Did we do well?

So, are we happy with the way the Miliband business turned out? As journalists, I mean.

Job well done? Our politics better as a result of the way we, as a whole, scrutinised the Labour leadership contest, the vote and David Miliband's self-exile to the back benches?

I don't mean, of course, are we happy with the outcome of the contest itself. Nor whether David rather than Ed should have won or "really" won. Nor whether one would be better at leading HM Opposition than the other.

No, it's more about the strength of adversarial politics which tend to work best when there's talented, eloquent advocacy emanating from the opposition benches, irrespective of which party's sitting on them. And the belief that, whichever party you support, politics is better conducted with the opposition's strongest and most experienced performers sitting at the front rather than the back.

So it's about whether we're happy that it was the failings, the limited framing of much of our journalism rather than any reality that made it inevitable that David would not be able to join Ed's shadow cabinet.

Genuine differences

It's true that there were and are genuine differences between the new Labour leader and his brother. Ed's unequivocal disowning of the Iraq war. The pace of deficit reduction.Tuition fees.

And it's true - as the BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson reported - that David thought that, to some extent, Ed's overall victory was compromised by his defeat in two of the three sections of the electoral college. (Nick Robinson's work, incidentally, was an egregious exception to this broad winge.)

We will never know whether any of these genuine differences were in and of themselves insurmountable. Genuine, ideological barriers to David serving in Ed's shadow cabinet - especially as Labour renews and repairs itself after one of its worst election defeats ever and its leadership passs from one generation to the next.

What we do know, however, is that the insistent framing of the David/Ed story made any difference between them, perceived or real, potentially crippling to effective opposition - not because there was no possible resolution to any difference of view or approach but because it was inevitable that any difference (and not all of them real) would be the sole focus of journalists in search of an easy headline.

And if it wasn't clear before the press and TV coverage of Ed's leadership address to the Labour conference that David couldn't join the shadow cabinet, it was pellucid after it.

"I think that raising a wry eyebrow with Harriet yesterday shows the dangers that can come,"

David wrote.

As Iain Watson puts it in his excellent analysis, the coverage:

" ...all but convinced him that every nuance between him and his brother would be pored over by the media at the expense of scrutinising potentially far more divisive differences at the heart of the coalition government."

Or as David Miliband himself described it:

"perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where there is none and splits where they don't exist"

Now, you can, of course dismiss this as the pseudo-rationalisation of a disappointed sibling. A way out of a tricky corner, of avoiding a fight for which he has no stomach. Perhaps, even, an admission that Labour is by nature fissiparous.

Or you can stop a moment and ask whether there might be a grain of truth here. And that whether you happen to respect the former Foreign Secretary or not, whether you agree or not with any of his views ... the loss of any talented individual of any party, however temporarily, to front line politics is not necessarily calculated to improve our self-government.

And when that loss is not about genuine, real, ideological differences beyond resolution but rather about the way in which lazy journalism's narrow, habitual and infantile framing would cast any mature debate, any mature attempt to resolve differences ... well, you have to wonder whether that's scrutiny deserving of the name.

Did we do well?

The leadership fetish

***This is a cross post from the BBC College of Journalism***

Ian Watmore's departure as the Football Association's Chief Executive has "torn the FA apart", according to at least one headline.

It 'may affect England's football World Cup bid', according to another. And is unsettling for the squad preparing for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa later this year. Apparently.

But hang on. Here's what BBC Radio 4 Today's Garry Richardson had to say about Mr Watmore's sudden departure. It happened because he was:

"Able to have such little impact on key decisions".

And as for that other stuff about World Cups:

"He obviously doesn't pick the team or coach the team ... the 2018 bid team is totally separate so it won't matter at all."

So ... the departure of this particular leader doesn't actually amount to anything.

Apart from a pile of overexcited news stories telling us more than we probably want to know, and more than we could possibly care about, the office politics of a body that's marginal to most of our lives.

