‘If people value investigative journalism, they will have to pay for it’
Wales Business — By Paddy French on July 13, 2010 7:00 am
Investigations like the Watergate scandal, uncovered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, can cost millions
WE LIVE in digital times. But nobody seems to know what that means.
What we do know is that, all around us, old media certainties are crumbling. The bi-polar model of an advertising-led capitalist media counter-balanced by the publicly-funded BBC is disintegrating. In television, ITV Wales is a pale shadow of its former self.
The Tories have abandoned the Labour government’s IFNC franchise scheme for the Welsh news service on ITV and turned to merchant bankers for a new approach. Clearly, the Tories in the new coalition don’t trust media regulator Ofcom and probably feel it’s a creature of New Labour.
Ofcom’s chief executive Ed Richards is a former member of the Blair-Brown inner circle, and married to former Labour AM Delyth Evans. David Cameron has already attacked Ofcom. The Tory communications director is Andy Coulson, a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Murdoch is also opposed to some of Ofcom’s policies. So Cameron’s merchant bankers are certain to come up with a market-driven solution to the problem of how to fund ITV’s regional news operation in Wales.
Meanwhile, the printed media is in dire straits. There is a strong possibility that both the Western Mail and the Daily Post will become weeklies, perhaps as early as next year. This has already happened to the once powerful Birmingham Post, also owned by Trinity Mirror. Local newspaper staff are demoralised with ever smaller numbers of reporters and shrinking budgets.
Only the BBC seems impregnable but the Tories are also likely to move against it.
So what is the impact of all of these developments for investigative journalism?
It looks increasingly likely that only the BBC and S4C have the budgets to do this kind of work. Only Martin Shipton at the Western Mail flies the flag for investigative journalism in Welsh print. However, S4C has already seen its £100 million budget cut by £2 million by the Tories in an early raid – and there is likely to further raids.
Also, the current regime at the Welsh-language broadcaster doesn’t seem to have the stomach for the kind of flak its flagship current affairs programme Y Byd Y Bedwar sometimes sends its way. And the BBC Wales’ Week In Week Out current affairs strand may revert to the type of output that existed before the 1980s.
People forget that it was the arrival of S4C that galvanised current affairs programming in Wales and introduced investigative journalism into broadcasting. S4C insisted on a world-class current affairs strand. That became Y Byd Ar Bedwar and HTV, which later became part of ITV, won the contract to provide it and a huge chunk of S4C’s other programmes.
HTV was the only commercial provider of Welsh programming and it took S4C to the cleaners, winning one of the most profitable contracts ever awarded in Wales. But that left HTV directors with a dilemma. At that time their current affairs output consisted of a bland weekly half-hour produced, on the cheap, as a spin-off from the newsroom. The BBC’s Week In Week Out programme was not much better. It was a cheap studio-based programme fronted by Vincent Kane.
HTV decided it had better produce something better or risk being shown up by S4C’s new flagship. Wales This Week was born in 1982, with a team of newspaper reporters who were willing and able to produce investigative reporting. The BBC soon realised its own output was being outclassed and responded with a revamp of Week In Week Out with a stronger team of journalists and bigger budgets.
Today, Week In Week Out is well-funded but ITV’s Wales This Week is limping along on ever-smaller budgets and faces the chop, probably early next year. With it gone, the BBC may be tempted to scale down the staff and budgets of Week In Week Out.
So, naturally enough, investigative journalism in Wales is slowly declining along with the quality of journalism generally.
It’s an accident that Rebecca – which pioneered investigative journalism in Wales in the early 1970s – is back at this particular time, but it addresses the lack of investigative firepower in both print and broadcasting. It combines “television” programmes as well as conventional print-style investigations.
It’s a paid-for site. That’s attracted some raised eyebrows from those who feel web-users are terminally addicted to free content. True, but a lot of the free content is coming from the threatened giants of the print world who are trying to build up market share.
