Remembrance of things past

Was it really ten years ago? Was it really that bad? Was I rude to Croydon?

The 'story' is dead

I don't think I meant to do this ... but you know how it is.
Two talks this month: the first to the University of North Texas (via a 128bit ISDN videophone - how retro is that?), the second to a group of early to mid career BBC journalists at a thing called the SON&R Centre in Bristol, a learning enterprise dedicated to sharing best practice.
At both, we were talking about multimedia news ... and both came soon after the launch of the new BBC News website and soon before the launch of the new BBC multimedia newsroom (I wrote about that here in the UKPG).
Maybe it was all the fault of that piece in which I wrote:

"... the idea of “the story” becomes meaningless ... “the story” is defined by an output deadline: “What can we find out and illustrate in the time we’ve got left?” There never was anything special about that particular iteration of those facts and that illustration, though we became very good at creating the illusion that there was.
And with “the story” goes the idea of an account being “complete enough” to put to air (why stop there?), of the fine balance of voices (there’ll always be another nuance, another voice) and the 24-hour-news cycle (whose 24 hours?)."

Anyhow, the idea that 'the story' is dead seemed to have wormed its way in there ... mostly because the concentration of thinking around UGC/citizen media, mobility and personalisation didn't seem to me to be getting at the essence of the transformation we linear journalists need to make to get to multimedia-/multiplatform-land.
Partly too, though, because this piece on Paul Bradshaw's blog back in September 2007 had taken root, followed up by Ed Roussel's talk at DNA 2008 - both, all, seemed to be pointing in the same direction. And so did the ideas underpinning the new, sleek, clean BBC News website.
The death of 'the story' - or at least we journalists' construct of 'the story'.
Which was how and why I came to two talks about 'Storyfinding and Storytelling' with the same opening line. 'The story is dead. Get over it.'
Since then, this in the New York Times echoing this from Loic Le Meur both articulate a truth we're all starting to see in action. News finds people - sometimes from Big Journalism, sometimes not (if you're under 25, usually not). And when it finds them - whether through BJ's alerts like Paul Bradshaw and Ed Roussel describe or by that weird wired osmosis that finds our teenage children without them apparently turning anything on - they don't quite respond to the carefully polished 'stories' we linearites cherish so much.
So far so obvious. But think about it for a mo. If you're one of those formerly known as the audience it's no big deal. But what does it mean for the stuff we journalists produce?
Thing about 'the story' is that it was the glorious evasion that enabled journalism. No-one can ever know 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' still less convey it to anyone else. But 'the story' absolved us journalists of the need even to try. 'The story' never was anything more than one subset of facts that we could bind into a coherent narrative to get us around the information asymmetry. 'I just tell stories.'
'Stories' are great for excusing irrational agendas and teamed with deadlines they create the need for false balance while creating the illusion of completeness. And 'storytelling' is wonderfully teachable, what with four w's and inverted pyramids and all that.
'Stories' have been good to journalism - all the greater truths (Watergate,Thalidomide, the Iraq deception) have been accessed, initially at least, by 'stories'. But they've done it a lot of damage too - mostly springing from the assumption that if the storytelling is good, you can get the attention of an audience not intrinsically interested. Fine - but for every Seymour Hersh story that gets through the mesh of indifference many thousand sensational half-truths swim through too.
But here's the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by 'the story' than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they're interested in ... and of those, over two thirds don't read every word.
And a pattern's emerging on the web that audiences are tending to use a 'story' as a prompt to find their own background and context and history and consequences and discussion. They'll all pot out at different stages in 'the story' ... but pot out they will, rendering redundant the careful polish we journalists have put on our storytelling. But think about it. Why should they suffer our choice of background and context?
I used a phrase that caught some of this which my audiences seemed to like: 'navigable narration.' I don't think it does the whole job ... but it does start to get across the problem we have.
At one level - we journalists can't escape the story as the unit of currency if for no other reason than one thing follows another and the conscious bit of the brain works in a linear fashion. At the same time, it's also got to be our job - surely - to understand our audience's need to navigate around our narratives and, crucially, to navigate back to our narratives when they themselves become the context, history and background for the next story.

