long before any directors will.
“the real debate, as I see it, revolves around the monetisation model.”
This is the economic debate of the next generation, regardless of industry. We will see the rise in industries, the death of others purely based on the digital revolution.