The Question Time special last night was compulsive viewing, which threw up a dozen interesting points. But one particular issue that came up was the fact Gordon Brown was unelected as Prime Minister, and so lacked the popular mandate needed to lead the country. While there is nothing massively original about this accusation, it was interesting to see how Labour’s opponents are suddenly dredging this matter up again.
Leaving aside my own personal view on whether the accession of a new PM should automatically trigger a General Election, I think it is worth pointing out how little the majority of the media made over Brown’s coming to power in 2007.
The majority of the broadsheets, swept along in a pro-Gordon anti-Blair jubilee failed to address the constitutional issues at stake. As such, some two years later when there is a genuine Parliamentary crisis, the matter raises its head, rubbing salt into the wounds inflicted on our body politic over the last couple of weeks.
If the press are still to claim a role as the Fourth Estate, then we have a duty to examine complex poitical issues as and when they arise, rather than wait until things blow up and others are able to use them to fuel some already very fierce political fires.
Budget day is not normally an event that even registers much on my radar. But today I was covering it in a journalistic capacity for peerless online news provider inthenews.co.uk
And it proved to me again that journalism is the best job in the world – the feeling of covering covering something that will directly effect everyone in the country’s lives is almost indescribable; thrilling and nerve-wracking in equal measure.
As with Vietnam veterans, to understand journalists I think you have to have been there. The rush, the focus, the pressure and, ultimately, the satisfaction have to be experienced.
Once tasted, the newshound never forgets the scent of a truly world-changing story.
Shame we’re all going to end up on the dole, despite Mr Darling’s best efforts.
PS This is in no way relevant but I need to get it off my chest. There is currently a Pot Noodle advert which is the most shameless rip off of Kiwi icons Flight of the Conchords. The whole thing infuriates me. How stupid are advertising people? Do they think this will appeal to the same demographic who like the Conchords? Do they not see that anyone who likes the Conchords will be riled by such a pale imitation of the band and be royally p**sed off? Probably not. They’re all too busy congratulating themselves on being down with the kids.
As Chuck Klosterman put it, advertisers do a job that’s half as hard as journalism, for twice the money.
There was something about this piece in the Sunday Times sport section which cheered up an already gorgeous Sunday morning even more. It’s interesting, beautifully written and long enough to feel a little bit indulgent (a prerequisite for any top notch Sunday newspaper article).
But more than all this, it showed again why print journalism will always have a place.
Intelligent, eloquent football writing has flourished over recent years – Henry Winter and Martin Samuel in particular are a joy to read.
And quite simply this is not something the digital revolution is ever likely to render obsolete. With its emphasis on speed, convenience, and squashing everything into 140 characters it is hardly a real threat. Some might argue the capacity to pick and choose articles on the web means the reader can go straight to a Winter, or a Samuel, and so our business model remains as worrying as Aston Villa’s loss of form. Maybe in theory, but I stumbled across both the Guardiola article and this piece on Alex Ferguson in the today’s Independent by chance. If the broadsheets continue to invest in quality writers I will still buy newspapers to see who might surprise me.
In the same way that I love Chuck Klosterman’s writing on popular culture, there is something fascinating about really good football writing, the ability of the author to see beauty in the seemingly oafish or mundane being the characteristic I most admire in all my artistic heroes.
And where else but a newspaper would you get it? I like the various football podcasts, particularly the Guardian’s, but they rarely soar any great intellectual heights. Television? Hardly. It is usually possible to count on one hand the number of incisive, or even interesting points made on Match of the Day. Rarely does the level of punditry, be it Shearer (now mercifully removed from our screens to play out his God complex), Lawrenson, Pleat, even Hansen, rise much above the “Well he’s looked up and had a go and he’ll be delighted to see it fly in” level of banality. Say what you see lads.
My friend Will posed a fantastic question yesterday when we were watching the FA Cup. What would be my dream time Match of the Day lineup? After some deliberation I went for Eric Cantona and Henry Winter. He went for Russell Brand and Gavin Peacock. Clearly we are both craving something different from our football coverage.
There are great swathes of the football following population crying out to for their minds to be engaged. It is the newspapers who are answering that rallying call.
I have waited a while before wading into the debate started by this post as Sarah Lacy’s insufferably smug take on the “can you train journalists?” debate attracted reams of responses when it was posted last week.
My Cardiff colleague Hannah Waldram added her voice to the argument via a guest post on Telegraph Communities editor Shane Richmond’s blog and did a good job articulating the journalism student’s defence.
