Journalism: from the bottom rung
Working towards media heaven ... or hell?
IN JULY of this year, I gave up my treasured BlackBerry, a cosy circle of friends, a good job and a flat in London to move to Cardiff and study for a postgraduate course in Broadcast Journalism.
After three years of working as executive assistant to entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den star Peter Jones, I left to pursue my old dream of becoming a reporter. The abiding response was that I was slightly mad. Why journalism? A dying and difficult profession surely, killed by the advent of the internet and citizen journalists. More importantly, it doesn’t pay much.
It is hard work, and there’s no doubt it is getting harder as access to information becomes easier. My fellow trainees at Cardiff University are entering an industry which has been rotted by lack of investment. The local newspapers that used to be the training ground for reporters are closing continuously. Even the industry paper, the Press Gazette, no longer rolls off the press. ITV teaches its reporters operate their own cameras. Local radio news bulletins are produced by skeleton crews of one or two staff. The buzz words are multi-platform, multi-skilled and multi-careerist. But missing in all of these multiples are money and time.
So why embark upon this overworked and underpaid career? We had a talk last week from the business journalist Ian Carson, who asked us this question. And the answer he wanted? Because it’s fun. Journalism is an endless learning experience, a way of making sense of the world. A mentor of mine, an ex-journalist, told me that it’s about getting angry. He’s right. I got angry a couple of weeks ago reporting on a spate of pub closures in Merthyr Tydfil. Journalism at its most poetic has been described as the writing of contemporary history. However, working on this latter day Grub Street doesn’t bring the hack much respect.
A big problem is that journalists have lost the public’s trust. Our international news coverage is terrible, but local news is often even worse. The public don’t think that journalists want to change the world, they think we want to destroy it. The Sun Broke Britain could be the nation’s headline. Journalists are listed amongst the least trusted professions in the UK, nestled next to estate agents.
Among the chronic angst sweeping newsrooms up and down the country, there are some very exciting developments happening in journalism. Cardiff alumnus Hannah Waldram has just become Cardiff’s hyperlocal blogger for a Guardian experiment aiming to revive hyper-local news. WalesOnline has hired Online Communities Editor Ed Walker. It is working to refocus news back on local communities, to produce well-researched, trusted content that is relevant and targeted to deliver what people want from their news sources.
Last week, groups bid for the Independently Funded News Consortia which will take over broadcast coverage from ITV. One of these, Taliesin, came to speak to us the other day about what journalism students want to see from the new service. They showed us their pitch which pulled together all of the jargon, the multi-platform, multi-skilling, multiples that we’re told we need to show in modern journalism. They were surprised by our response. Apparently we were far more conservative than they had expected. We were sceptical about the idea of using local bloggers to provide the news, about the idea that news companies don’t want to pay for content they can get for free.
We should all love the concept of engaging with the communities that news organisations serve, but content still needs to be checked by journalists – by editors. You cannot rely on members of the public to feed your site. It is very unlikely that much of the public wants to supply the ten o’clock news. People they want professionals who they trust to inform them, not their neighbours.
Journalism is about listening to people. Sometimes, in the digital cacophony, it’s easy to forget that. Really good journalism, such as The Telegraph’s exposure of the MPs expenses scandal, takes time and money. Under the shadow of lawsuits and with the rise of the super-injunction, it takes brave editors to follow stories that stronger powers seek to suppress. The importance of journalism as a democratic check is indisputable.
For a generation brought up with the internet, my fellow trainee journalists sometimes wonder what all the fuss surrounding ‘the digital age’ is about. Facebook has run our social lives and birthday books for years, we use Twitter as an aggregator for people and information that interest us, YouTube hosts our videos – the embarrassing ones as well as those on our blogs. We’re not scared of what the internet age has brought. But we are studying journalism to learn the fundamental skills that haven’t changed despite the domination of the internet. We take classes in law, government, writing impartially and, for broadcasters, recording and editing. These are the skills that people want from journalists. Despite the millions of blogs, the tweets, the networks, people still turn to the stalwarts of news for reliable, high quality information.
What we are scared of, however, is how journalism will be paid for. No-one goes into this profession to become a millionaire, so a degree of dedication to journalistic ideals are a requirement if you want to pursue it as a career. But we want people to wake up and realise that news content costs money to produce, and the internet hasn’t miraculously changed this. As Wales Home columnist and co-editor Rob Williams said last week,“the singular failure of media corporations to respond to the challenge of the internet is the cause of the demise of local newspapers.”