It highlights once more, though, journalism's obsession with 'the leader'. An obsession that is close to a fetish and isn't confined to political leadership. The leader is the organisation, this addled thinking goes: so their departure must matter. Even when it doesn't.

It's worse when there's a problem in an organisation. Then, sacking the leader is the obvious and only remedy.

It's lazy thinking. Worse, it presents the illusion of accountability journalism without any of the inquiry or understanding that lies behind the real thing.

Years ago, in our World at One morning meetings, some wag would usually break a stumped silence with: "Maybe we can get someone to call for John Prescott's resignation." It was code for: 'We haven't got a clue how to develop this story.' And finding someone to call for John Prescott's resignation was never very difficult.

Now, of course leaders should be held to account and journalists should hold them to account. Of course leaders are responsible for those they lead and should take the rap. And that might - might - mean a leader has to go for the good of the organisation. But of course it might also mean staying to put things right. Or firing those who've got it wrong. Accountability journalism is as complex as the problems those we hold to account have to deal with.

Last week, six Birmingham social workers were sacked: the sackings followed the deaths of eight children in the city, though were not directly related.

And then, the inevitable question: Why were no managers sacked?

The reasoning, all too familiar: if those sacked weren't doing their jobs properly, then it follows they weren't being managed properly or that there weren't people keeping an eye on them - so they must be sacked, too. All the way to the top - after all, the bigger the scalp, the bigger the journalistic kudos.

The problem is that once the dogs have barked and the caravan has moved on, interest in how - or even whether - faults are put right is far from the minds of those journalists of simple remedy.

Birmingham's new social services director, Colin Tucker, put his finger on it in one of his interviews. He'd been brought in to sort out what was clearly a dysfunctional child-protection service. And what he was leading, he said, was "a learning process, not a blame process".

And that's something journalists as scalp-hunters just don't get. Public services - like our police or our hospitals or child protection - don't automatically improve in proportion to the bloodiness of journalists' belts. It may need work rather than symbolic, top-level resignations.

'Heads must roll' journalism does us citizens no favours. As Colin Tucker reminded us, "for ten years, social work has been on its knees". It is "failing to attract the brightest and the best".

And that's a surprise?

A long silence ...

... though why should anyone care.
It's been all about this:

The new BBC College of Journalism site - on bbc.co.uk and, I hope, soon to be launched to the UK public.
More news soon.