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.

Future(ish) News(ish)

Recently, my good friend and Head of BBC Newsroom Peter Horrocks spoke to Leeds University and posted these comments to the BBC Editors' blog on user generated content.
The speech and blog are an early glimpse of the direction he intends for the newly merged 'News' department of the world's most important broadcaster and it’s a pretty clear statement of the relationship he sees between traditional, 'big' journalism and the participating audience ... as both journalism and information sharing on the web evolve.
He has the responsibility for that News - I have the luxury of being able to comment with no responsibilities, now, of a similar order. Peter was clear that he wanted a debate on his thoughts ... so I helped with these thoughts from the yellowing ivory tower and posted them this week on the internal BBC College of Journalism website.
One thing no-one could argue with; the nature and scale of the challenges to the BBC from new(ish) journalism are unique. The risks to it dwarf those confronting any other news organisation. It would be wrong to underestimate that. In this as in most things, the BBC is different.
For that reason if no other, a careful and cautious approach is probably essential; but, some would argue, Peter's journocentric approach might not be so essential. It’s worth discussing - his vision of journalism yields very little of the trade’s role as the principal agent in the information business. Interacting with audiences isn’t much more than a help and assistance in that.
Not everyone would agree.
Take this. Peter describes how the BBC considered closing down the online debate following Benazir Bhutto’s death, ostensibly because that debate, in conventional journalistic terms, went off message - discussing Islam (rarely in flattering terms) rather than the political future of Pakistan (though there are perfectly respectable arguments here, here and here, to pick a few at random) to be had about the nature of Islam and its effects on Pakistan’s social and political development.
In the end, he/they didn’t close the debate down … not because it was felt that the debate was in and of itself worthwhile but with two ex post facto, journocentric justifications.
One, this.
“Buried amongst the comments … were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eye witness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi. Our team that deals with user content sifted through the chaff to find some excellent wheat.”
The other, this:
“In one sense it is very useful to understand the strength of feeling on this issue (the nature of Islam) amongst our audiences.”
In other words, the value of hosting the debate (and remember, it’s the comment and debate side of audience participation not its role as occasional, accidental reporter) lies in the “wheat” we journalists can sift from the chaff (a wheat/chaff distinction determined by us journalists) and in the steer it gives us journalists about what audiences are thinking, though a steer we journalists interpret and are at liberty to ignore.
“We cannot just take the views that we receive via e-mails and texts and let them drive our agenda. Nor should they in any way give us a slant around which we should orient our take on a story. At their best they are an invaluable information resource and an important corrective to group-think.”
True. But who’s saying that it should?
Put the other way around, is it right still to place traditional journalism (with all its failings) at the heart of the “public participation journalism” model? It’s understandable that we journalists want to - but is it really just “messianic and starry eyed” to consider the possibility it doesn’t have to be that way? Or even that it shouldn’t be that way.
Peter gives a straw man a good shake with this rhetorical interrogative:
“Should we (in the case of the BBC’s Bhutto coverage) have given over a significant part of our website and our analysis programmes on Radio 4 to consideration of whether Islam is a religion that is inherently skewed towards violence? Or were we right to concentrate our journalism on reporting and analysing the life on Benazir, how she came to die and the political consequences?”
Some will see this as a journocentric elision that assumes the web and what happens there and on Radio 4 (or in any other traditional context) are both parts of a single editorial continuum … with traditional journalism at the ‘good’ end and peer-to-peer web action at the other.