Underfunded news organisations are no joke. I’ve done work experience in a couple. To set the scene, underpaid, embittered journalists rewrite press-releases (so-called ‘churnalism’) while envying their well-paid accountant friends. They don’t have time to leave the newsroom because they have to man the phones. The hardly speak to anyone, except perhaps to get the odd sound-bite for ‘colour’.
So of course I’m nervous about my employment prospects. Andrew Hankinson’s story in last Sunday’s Observer cut far too close to the bone. Friends and relations are going through the heart-stopping feeling of post-graduate unemployment. Journalism would seem to be a very bad path to follow for an ambitious graduate. When I leave the course in June and the cold reality of job hunting sets in, I might regret turning down a place at law school. For now though, the media remains an exciting place to be.
More than that, I think the industry come out of this crisis stronger and fitter than before. Churnalism is slowly becoming less tolerated. We all realise that investment in journalism is needed to regain the public’s trust. This trust will make our content worth paying for. And perhaps, one day, the industry will let me get my foot on the housing ladder, too…but that’s a lot less likely.
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An excellent and timely article Katie. Let me offer a possible solution and way forward here….
Broadcasting , the Mutual Way:
As well as making the BBC more accountable by giving all TV licence holders membership of the BBC Trust, there is another area where co-operative principles can be applied to broadcasting in the UK.
Encouraging growth and innovation in regional media is an area well suited to the mutual model, which would enable social entrepreneurs to combine a commitment to high quality public service journalism and address the needs of their local communities.
With the likely passage of the Co-operative and Community Benefit and Credit Unions Bill there should be a level playing field between the proprietary and mutual model of ownership. This opens up exciting possibilities for social entrepreneurs wanting to deliver innovative ways of offering news services, in both digital and print media, while enabling wider participation in the service by the various stakeholders.
Over recent years the trend has been for a decline in the quality of local news as readership numbers and advertising revenues have fallen and the proprietor holding group, often a transnational, decides that such a service is not meeting the needs of its impatient institutional shareholder base, which is looking for short term rises in dividend income.
Here is a novel way of financing journalism but crucially imbues the enterprise with the ethics and values of co-operatives. As the UK pulls out of a difficult global recession, new ways of conducting business and offering novel news solutions to a changing demographic present an ideal platform for the mutual model.
A recent example of a news mutual is the Chicago News Co-operative (CNC) launched last Autumn with a commitment to public service journalism of a high quality in the USA. Supported by the McArthur Foundation and staffed by former Chicago Tribune journalists and editors this approach is a timely counter to the Media Tycoon model so long dominant in news, both digital and print.
It would be possible for such a co-operative to work closely with other providers and share resources with the aim of sharing content provision. Under such a mutual umbrella, it would be possible for entrepreneurs in say Cardiff to collaborate with colleagues in Edinburgh, Bristol, London and many other cities to aggregate news.
A further development of this model could include a co-operative version of social media such as the highly successful Twitter platform or Facebook, which is a very effective tool of notifying the blogosphere and MSM of breaking news in niche sectors and of speeding up the indexing of new web content.
Imagine a co-operative equivalent, let’s say “Share.coop”, which could unleash a vast membership who also use the service. So rather than one proprietor owning the latest social media platform, such a service could owned by the very users, who post their latest tweets or “share’s” to cyberspace.
Just consider the possibilities when an account can be added after the domain name, for example, http://www.share.coop/john_smith.
And so the use of the mutual model, underpinned by the new Co-operative legislation, could profoundly transform public service journalism and boost communication among a digitally literate generation.
Income could be generated through new forms of contextual advertising while the capital anchor would be provided by initial investment from a range of stakeholders including individuals and a range of co-operatives.
This form of mutual ownership of social media need not, by definition, by restricted to the UK market but could be truly global. Technology now facilitates the empowerment of millions, so let’s consider this approach using the mutual model.
The other key issue is one of plurality of news sources, so that news co-operatives could offer high quality journalism as alternatives to what is often simply the regional office of the UK-wide BBC network.
Giving people the power to use their entrepreneurial skills, creativity and dynamism using this mutual model offers significant potential to enrich the plurality of cultural life in Britain and boost the various media in our regional economies while also helping to building bridges to other countries.
David Phillips
Fantastic post Kate – coherently summarising recent developments journalism and pitching them against your point of view as a student journalist.
Looking at the facts and the figures, the state of journalism as we know it can seem incredibly bleak, especially for those just breaking into the industry.