What I learned in 2008

... is the question over at The Learning Circuits blog. The big question.
Background first; I do many things these days but first and foremost I earn my corn at the BBC College of Journalism. Somebody thought that after thirty years in the front line - I edited the BBC's biggest domestic radio news programmes, including Today with some 6 million listeners - I might have something worth passing on to the rest of the organisation.
Not an unreasonable assumption ... except that I did my learning in a world very different from now. So different that the past couple of years have been more about discovering how journalists learn today than they have been about systematising my own learning from the past.
Example: everything I know about journalism I learnt from other journalists - ones I admired, feared, resented. It happened in pubs; in cutting rooms; in cutting corners; in salving wounds and pride; from that one piece of intelligence that transfigures understanding and from the revelation that came from riding the Story Curve (hence the title of this blog). Oh, and from that feeling you get after putting down the phone, bested by a politician or spin-doctor.
The common factor in all of this? Time.
Time to talk, reflect, experiment, understand what's just happened to you and to construct a principle for the future; time to go to the pub; time to talk about the edit; time to use short Anglo-Saxon words outwardly while embedding a piece of learning inwardly.
And what is it that our young journalists don't have now? Quite.
So part of my learning about learning in 2008 has been trying to find ways to use our website - sadly, still internal to the BBC but going global in 2009 - to recreate something of the power of that way of learning.
Some has been easy; journalists still want to learn from admired experts; they want critique - inwardly, at least ... outwardly they put on a good show of shrugging off anything that looks like criticism or learning. They want 'just in time' advice; intelligencing and a sniff of the Story Curve. Some simulacrum of this we can fashion online - but it only goes so far.
So here's the other thing I learned; organisations like mine can put social networking tools in place and we must and we should and we have ... but even if they're used (more on that in a moment) on their own they're not enough. The way journalists have learned traditionally captures a truth that we all now theorise - the piece of learning comes initally wrapped in garish emotional wrapping; the crashing, heart-stopping moment when you realise just how wrong you were ... how easily you could have got it right; but then moves - sometimes at dead of night or in an unguarded moment - to realisation, rationalisation and resolve. Deep learning self-generating away from the learning stimulus in other words.
On this, here's the thing I have still to learn; how to use online content to 'create' time or its illusion; 'create' the crashes of the learning moment; 'create' the opportunities for that deep learning.
Here's something else I learned; try to understand the learning networks that already exist - don't try to reinvent them. We did a lot of work in the middle of the year around how organisations use networking to support learning. It was good work, but it overlooked one thing; BBC journalists were already sharing learning, links and intelligence like crazy - millions of transactions a day amongst the 8,000 or so journalists. They were writing stuff that was in every respect blogging ... it's just that no-one called it that.
Like most newsrooms, the BBC uses a computerised real-time news production system to read news agency wires and write scripts; that news production system has an informal instant messaging system as part of the package. It's used routinely for every conceivable purpose from conducting questionable social lives to passing the most profound intelligence and thinking around breaking or moribund stories.
We - those of us delivering online learning to our journalists - shouldn't try to create an alternative to this. But here's the challenge; one very senior executive is reported - almost certainly unfairly and out of context, for it is ever so - to have said, "I go to blogs and read stuff ... but that's not learning".
Getting that particular executive to acknowledge formal/informal learning - that's to say, the informal learning contained within an enterprise like the College of Journalism website and blogs - is a bit of an ask. Getting him/her to acknowledge the rich learning contained in the instant messaging around programme production ... oh dear.
Here's the final thing I learned in 2008. Everything we journalists work with changes each time we use it - not just the technology to gather, produce and distribute our content but journalism itself. The story is dying ... but we're still not entirely sure what to put in its place. Our former audiences are talking back to us ... but we're still not entirely sure what to do with what they say. We stumble on fantastically successful formats ... but lack the confidence to read across from them to other content.
That's the big learning challenge/opportunity for 2009 - how to teach the 'meta-skills' of journalism ... or raise awareness of them and find some resource to wheel in behind. Not 'here's how you do this' or more accurately 'here's how we've always done this in the past' ... but 'here's an idea about how you could think and be to be able to deal with whatever it is that journalism becomes'.
Coo.

Alastair's denial

I was struck by a couple of passages in Alastair Campbell's Hugh Cudlipp Lecture and subsequent comments blogged by Charlie Beckett of POLIS.
First this: that, apparently, one of the reasons Alastair left No10 was:

"relations between media and politics had become so bad, I had become something of a symbol within that, and part of me thought maybe things would improve."

An act of selfless self-sacrifice, then, on behalf of the greater good ... though, he asserts, a sacrifice made in vain.

"I am not sure things have improved at all.”

May as well have stayed on, then ... though the diaries (and cheques) etc would have had to wait.

Alastair's list of what didn't improve at his going is long and familiar: quantity of journalism up, standards down ... and there's much with which most would agree. The media - the press in particular - should

"understand (that) its responsibilities in a modern democracy go beyond making money and filling space"

for example. Amen to that.

But while Alastair seems on one level to recognise that his controlling urges changed both politics and political journalism, he seems on another to be in denial about the scale and corrosive effect of that urge for control ... and what needs to be done to make good that corrosion.

The truth is that some very important things did change the moment Alastair left No10. It became possible, for example, to have rational, calm conversations both with Downing Street and other Government departments. My dealings - I was then Editor of Today - with Government and Ministers was no longer a perpetual combat, a zero-sum game in which reason was a sign of weakness and the resolution of every negotiation or complaint had to have a winner and a loser.