In the end, however, investigative journalism will have to be paid for. It will never attract advertisers and donations are an unreliable source of income. This came home to me when I was searching for a slogan to describe this new incarnation of Rebecca. The words “Britain’s first investigative website” popped into my head. I immediately thought: “That can’t possibly be true.”
But it is, at least in the sense that Rebecca is the first completely independent website in Britain dedicated to investigative journalism. And, if that is the case, then it follows there isn’t much investigative journalism being produced, even though millions of pages are being generated. (Ironically, Rebecca can also claim to be Wales’ fourth broadcaster, in that it produces broadcast-quality programmes and makes them directly available on the internet.)
Of course, it will take time for all of this to sink in. Rebecca is fortunate in that I’ve retired and don’t need to make a living out of it. Back in the 1970s I was a radical and was prepared to live on next to nothing to make it happen. However, this type of reporting doesn’t come cheap. The legal bill for the first internet edition – and the second edition due out in the autumn – came to £6,000.
All of this has implications for the BBC. So long as the commercial media was profitable and could subsidise its web content, the BBC’s free online services seemed like an extension of the old broadcasting counterbalance. But things are changing and the BBC’s online presence can now be seen as an over-dominant force restraining other entrants.
Rupert Murdoch, already building a paywall for some of his titles, has always railed against the BBC’s internet power and will pressure the Tories for an end to what he will believes to be increasingly unfair competition. Even more significantly, other national newspapers will add their weight to this campaign.
Rebecca has had a slow start this time around, not helped by the indifference of broadcasters and the national dailies. But Rebecca will slowly build up a constituency of people who realise that if they value investigative journalism they’re going to have to pay for it. Otherwise, it simply won’t exist.
In the end, Rebecca will pay its way. That’s what happened last time and I’m confident it will happen again.
Tags: BBC, broadcasting, journalism, S4/C, Western Mail
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14 Comments
Interesting piece, and it’s great to see the return of Rebecca.
Just to take issue with a couple of points, however.
Rebecca is, of course, not the only completely independent investigative journalism website in the UK. The http://thebureauinvestigates.com/ is also an independent site dedicated to investigative reporting. It also crucially publishes its content across a range of print titles and is not behind a paywall.
In my opinion investigative journalism covers issues that are often far too important to be placed behind a paywall. The phrase ‘in the public interest’ is central here. The tiresome argument that the only way journalism can be sustained is to put it behind a paywall is based on false assumptions.
It assumes that websites can’t make money any other way – this is false. Websites do make money through advertising, and in many cases make enough to happily sustain themselves and make profit. It shows the arrogance of the paywall advocates that they tell us we must pay or we’ll lose out. To them there is no other option. This is false.
As Clay Shirky points out:
“Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
The problem of free content is a problem for producers of content and requires innovation. The ‘paywall or not paywall’ argument has been created in such binary manner precisely to suggest there are no other options. There are. Part paid-for content for a start. Reducing overheads and making production simpler for a second. And primarily the acceptance that profits on the huge scale that large media organisations seek are just not compatible with providing what is essentially a public service.
Your claim that investigative reporting online will never attract advertisers would be better stated as ‘it will never attract sufficient advertising revenue for me to make the profit I want’.
As Shirky identifies in The Collapse of Complex Business Models – producers of content need to keep it simple and in the world of Wikileaks it’s hard to to justify locking away investigative reports.
Good luck with your project, but it’s a terrible shame it’s behind a wall.
Rupert Murdoch, already building a paywall for some of his titles, has always railed against the BBC’s internet power and will pressure the Tories for an end to what he will believes to be increasingly unfair competition.
The BBC is paid for by the public, therefore the question of “competition” unfair or otherwise is irrelevant, As for Murdoch’s paywall, it just won’t work.
If the media want people to pay they have to offer them something people really want as part of an exclusive package, as any news content will be reproduced by subscribers elsewhere online for free.