Notes in this blogpost on whether community journalism can bolster new online ventures are illuminating: “You cannot rely on members of the public to feed your site,” from my experience – voluntary contributors cannot be relied on for consistent continual content, but are a valuable source of news and information on the ground and are integral to building a vital network. You might find Rachel Sterne’s slideshow of hyperlocal news models useful: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/13956264/US-Hyperlocal-News-Market It looks at four stock ways community journalism can be funded – and the pros/cons of each model.
Your last few paragraphs make for sober reading – the feeling was much the same for the class of 2009 leaving our training pool and venturing out into the ‘real world of journalism’ last June – but nearly all of us have jobs in the industry now (many on regional newspapers) and I cannot help but feel this period of transformation is an exciting time for j-school graduates learning still-essential skills and will reward those with the vision to see the future as bright.
Hannah,
that’s an impressive site you created at BournvilleVillage.com.
As for your point:
“You cannot rely on members of the public to feed your site,” from my experience – voluntary contributors cannot be relied on for consistent continual content, but are a valuable source of news and information on the ground and are integral to building a vital network.”
I would agree that it is not easy to get a steady flow of contributions from the public unless of course there is an issue that really exercises local people, such as building an anaerobic digester or siting a regasification plant near residential housing for example.
The case you highlight, that of Kraft taking over Cadbury and its impact on jobs, is one that has understandably caused great anxiety and anger among local people as well as the wider community.
Using blog and Web 2.0 platforms does have a role in such cases especially when combined with the leverage power of social media and bookmarks such as twitter, stumbleupon and facebook.
That is why I believe building co-operative networks as in the CNC example provides a more secure investment base for social enterprise journalists and enables the sharing of content across other platforms and with other organisations.
There is also a strong case to be made for providing premium content for a monthly fee on top of that which is free, and when combined with in context advertising revenue can offer a sustainable business model.
Katie,
Thanks to you for writing this piece and to the comment contributors for taking it forward. What we were looking for from Katie – and what I think she delivered – was how the industry looks from the point of someone who has grown up with new media, rather than grown into it like old duffers like me have had to.
What I’m hoping we’ll see from Katie, Hannah and others like them is a different approach to the problems facing the industry. I still tend to compartmentalise social media away from news delivery, and so do a lot of people. We are rapidly moving towards the point where one is indistinguishable from the other.
As such, I now no longer see the point of picking over the bones of what has gone before. We’re in a Darwinian race now, and may the smartest man or woman win.
Hi David – thank you for your detailed post in response. I was fascinated to read your comments in an area I hadn’t explored. I think the mutual idea is a very interesting one, but I worry about how such an organisation would be funded. The CNC say they received a substantial donation from the MacArthur Foundation – does this then mean news should be charitably funded? I still think/hope that newsrooms can be run as commercial organisations, without damaging the news values. But I think we do need to place a higher value on the content journalists produce. Journalists have to become increasingly entrepreneurial in their outlook, and clearly we need to look at challenging so-called ‘traditional’ ways of funding news.
Hi Hannah – thank you very much for your comments and your positive few lines at the end re.jobs! Cardiff is a fantastic training ground, not least because we’re so encouraged to engage with all kinds of journalism. Yes, some opportunities have disappeared in the training patches regional news, but the web opens up others. Your role now is testament to that. We’ve all got our own blogs, our own patches and are able to make and maintain our contacts more easily than ever more. News organisations are beginning to change how they are funded and it’ll be a really interesting time for those entering the industry to see for example whether the pay walls Murdoch is planning will work.
A really interesting article.
Not a journalist just a pleb I have been saddened by demise and ever diminishing content of local newspapers. As a dad of several daughters I have spent at least 7 years delivery between 400-700 free newspapers each week. Thery have just become thinner and more people are asking us to stop delivering because there is so little local news. Incidently we are on the last daughter so my regular exercise will go by the board.
We have some great local journalists whom have begun to know. t seems to me that they are driven by micro-local stories that affect little more than a street: coupled with a formula photo this seems to be their bread and butter. How dull this must become and how distant their horizons must disappear.
On a point of local newspapers I asked if ours would give papers away at a local exhibition I’ll beholding. “No” came the instant reply. hat’s not our style. Last week I spent 3 days in my beloved London and found trains with carriages full of people reading the newspaper, usually the Metro, which is free and being read.
At Holborn Underground station there was a group handing out free Evening Standard papers. At Euston there is often a promo team giving out papers. If this happened with provincial papers wouldn’t it encourgae more to become regular readers. I often speak to local people who haven’t read their local paper for years except on special occasions. Shouldn’t we be trying to increase circulation.