But are they all on the same continuum, the ‘low’ end validated by the ‘high’? Or if they are in journalists' minds, do they have to be?
Only if you assume that the web is no more than a source (of stories and audience insights) for traditional journalism does the argument hold. It may just be that (some of) what’s done on the web – in particular peer-to-peer information sharing and debate - really is a different species from traditional journalism … and that it should be. And that by the same token, what happens there – even on a BBC site – should have no inevitable consequence for the choices made in traditional journalism contexts.
So why not either let the web crowd do what it does or – if traditional journalism must intervene - inject into that web debate (in this case, over Islam) content touching on the question the audience is itself discussing? Why does that have any necessary consequence for the choices Panorama, Newsnight or News 24 makes?
Here’s one of Peter’s answers why not – but some will wonder whether it really flies.
“The general conversation on the web is freely available to all. The BBC does not have to host that.”
Rework that with the word “News …” instead of “The general conversation …” and see where it goes.
And for the BBC to host a web conversation, here’s the essential criterion ...
“We will want the information generated to be editorially valuable ... we need to be able to extract real editorial value from such contributions more easily … (we must get) real journalistic value out of this material.”
Hmm. Is there really no intrinsic worth in civic debate - whether on the web or in a village hall? Is that debate and conversation only to be judged by the editorial content it supplies to traditional journalism? Is there truly no public purpose and civic value in hosting that conversation?
It’s a question of choice. The argument that moderating web debates is costly and time consuming and brings editorial risk is true of all BBC journalism. Cost and risk alone and in themselves can’t invalidate any journalistic activity – they’re parameters to help a broadcaster work out priorities.
There’s no doubt that audience participation on the web does and should support traditional journalism done by traditional journalists. Anything and everything is a source. There’s no doubt, too, that peer-to-peer debate and information sharing offers big journalism important audience insights – including an aid to calibrating what impartiality seems to mean to audiences on any story.
But is that what it’s for?
Few will argue with Peter's stress on the idea of “radical impartiality” and the pointers the web conversation gives traditional journalism to achieve it – though I think “radical impartiality” was something both Peter and I were already pursuing in the pre-web age … he at Newsnight, me at World at One ... both ever looking out for the “thoughtful or surprising views and opinions” in any source.
But some eyebrows might be raised at the characterisation of web debate as, occasionally, “digital bullying”. And at the assertion that it’s:
“actually about getting the so-called mainstream media to adopt specific policy agendas, or lean in certain directions.”
It may once have been true that contributing to online debates was a minority activity and that, therefore, marginal views became amplified. But even if that’s a valid metric – and most would argue that on the web, it isn’t – it’s becoming less and less true. A piece of academic research due to be published later this year suggests that 42% of audiences now participate in online interactivity.
But even if the web debate does shift the centre of gravity on an issue? So what? Off-line conversation as well as speeches, books, magazines, newspapers … even press releases and spin meisters … have always done that. Have journalists feared “hot-air” or “paper” bullying?
So, the question is worth asking in the light of Peter’s clear statement of purpose for the BBC in journalism’s latest burst of evolution.
Is audience interactivity on the web – or more precisely, interactivity on BBC websites – only validated by its usefulness to traditional journalism? Or, conversely, does the BBC (and some other parts of big journalism) need to shift from an understandably journocentric view of audience participation and consider the fact of the online civic debate as a public good in itself?
Discuss.