Investigative journalism? Is that the one in which an undercover Star journalist offers a bag of Coke to a celeb, then “exposes” them?
There have been good examples of investigative journalism. But take the expenses thing – if that had occurred behind a paywall, do you think that the paper could have legally, morally or physically KEPT that story behind a paywall? No way. I have several hundred bloggers, and a few million people on social-networking sites that says otherwise. It is the internet. You can’t confine information. If Murdoch thinks he can, then he really really doesn’t understand the internet.
Well i have just purchased the first edition of Rebecca and was astonished to learn there are (a large number of*) masonic lodges in swansea alone! I’d formed the impression – judging by the sort of coverage afforded to freemasonry in the ‘mainstream’ media in Wales – that freemasonry was on the wane. Obviously I couldnt have been more wrong, if the first edition of Paddy’s magazine is anything to go by.
(* Leigh – we removed the number because telling the story rather negates the purpose of the paywall. Like it or loathe it, that only seems fair to Paddy’s efforts – Duncan)
Surely Leigh’s comment illustrates the problem with paywalls perfectly. The information is out and about including the number of lodges, for instance. In an article I found with one search. Easily Googled and easily read.
The trouble is, if you don’t have Mr Murdoch’s money you can’t lock down the content. Even then it’s difficult.
Duncan, you can get the whole list from the mason’s own website. The names are quite interesting. The one I like is the St. John Charles lodge. Many of us would like to have seen Wales ‘s greatest footballer become a saint but it seems that the lodge was name after an old mason. I also liked the idea of a Juventus lodge. For the Welsh Nats among you, there was a lodge in Maesteg – the Dewi Sant lodge, which was suspended by the national masons in the 1990s because it held its meetings in Welsh. As a young county councillor, I used to live quite near the masonic lodge and it was amusing to see the primary school heads parade by with their briefcases. On nice summer evenings you can still some of them walking through town in their DJs as if they were members of the Joe Loss Band.
On the political front, the first Labour MP for Ogmore, Vernon Hartshorn – the first miner to become a cabinet minister – was a mason. For years the Caerau branch which was dominated by communists, who would put forward a motion that freemasons should be expelled from the Labour party. This was aimed at Hartshorn and his agent, who were both masons. Most of the real decision-making in pre-1974 Maesteg UDC was made in the Masonic temple where politicians and officers could met in private. The Labour leader of the Council was nearly always a freemason. At a national level, Morrison blamed his defeat by Attlee for the leadership of the Labour Party in the 1930s on the fact that the MPs who supported the third candidate Greenwood, who was a mason, swung behind another freemason Attlee. Joining the freemasons was just another way for many working class leaders to show that they had arrived in their community. Throw in receiving the Lloyd George invention of the Order of the British Empire and you had really arrived. Look how excited they still get when the letter awarding them the MBE still arrives in the post.
Just a couple of further points on this piece.
Firstly – the Rebecca slogan is ‘Britain’s first investigative website’ – which is fine – but the sentence in this piece ‘Rebecca is the first completely independent website in Britain dedicated to investigative journalism’ is misleading. It should probably have a ‘was’ inserted in there. The London Bureau launched four days after Rebecca.
Secondly it’s now my understanding that only single issues will be behind the paywall – a point sadly not mentioned in the article. So you can either buy it when it comes out or wait for it to appear in the free archive, which seems more than fair enough. It therefore appears that the headline of the piece ‘If people value investigative journalism, they will have to pay for it’ isn’t entirely accurate (it’s also a phrase that doesn’t appear in the article so I guess that error is down to the eds?). ‘I value investigative journalism, but I won’t have to pay for it – I’ll visit the free archive’ would have been more accurate!
On the subject of profit – after having a chat with Mr French I’m now convinced profit was never a concern so I withdraw that part of my hasty first comment – I’m too cynical for my own good.
More power to you Paddy and I hope the magazine prospers.