Second, this: I sometimes wonder whether Alastair's obsession with the quantity of news (“In an era of more pages, more space, more access, more talk, there is less said and done that is truly memorable”) is any more than the realisation that he could never really control the supply of news ... that no-one could. That news and journalism is cantankerous and messy. And I wonder whether what he calls "the media's obsession with itself" isn't just a cry of frustration at those pesky journalists he felt he should have controlled but who insisted in going off-grid - like Nick Clarke's The World at One, which always took as its starting point stories and angles that weren't on the Downing Street spreadsheet.

But Charlie Beckett is right - the question to both journalists and politicians is ... what are you going to do about it? Things may have improved since Alastair left Downing Street ... but not by enough to make repair all the damage done while he was there.

There are plenty of shortcoming in the British press; the obsession with failure or with doing down public figures ... rather in the way Alastair describes the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition as:

"a PR man by trade whose single most important achievement prior to becoming leader was making a speech without notes"

and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as:

"a good looking 40 year old about whom next to nothing is known"

But then, old habits die hard. Which is the point Alastair has never seemed able to grasp - that if you want a higher level of serious political debate then some old habits need to go ... on both the political and the journalistic side. And that those habits will never go while the default nature of politics and political journalism is blood sport and neither politician nor journalist really, really wants that to change.

A UK first?

Roy Greenslade asks the question:

"Is Guido Fawkes responsible for Britain's first genuine
blogging scalp with Peter Hain's ministerial resignation?"

And points out that Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines makes a passing mention of his possible involvement in the tonsuring while asking:

"Is this the first example of a blogger supplanting Fleet Street?

A good question given the realities of politics and journalism ... but one that for some reason hacks me off.

And not just because I've been reminding myself of the glory days of Ian MacIntyre and John Birt in David Hendy's excellent history of Radio 4. I was a rebel, honest.

Of course, bloggers have been supplanting Fleet Street (columnists) for a couple of years now - sorry Simon - you really don't get the best venom on paper any more nor do you have to pay for it.

Question is, have bloggers usurped Fleet Street's right to fuel palace coups or court culls - aka make the kitchen so hot the only sensible way is out? Answer is, no. Fawkes/Staines may have known (roughly) where the petrol cans were ... but it was only when the mainstream started waving them over their heads that it got dangerous for Mr Hain.

Test is this: who'd have cared if Fawkes/Staines was wrong? Or ... alongside the Hain 'scalp' how many missed crania are there? Possibleymore than one and perhaps up to many.

But back to the coups/culls. I really do understand the thrill of it - I've had my share and there's something undoubtedly satisfying about tucking the bloodied follicles under your belt. It's exciting, fulfilling, endorsing, validating. I really do understand it.

Except.

It can't be right, can it? Being a watchdog is one thing - waking voters up to those things the elected have done in their name. Reminding the people that they own the power, not those they lend it to.

But ... do watchdogs scalp those they watch? Isn't that up to voters? Is this kind of pressure exerted by a handful of journos on a single individual, an uncertain and increasingly insecure Prime Minister, really what democracy is about? Or what voters want it to be about?

Actually, the thing that really hacks me off is that it never seems to me that many political journalists - and now bloggers - see this side of their trade as anything more than or other than a game.

They use the language of democratic accountability to describe something that looks to those on the outside (ie voters, citizens - sorry, subjects - people, you, me) like a round of British bulldog in which they're not asked to play.

I said something like this here back in April:

"From what I see of the successful political blogs - let's take Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes for instance - they replicate the inward looking, metropolitan chumminess of the Westminster village that many in the audience find repellent in both politics and political journalism."

Fawkes/Staines pinged back:

"it is only a blog, and it is intended to entertain not save the world."

Or change it. But that was then. This is now.