One of Hannah’s gripes concerns Lacy’s patronising style and, as I said before, utter smugness.
But though I agree with the thrust of Hannah’s argument, I do think Lacy’s (ahem) divisive writing style has deflected attention away from some of the points she makes which might just on closer inspection merit further inspection.
When an article carries such a needlessly aggressive headline, it is not surprising some of the subtleties of her argument might be lost in translation, as the frothing-mouthed Lacy turns her points of view into polarising invective.
This paragraph is a perfect example of this:
Journalism schools are like foot-binding. They force you into a style that a bunch of dinosaurs all agreed was acceptable a zillion years ago. So in an age of blogging, you have no voice. In fact, if I were in J-school now, I’d have my knuckles rapped for using the rhetorical “you” in those last two sentences.
The foot-binding simile, “dinosaurs”, “zillions”, it all smacks of trying far too hard. Hey this girl’s crazy! Two fingers to the squares who make up the Establishment and no mistake! She doesn’t care who she upsets.
But hidden within is the kernel of an interesting point. As Hannah points out we are very lucky that Cardiff has embraced the digital future and our multimedia training is first rate.
But in terms of language and style there are rules imposed on us by tutors which I would question. Writing with flair is rarely encouraged in a training environment which is a shame.
On another level BBC Trustee and Director of Cardiff school for journalism Richard Tait gave an excellent lecture last year in which he deplored the slide (as he saw it) from newspapers to viewspapers. Personally I am not convinced this is such a bad thing.
With short, factual news updates available everywhere, from trains to coffee shop screens, it may be that newspapers should now be brave enough to increase their opinion pages.
Say what you like about Sarah Lacy (and goodness knows people have) but her piece has stimulated a fascinating debate across the blogosphere. Writers with such an ability can only be a good thing for our industry.
News today on BBC that Roger Friedman has been sacked from the Fox News website for writing a review of the new Wolverine film which he downloaded illegally (along with another estimated 99,999 people).
High stupidity considering the film is a 20th century Fox production, and Friedman must have known what he was doing would lose him his job.
But when journalists are being urged to embrace every technological advantage at their dipsoal to keep our industry relevant, is there a moral grey area here?
I suppose the answer hinges on how many people who would not otherwise have done so were encouraged to download the film after reading this review?
The media were full of stories about the leaking of the film, so it seems unlikely many people were alerted to it by this review.
And what would have happened if the film was made by one of Fox’s rivals? Would they have acted in the same way?
There were bound to be other reviews available on blogs and other sites across the web, but praise should go to Fox for refusing to compromise the ethical correctness which should remain the hallmark of the big media organisations.
Interesting piece from the Sun today which raises a few of points re the G20 coverage.
Firstly the picture at the top of the page is hugely concerning (I am unable to reproduce it here because of copyright). At first glance it is an exciting scene, the manifestation of anti-bank anger captured by the massed media. But the more I look at it the more it unnerves me – where are the other protesters? I count 17 cameras in the picture, yet the ratio of press to protesters was nowhere near 17 to 1. Has the presence of so many cameras outside the RBS building egged this man on? Have we inadvertently (or even more worryingly advertently) created the news here?
The second point is that I do not recall seeing a rational, reasoned defence from a member of the banking community. Have they been given the opportunity to do so? Here all we have is the odious report of leering bankers waving money out of their windows at the march, followed by this desperate quote.
“I think if we had our way we would not necessarily dress down, we would rather carry on as normal.
“You feel a bit aggrieved having to change for the protesters, but the company asked us to dress down so we did.”
So said James Hughes of CMC markets. Almost everything about this quote is incendiary to the general public; the idea of carrying on as normal, the stroppy tone.
But why aren’t the banks waging their own PR war? Is it because they are too wary to trust the press at the moment? Or are we simply not giving them an outlet, worried that any humanising voice might puncture the devils in Saville Row suits image which is proving so popular?
I know, another journalist wrting about Twitter. There will be only one mention of Stephen Fry is post and you have just read it, if that helps.
This story on peerless comedy website Chortle offers an interesting commentary on the brilliance of Twitter and the reason why ultimately its brilliance may well be stifled.
My colleague Rachel Quigley wrote on her blog about the relative ease with which she contacted Rob Brydon on Twitter, and managed to persuade him to do an interveiw for our student arts’ supplement, an offer “his people” would almost certainly have sniggered off the line.
The kind of direct access Rachel enjoyed was fantastic, and Rob’s interview a great success. Likewise hearing Robert Webb rant against a reviewer in exactly the way he did last Friday was brilliantly refreshing, so rare has real, forthright opinion from people in the public eye become.