People will always want things investigated and, probably, at some stage, a website will arrive where people can put money toward investigations. Some of these will become popular and will create an ecosystem for investigative journalism.
This model hasn’t arrived yet – probably a future offshoot of Twitter.
People get to focus in on an area of interest. Team up with others also looking at the same subject. It becomes a focal point, an entrepreneur journalist offers to research subject. People fund it.
I have no idea whether the Times paywall will work. We’ll find out in a few years time – when the other nationals decide whether they’ll have to join in for economic reasons. But people presumably won’t be paying just for investigative journalism, they’ll be after a lot of other things – such as accessing opinion columns & features etc that suit their tastes and where they can find them well presented and all in one place.
The paucity of investigative reporting in Wales, and its likely further decline, is a bad thing. But of course it is very expensive and much of the cash-strapped media is risk averse.
I doubt that a 100% investigative reporting site will prove very attractive to advertisers, who’ll baulk at the commercial risks associated with appearing alongside non-stop controversy.
Investigative journalism, packaged with all the other information such as we get in our dailies, could yet prove sustainable behind a paywall. I’m a Times reader, and I like accessing its site.
I may be one of a small band destined to dwindle, not grow. I am no media sage – but I wouldn’t write off more people being willing to pay for investigative journalism and the softer stuff neatly packaged. I’d rather that than seeing ever more anodyne and risk-free reporting. I don’t mind paying for something that I think is worth it.
“it was amusing to see the primary school heads parade by with their briefcases.”
Was that before or after they’d been to the ward Labour party meeting?
Heard this article is stirring up the staff in a leading British broadcasting company, especially in the senior management.
Thanks to everyone who commented – here are my thoughts on what you’ve all said.
On Rob’s point about Rebecca not being the only investigative website in Britain. I didn’t say it was – I said it’s Britain’s first investigative website: that’s true.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that – aside from the fact that it has funding of £2 million! – the Bureau doesn’t include television programmes in its content.
On the paywall issue: news will always be available free on the net.
Will could be right that the comment, features and the cultural ethos that newspapers provide might form the basis of a paid-for site. Investigative journalism could be part of that. Time will tell.
But where does that leave an independent site like Rebecca which doesn’t have a big print or broadcaster behind it?
I guess the model I think applies to Rebecca is that the content is so unusual that a small audience will pay for it, as people currently pay for the specialised financial information on the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Peter Denning raises the idea of an ecosystem for investigators. On paper, it seems a great idea but in practice it’s not going to be easy. How many investors will there be, how will they know if they’re getting value for money, will they carry any of the legal risk, how many good investigative journalists are there?
In any case, this ecosystem doesn’t exist now.
Nor do I want anybody telling me what to investigate: I started Rebecca so that I could get the freedom to write about the things I think are important. To me, there’s something very clean about people paying £1.50 for something they actually want to read.
Also, although everyone has an idea of what investigative journalism is, I’m not sure that many actually understand just how gruelling this process can be.
To take just one element, libel law is unique in British law. Normally, the person who brings a court case has to prove their case. The rule in criminal law is that an accused person is innocent until proved guilty.
In libel, the investigative journalist is, in effect, assumed to be guilty of defamation until he or she can prove that what they’ve written is true.
That’s a heavy burden to bear. A good investigative journalist has to tread very, very carefully when writing the final piece – and even then a specialised libel lawyer has to vet the piece to make sure it’s legally secure. Investigative journalism is a legal minefield.
Al talks of Star journalists and bags of coke – that’s sting journalism which I don’t approve of. The expenses scandal was chequebook journalism: in effect, the Telegraph bought the information. I don’t much like that, either, even though it sometimes proves necessary.
And, yes, investigative journalism does aim to break its way into the main news agenda: it highlights the issue involved and draws attention to the piece. This is what happened when Rebecca began its long series of articles about bent councillors in its Corruption Supplement back in the 1970s.