Addressing your article, Katie, having met and been impressed by your attitude it would be sad to see you and your peers drift into a world of local tedium when you have so much potential. Where do you start. I have young film-maker friends who decided that joining a major production company would be the long haul so they are formimg their own company and concentrating on short low-budget productions with the hope that they’ll produce a masterpiece that’ll take the critics by storm. But where do you go as a journalist?
I’ve now created my small internet radio show and am mow looking at having a complimentary website that will do more than one usually expects. I’d like to see the radio working alongside articles and video expanding one on another and giving a broader coverage through different media and bringing in listeners to participate through their own comments, articles, video and podcasts so that they become obsorbed in their local community and that the old chat across the fence (you young journalists wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about) would return as communications brought them back to their roots.
And who best to drive this type of community (and it doesn’t have to be local, it could be national or global). Why qualified jounalists who can bring impartiality and a level playing field, who are trained to be provocative. Make readers, listeners and viewers sit up and beg for more and a chance to participate.
Long live young journalists, our future but also the guardians of our past.
Does this make any sense?
A pleb by any name!!
Great post Katie and good luck to you in journalism.
Newspapers are different today than 30 years ago, the archives of libraries will show that there was much more written content then than now.
Today as you know its ads first then pics then writing in building it up. Notso much writing and not so many journos needed.
Newspaper sales are gradually and inexorably going down and the price gos up for the indy or guardian (more than inflation) to compensate which mean people like me would rather read on the internet.
News blogs are certainly the future . Blogs are much fresher and less contrived generally, more analytical and it is always good to see a point of view put forward, even if one may or may not agree. Alot of modern newspaer writing is mechanical and since the space is eaten up by ads and pics stories can lack detail.
Best stuff to get into is undercover stuff in London , on a freelance basis . Great time! These positions will never be advertisied, job to job . Just gotta be discreet and talk to the right people at the right time you will build up an idea of who wants what.
Dear Katie: Interesting overview of the challenges facing aspiring journalists. The big issue is that much of journalism has become dependent on advertising revenue to subsidize content, and this seems to be fleeing to the internet, particularly locally. Not sure how we solve that,one, but the move to electronic print distribution is part of the answer. I read our main national paper on-line every evening. John P
Superb article.
As an ‘old hack’ but relatively well versed in new media I can empathise with your worries about getting paid to do what is needed more than ever – which is good properly edited writing, good research and brave investigation.
New sophisticated monetisation strategies are needed for online. Plain vanilla adverts (like the classifieds in print) don’t work well on the internet and Google adsense revenues are pitiful for most sites. The way Facebook targets its ads is clever but requires info about the reader which most sites will not be able to access (like age).
One model which might work is ‘sponsorship’. For example, many TV series are sponsored by large corporations and they get to plaster their adverts before, after and within (product placement). This can be big money. So, for example, if I were a media buyer I might consider sponsoring an individual journalist or local news outfit. Of course, there are concerns about independence, commercial influence and editorial freedom etc but a sponsor wouldn’t necessarily need to have control over this (if they didn’t like it they can pull their sponsorship like Gillette has from Tiger Woods!). In any case these concerns are not new. Maybe a way forward is for journalists to become more like sports stars rather than ‘hacks’. Have a sponsored byline bit like a columnist. Anyway this is a complex and evolving situation and I hope that people cleverer than me are working on it.
I look forward to reading more of your excellent contributions – its a pity that you can’t get paid for it!
CP – your’s is a monetised operation. Why don’t you commission Katie?
Writing for Wales Home is a privilege and a reward in itself. Also Duncan keeps telling me the cheque is in the post….must have been held up by the snow eh?
Like you wouldn’t believe. It’s another ice age outside the orbital.
Duncan asked. “Why don’t you commission Katie?”
Well yes it’s a thought. I am thinking more along the lines of a bursary to (the excellent) Cardiff J-school for trainees like Katie. However, when she’s finished she could be sponsored. All she would have to do is wear the, ahem … T-shirt and produce an article from time to time for the print magazine and contribute to our blogs under her byline.
I don’t see any barrier to her collecting any number of such sponsorships, including you Duncan. I am sure Wales Home is already thinking of a logo emblazoned article of apparel she could wear.
Thanks very much for your comments.
I think we need to be brave with the business of funding journalism – and not be ashamed to place a value on journalists’ time. Purely advertising online doesn’t generate the kind of funds which newsrooms need to run effectively.
We may have got used to reading the papers online, but why should this be free? With the advent of e-book readers, writers and publishers will be benefiting from two income streams for their work. Why should journalism be any different?
I like the idea though of becoming a psuedo-sports star…the closest I’ll ever get no doubt!