But how long before the insufferable PR minions of the rich and famous take over their Twitter accounts? It is already well established that many of the Facebook profiles of celebrities are actually the responsibility of some work experience underling at their PR company.
If Twitter goes the same way, then it will lose a huge part of its appeal. If it doesn’t, then it will strike the first real blow against the over-managed, overslick PR mechanisms which control our access with such precious,self-importance.
And if they do take a hit, then we might be able to start talking about a digital “revolution” less in hyperbole and more in hope.
Articles like this one make me excited about British journalism and confident for its future.
But it got me thinking (how Carrie Bradshaw have I become?)…
This week’s G20 summit and the accompanying demonstrations will pose an enormous challenge for journalists.
In the past, the prevailing prosperity pulled the rug from under would-be world-savers before they even waved their placards. When they were afforded column inches at all, journalists would at best patronise them, and at worse savage them.
But this year it’s different. For the first time idealism doesn’t seem so naive. Firstly because more and more people are struggling and in agreement with the principle that certain things need to change.
And second because the Obama election, showed the world that bitter, cynical resignation was no longer an acceptable position to cling to.
The British press on the whole jumped on the Obama bandwagon and rode it all the way to the White House, safe in the knowledge perhaps that though a fun diversion, a messianic politician wouldn’t last five minutes this side of the pond.
But this week ideas about hope and change are going to be articulated right here in our back garden.
How the media choose to cover it will be interesting to see. I said in my last post the press need to be careful against whipping up public frenzy. But by the same token derisory dismissal or (even worse) patronising head patting of the protesters does the public a disservice. We can’t have it all on our terms.
It’s easy to sit in front of a computer and tap out excoriating leader pieces calling for change, but it’s a damn sight more difficult to get out on the streets and do it for real.
The press has been goading politicians for months about letting down the country. If they now abandon those in the streets at the first hint of trouble, or passion, then they too should hang their heads in shame.
PS Cripes, this is all rather heavy. On a lighter note I heard the Babybird song You’re Gorgeous today which made me smile.
As reported yesterday, Sir Fred Goodwin’s Edinburgh house was attacked by a group called Bankers are Criminals. My first response, shamefully, was to grin. Like everyone caught up in the economic downturn, my feelings towards bankers and the odious city-boy culture have hardened over the past few months.
But on reflection, I cannot help but wonder if journalists need to ask themselves whether they might be to blame. Goodwin has come to personify the evils of boom and bust, and that smug photo of him on the phone has been splashed across papers, TV and webistes for weeks. All of society’s frustration, anger, and sense of injustice have been poured into one figure and Goodwin has taken on all the attributes of a pantomime villain, except the confidence on our part that ultimately he will meet his comeuppance.
I wonder how much we have let the particularly precarious position of our own industry feed our Fred-frenzy? This week’s attack may prove that the anger we have stirred up is now out of control. Shame on any journalist who now piously condemns Bankers for Criminals (shame too on opposition politicians). Between us we have goaded the public to the point where an act like this became inevitable.
Study most revolutions and you will find journalists whipping up public anger to the point of no return. I am not saying we are heading for a revolution. But we must acknowledge we are playing with fire, and Sir Fred’s Mercedes may not be the most serious casualty.
There is an exchange in Men in Black where Will Smith’s character asks Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) why alien presence on Earth must be concealed:
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
It sums up perfectly the debate that appears to underpin Dr Andy Williams’s lecture last week about user generated content (UGC) and the future of journalism. There seems to be a fundamental disagreement between the cheerleaders of participatory journalism, who like Edwards believe that the people are ready for the revelation, and traditionalists, who like K feel that people need to be protected from themsleves.
Dr Williams said that many media professionals recoil at the term “citizen journalist”. Little wonder, considering the connotations of the word “citizen”. For centuries it has been a byword of revolution and its emergence in this context illustrates the ferocity of the passions that are aroused by this debate.
Those on both sides of the fence are trapped in this idea of an old order versus a brave new world, and an imminent apocalyptic clash between the two.
UGC cheerleader-in-chief Dan Gillmor called his book We the Media playing on the famous opening of the US constitution, “We the People…”.His first chapter, “From Thomas Paine to blogs and beyond,” draws an explicit line from the virulently anti establishment pamphleteer Paine to today’s bloggers.