Jeff Jones is right about freemasonry: all the lodge names are freely available and there’s lots of free dope about the masons. What Rebecca has done, though, is quite different: it’s arranged the information in a way that goes much further in helping people actually identify the masons in their part of the country.
Finally, back to the paywall issue. Rebecca provides a service: you can buy it or not. Leigh shows that some people are going to pay for it: I hope he found that the first edition told him things about Wales that he didn’t know before.
Simon Dyda hit the nail on the head: offer “something people really want” and they’ll buy it.
Not everybody will want what Rebecca has to offer. But I believe, in the end, there will be enough people out there who will.
One final point. I find that a lot of people talk about these issues without ever visiting the Rebecca site. I’m sure everyone who’s commented here has done so but I come across a lot of people who have an opinion about Rebecca even though they’ve never bothered to look at it!
This discussion – and especially Paddy French’s response – beautifully encapsulates the state of flux which journalism is in, torn between the historic, professional model, based on ‘broadcasting’ information to an audience and a totally different system of communication based on networking.
Whatever the medium, the professional journalist must take into account what the audience wants (or needs) to know about – otherwise why would they pay for the information or even bother to read it, view it or listen to it? Rebecca has always had a good nose for a story, but – as Paddy so neatly puts it – he wants to write about the things he thinks are important; he does not want anyone else telling him what to investigate. He is going to broadcast it and they will pick it up if they want it – and if they know about it (is anyone retweeting Paddy’s work?).
The new Rebecca has deliberately insulated itself from the life of the networked world. The blurb on Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody says: ‘The revolution will not be televised – it will be emailed, texted, blogged, wikied …’. For ‘the revolution’ substitute ‘Rebecca’ and the contrast becomes clear. Of Shirky’s options, perhaps ‘wikied’ is the one we should take most note of, because it involves collaboration.
All of us who have been involved in professional journalism are worried about what the future holds – what will become of the professional standards to which we have aspired and adhered? Would you trust a ‘citizen’ journalist any more than a ‘citizen’ dentist?
Shirky describes the new web order when he says: ‘Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterised mass media. The result is the mass amateurisation of efforts previously reserved for media professionals’.
The online Rebecca – insulated from the networked world – will be an interesting experiment in discovering whether the old, professional, ‘broadcast’ model will work on the web. For Rebecca it is a publishing platform, an alternative to a printed magazine or a TV broadcast. It does not have the characteristics of a ‘community of practice’ as it’s been called. (If you want to investigate the influence of freemasons, what could be better than an opportunity to share experience, to build a case? Why deny yourself and your audience the opportunities afforded by networking? Confining the process to a one-way communication via e-mail has all the drawbacks of allowing anonymity for rape victims – others have no way of contributing their knowledge and experience to the developing investigation.)
Paddy is sceptical of the possibility of an ‘ecosystem’ for investigators as hinted at by Peter Denning. But such ecosystems do exist and are working with the grain of social networking and a ‘post-professional’ journalism.
The American site http://www.spot.us is an interesting model which still pays tribute to professional journalists but sets an agenda for them to follow. In Birmingham, helpmeinvestigate.com brings the skills of ‘amateur’ investigators together – but what’s to stop professionals, journalists or others, joining in?
All investigative journalists know that they start with nothing – information, leads, interpretation come from other people. What the journalist does is to make sense of the information, follow the leads, prove the case and tell the story. Throughout that process, the participation of the ‘former audience’ could bring confusion, false leads, outrageous opinions – and the benefits of an input far beyond the capacity of the most professional investigative journalist.
Good piece – food for thought, although I think the Daily Post is robust enough to continue for some time yet. Not so sure about the Western Mail, but a merger of the two would come before going weekly, surely?
Paddy’s key point is that good research takes time and unless you have independent means, that means money – otherwise all you have is an opinion.
And I have subscribed to Rebecca!