The shoe-horn cracked.

Nick Davies' excellent deconstruction of what must be one of the worst reported stories this year - the Haut de Garenne investigation - is a great Bank Holiday read. (Oh, how sad is that?). Until this:

"Like so many false and distorted stories, this one was driven by PR, here from the police. That PR material was used by media outlets without sufficient checks and then recycled secondhand by masses of others, all of them falling foul of the commercialised media's in-built preference for certainty over doubt; for fitting facts into fictional templates; for taking the safe road of running the same angle as the rest of the media; and, most of all, for running stories which sell."

You really could hear the shoe-horn crack. Somewhere deep, deep in the background of the Haut de Garenne insanities may perhaps be aspects of the far from unarguable journalistic universe that Nick articulates in Flat Earth News. But even if they are, they're well hidden by the figures in the foreground - the 'reporters' locked into a ritualised reverence for 'the story'.

By Nick's own account, the information shared with journalists was a million miles from PR - and it's worth trying to imagine the alternative for a moment. What if deputy chief officer of police, Lenny Harper had revealed nothing of the inquiry in press notices and conferences?

Inevitably, details would have leaked and the headlines would have been similar, the coverage similarly mendacious and chaotic ... with the added implied verification "it must be true because they didn't want us to know it."

Coverage like that of Haut de Garenne is much more the result of the internal rites and rituals of reporters obsessed with the outdated idea of 'the story' - and their preparedness to bend or omit any set of facts to make 'the story' - than it is newsrooms' surrender to commerical pressure or slave-labour news production quotas.

Bloody internet

Seems I'm the only person I know who isn't publishing a book right now. That's OK - I can live with it. What I am doing, though, is trying to get my head around an idea I sold to BBC R4's Analysis: and, yes, it did seem like a good idea at the time etc. The programme Editor and producer, Hugh and Ingrid, have that irritating tendency proper to clever people of insisting that people like me who aren't very clever get a grip of their facts and what it is they want to say before opening their mouths.
The idea is, on the face of it, a straightforward one: 'Can the British press survive its crisis by taking lessons from the American public journalism movement?' And yes, if I'd had the courage of my convictions, I'd have opened it up as a web conversation and taken it from there.
But I'd written a short(ish) pamphlet on public journalism for my BBC bosses back in 2005 ... so at the time I floated the idea, it didn't seem too big an ask.
Which is where the 'bloody internet' comes in. The great thing about the internet is the serendipity of the research you do there, arriving in places you could never had predicted when you clicked on that first link: I remember Theodore Zeldin telling a symposium at the World Economic Forum in Davos back in 2004 that the ideal internet search engine would be one that delivered random results, his way through the information fog.
The bloody thing about the internet is what happens when it crashes into traditional research for a traditional, linear piece of work. A piece of work with a deadline.
First, the depression when you find that every 'original' thought you think you've had has already been had: second, your subject's refusal to be constrained by any single, or even complex, line of thought: and by extension, third, the distance you travel from those post-its you sprayed around your computer screen with the chapter or section titles on them.
'Course, Dr Zeldin is right - it's much more fun this way and you do end up with both the conscious and unconscious bits of your brain better employed. But it doesn't make it any easier to arrive at five thousand particular words which, when joined end to end, work both grammatically and intellectually.
Take this: I thought I'd got the bit worked out about the 'BIG CHOICE' for the press - whether it re-establishes itself as a meaningful agent in the public sphere or finally abandons its threadbare 'public interest' loincloth and just gets on with flogging eyeballs to advertisers.
Then Googlereader gives me a link to this post on Steve Boriss' 'Future of News' - reviewing James Bowman's new book. Steve summarises James Bowman's arguments like this:

"... a key motivator for consumer newspaper purchases is the vanity of knowing more than others do. Since we tend to assume that the privileged rich, powerful and famous have access to knowledge the rest of us don’t, much of modern journalism has devolved into the questionable and narrow practice of digging out the “hidden truths” allegedly known only to elites."

Now, the problem with this is that it gives a second chance to a line of thinking I'd abandoned on space grounds: linear means you can't get everything in and have to decide priorities ... thank heavens 'the story' is dead. The post-it had already been crunched into the recycling.
When I was Editor of The World at One, in 1997, I commissioned some research to try to find out how the audience actually used what we broadcast. What it told us was that a huge chunk of our 3 million or so listeners used what they learned in conversations with others - in the pub, at the golf club or even in the 'bus queue: in the words of the academics, we were both a location and agents in the public discourse.
Of that huge chunk, a significant slice liked to feel - and here's the link - that what they heard on WATO enabled them to feel they knew more than others. Now, I wouldn't call that vanity ... though clearly the motivation has some sense of social hierarchy hidden in it.
But here's the thing: I had never linked that motivation - to know more than others within the context of their engagement with the public sphere - with the second half of Steve Boriss' summary: that it leads to the "questionable and narrow practice of digging out the “hidden truths” allegedly known only to elites" aka "punk journalism".
So what to do? Now that I know this is an argument out there ... do I have to include it? Do I have to un-crunch the post-it? I'm not sure that the link between the two propositions is a necessary one, by the way.
Or do I stick to the nice straight line my surviving post-its make across my desk and pretend either I never came across this or - haughtily - imply I've considered and rejected it?
Like I say, bloody internet.

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.