Istanbul.

It is not the image I had of Turkey. More Barcelona with minarets. Perhaps it isn’t Turkey at all.

The problem is this. Since I started pontificating on this whole Corporate Social Responsibility lark - in particular (my bit, this) the social responsibilities of the media - I’ve been getting interesting and puzzling invitations from all kinds of places.

Kyiv in July. Tbilisi in November. Istanbul in September. I suppose I have an attraction that someone who knows what he’s talking doesn't have. I’m free.

They work you hard and so in less than 24 hours in Istanbul, it’s one lecture, one televised panel, five press interviews and a TV appearance.

I’m asked, among other things, about the portrayal of Turkey in the European press … that was what the lecture was about. I’m not very kind about it. The press, that is. And though I’m no expert on Turkey, I do try to understand the British media for a living and think I can spot a bizarre portrayal when I come across one.

This account by Yasemin Sim Esmen captures some of it.

I exonerate the BBC (as well as the FT and Economist and even some of the quality inside pages … though they are exactly that: inside pages. Often a long way inside). As far as the press is concerned, it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t refracted through the EU/Islam/culture clash prism – even the quality press isn’t always as careful as it could be.

Criticising the UK press portrayal, incidentally, doesn’t mean supporting the Erdogan view of the world … nor even the longer term Turkish take on history. Intriguingly missing from that Turkish Daily News account is a chunky discussion we had about Article 301.

That’s the article of the Turkish legal code that was used to prosecute Orhan Pamuk and a clutch of journalists. One of the (must-be-reformed) weaknesses of the Turkish judicial system is that more or less anyone can prosecute more or less anyone under 301. And they do just that – usually hard-line secularist/nationalists trying to imprison liberal journalists and intellectuals.

“So what’s the responsibility of the Turkish press as far as 301 is concerned?” was the question.

“Well, it’s got to go” was my answer. “And it’s a test of the Turkish press and broadcasters whether they can be the agents of the debate that gets rid of it … a debate they’ll have to reflect in an open, transparent fashion.”

Etc. I see it’s not in the TDN article.

It was pretty clear from my 48 hours in Istanbul – most of it stuck in traffic – that it and probably the Mediterranean seaboard could walk into the EU tomorrow. But as everyone I met made clear, it’s the vast eastern part of the country stretching down to Iraq and Syria that’s the problem.

And that was my message about the western press coverage of Turkey. For the moment, more Brits favour Turkish EU entry than oppose it. But my hunch is that if or when it ever became a close prospect, the western European press would kick and gouge and bite like crazy to make sure it was as difficult as could be.

In France

I am in France for three weeks and it is very different here.
The local weekly (paid-for) paper has gone through traumas over the past few years. Resolutely off-line, it’s tried every possible way of re-configuring its local offices to offer, first, a single paper for the whole region; then, a complex web of micro-papers which were flops because they were too micro; then a micro with a macro fold-in; and now, back to a single paper for the whole region.
The problem they had with the micro-papers was that there just isn’t enough news. No, really.
It’s even a bit of a problem with the single, regional edition.
Top headline this week? A picture lead on “the dead wife of the Lord of Crequy, who died in the war (crusades, that is), Dame Brunhilde haunts the chateau by night (that’s a pun, incidentally, on a dramatic production coming up at Fressin castle called ‘Nuits de Chateau”) whenever danger menaces the fortress.”
Inside. Barn fires – one of them deliberate. Car crashes – no-one hurt. One obituary.
And this, under the headline “Dog beaten up”:
“After passers-by raised the alarm, a 22 year old man was arrested on Saturday morning for beating up his dog and throwing it from the four-metre high sea wall. The dog – an American Staffordshire - did not seem to have been injured.
The man is being charged with cruelty and also for failing to muzzle the dog – the dog was not wearing a muzzle even though it is considered as belonging to a dangerous breed, category two.”
It’s about as bad as it gets in the summer. In the winter, he might have shot it.
Elsewise, all the news is good. A couple who have welcomed a child from Darfur into their home gets an inside page to itself. Painters and artists are inspired by or hang their work in trees. Artois medievality is celebrated on all sides, Victor Hugo here and there.
There are births marriages and deaths; theatrical and musical productions where the audience rather than the performers is the picture feature.
Mayors, departmental, regional and national government are invisible; the CRS a welcome buffer between the seaside town rowdies (many of them British stag and hen parties) and ‘us’; the courts seem never to over or under sentence.
And in spite of the pictographic weather forecast predicting brilliant sunshine, the sun has not returned and it is raining, raining, raining.