K
Kate said:
“Journalists have to become increasingly entrepreneurial in their outlook, and clearly we need to look at challenging so-called ‘traditional’ ways of funding news.”
I agree with you Kate. Actually I think the way forward may be to be an aggregator or publisher of content. This way you would be providing the forum for individual journalists/writers/bloggers to make contributions.
I guess you would be free to monetise it with advertising or as someone above has mentioned, secure some sponsorship.
Alternatively, you could get together with some like-minded folk and set up a co-operative which would be able to attract start up capital so long as you have a sound business plan.
Just google ” the Co-operative Fund” which shows how the co-operative approach can provide solutions to a whole range of challenges.
Looking further out I think the trend will be for the sources of news creation to be far more disbursed and the “traditional” model will be replaced by thousands of contributors across the globe. This trend will see an exponential surge with the growth of social media like twitter.
I reckon the very concept of what is news will be transformed over time – a democratisation of content; now there’s a co-operative ideal for you!
It strikes me that the more airy-fairy discussion we have about new media and social media replacing news the more the concept of journalism gets denigrated.
The truth is that previously barriers to entry in the media market were so high that people couldn’t produce writing that was widely read, and therefore couldn’t compete with mainstream media owners.
If anyone thinks that has changed they are sorely mistaken. Barriers to entry are as high as ever if you want to compete with mainstream media instead of just blogging screeds in the web-wilderness, or in your niche silo. Because of this the democratisation of news won’t happen in the revolutionary manner folk think it will.
Social media, for instance, is too noisy already, and news organisations were at least usually pretty good at filtering out that noise.There is no editorial process and no real quality. Also people tend not to trust it, and in many cases they are right to be wary. Think of the complex editorial process associated with the production of a newspaper, and compare it to a hyperlocal blog or website with a twitter feed. They are different things for massively different purposes.
Besides which its worth remembering that there is precedent for these kind of developments being adopted and killed by mainstream media. Thus it’s best not to get evangelical about the future of news (there’s a conference every couple of days in London on this subject!) and recognise that it’s impossible to write the recipes for the cookbooks of the future.
One thing is for sure though, without a sustainable funding model nothing will happen, and that’s where we’re stuck now.
I’m interested in mutuality and co-operative funding ideas, but it seems unlikely to me to be a rival to the dominant model in an advanced capitalist society. Maybe I’m a cynic, maybe I’m a dinosaur, or maybe I just know the industry too well. As ever with these things it’s important to point to a model that’s working Can you provide a good co-operative example in the media industry David?
I’d be glad to hear from you if you can…it’s a fascinating idea, and thanks for your comments.
mabiblogion@googlemail.com
Perhaps we could discuss the value of ‘embedded’ journalists. Not just in the context of a war but also in localities (rural towns and villages) or communities of interest (Senedd, Westminster). Most journalists (should) operate by having ‘sources’ of news (pub, police station, mortuary, county council, market) . This means that people have to know who they are and whom to approach with their gossip, titbit, scandal, secret, complaint und so weiter.
As Katie and others have said many (but not all) journalists are now ‘churnalists’ which means they are sat at a desk copying and pasting from press releases and newswires and answering the phone all day. In the days of strong regional newspapers the local journalists were ‘out’ all day (amongst their sources) and people knew them as people. But this costs money both from an expenses standpoint and also so the journalists can have a living wage to keep them ‘out’ there and not hobbling at another job in order to eat or keep a family.
People will divulge their stories to a real person not via twitter or email or even the phone. The best stories come from engaging in the community, from being in the pub, from parties and from gossiping and from research/investigation of a pet project that has made you furious or intrigued.
In spite of all the new ways of communication we have (mobile phones, internet) it still requires a (properly trained) journalist to be ‘embedded’ in their communities. Sadly, this is no longer happening as much; sometimes I think technology is driving us apart rather than bringing us closer together.
It’s the same in politics – when was the last time anybody ever saw their MP or AM? This is in spite of the knowledge that voters can be influenced by personal contact such as door stepping and baby kissing. Mind you expensegate has caused some of them to go into hiding in case they get battered verbally and physically!
I’ve just come across this blog today and was interested in David and Rob’s comments. I’ve blogged a number of times in the last month or so about not-for-profit models of journalism and have also filed a feature to the Journalist magazine that covers journalism collectives and cooperatives.
http://rosieniven.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/stop-collaborate-and-listen/
My view is that the number of news co-ops will grow, but they will continue to be a niche player. I’d be interested in discussing the potential for not-for-profit models with others. I hope to raise it at tomorrow’s Future of News event in London.