Gilmoor is influenced by the startlingly revolutionary Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) which set out the ways in which the internet would change the world. Firstly there is the title, after Marx, and the organisation of the piece into “theses” ( the form in which Martin Luther presented the formative ideas of Protestantism.) The language swings from pithy to pretensious, mystic to moronic, best illustrated in theses 7 and 95.(Technology journalist John C Dvorak ridiculed “the cult of the Cluetrain” here )
While the rhetoric continues to rant and rave, big media organisations are going to prioritise showing their committment to USG over finding innovative, meaningful ways in which old and new might be assimilated. Rupert Murdoch’s lip service to new media is all very well but attitudes to grass roots journalism can be as patronising as the voiceover in this excellent spoof:
Collaboration between the established and the emerging media is crucial. We heard today how moderation (in the technological sense) may hold the key to successful assimilation. Moderation of the debate may be even more important. “Let’s have this conversation, for everyone’s sake,” pleads Gillmor. The world isn’t going to wait for us.
As Agent K points out,”Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”
In 2007 I had a disconcerting number of conversations about bestiality. Like many others I was fascinated by the story of the Sudanese man forced to “marry” a goat after being caught in flagrante by the goat’s owner.
For weeks the story stayed resolutely in the BBC’s most read section, it was emailed to me by friends and acquaintances across the globe (get me) and hours of pub time were devoted to Charles Tombe and whether forced marriage to the animal in question was a punishment likely to put off other would-be animal lovers.
Matthew Yeomans talked in last week’s lecture about social media and the power of the internet to propel a story way beyond its usual audience. He mentioned Greenpeace as a prime example of an organisation that used all the technological tools at its disposal (YouTube,blogs) to spread their message to as wide a readership as possible, to “punch above their weight”.
The Tombe story is another illustration of the magnifying power of the web. Could Charles Tombe ever have conceived that millions of people round the world would hear about his humiliation? That office workers would read it over lunch, school boys would send it round on Facebook and that long after the event blogs like this one would flag it up once more to the uninitiated?
Perhaps if he’d known, old Charles would have gritted his teeth and hurried home for a cold shower.
This Telegraph piece, one of a number of follow-ups in the national press, gives a good account of how the story snowballed. But the most interesting revelation it contains is that this story was never actually put on the Juba Post website.
The BBC were as shocked by the story’s staying-power as anybody according to this blog. Matthew Yeomans talked about the half life of the internet and this story broke into the public consciousness over a year after it was first on the BBC.
So how did this go from a small piece in the print edition of a Sudanese paper to my friends and I guffawing in a pub in the suburban West Midlands? The BBC got the ball rolling but from then on it was all about networks, people passing this story onto people. The big media organisations could only jump on the bandwagon as and when there was a space.
These are the new rules.
We talk about media and trust but it is a world away from the kind of real trust we have for our friends and family. If one of my friends links to a story on Facebook, or Twitter, I am almost certain to read it.
It’s easy to ridicule Sarah Palin (no really, have a go!) but the scorn poured on her over her failure to name a paper she reads is misplaced. So she doesn’t sit down with a copy of the New York Times every morning? Fewer and fewer people do.
That paper wrote an excellent piece last week that Matthew Yeomans quoted from. The article cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt warning that the Web would become a “cesspool of useless information” unless the big, trusted brands survived.
“People are willing to settle for content of generally less value that is free of charge.”
This challenge for us as journalists is to reverse this trend, to make sure our work is better than that of the untrained, unchecked and unbalanced (sometimes in both senses of the word) blogger. Let others worry about advertising revenue, all we can do is ensure that we are writing is something that others will want, and need, to read.
So lets’s step up and take the bull by the horns. (No Charles, it’s a metaphor).
I love Birmingham and spend an inordinate amount of my time defending its reputation. It is friendlier than London, less self-consciously cool than Manchester and more diverse than Cardiff. It is the city that gave the world the Balti and Black Sabbath, Cat Deeley and custard powder, Jasper Carrot and Jamelia.
And I will put it on record I ruddy love the Brummie accent, even though one surveyclaims a person with a Brummie accent seems less intelligent than someone who just stays quiet.
Therefore I was disappointed with the predictable unleashing of Brummie-ism over your now infamous drunken YouTube rant. The fact you are a Brummie seemed to add an extra layer of sneering to the fallout and so I tried to defend you as much as possible this week.
”I am a bit of an idiot,” you slur at one point. True enough, but you’re our idiot Smithy.
But of all the ways in which you let himself down, one line sticks out above all others. When the mysterious Dutch interviewer asks if what you’re writing is going online, you snarl back, “It’s going in print. I’m a proper news journalist.”
Oh Smithy.
We have heard about these dinosaurs who still cling onto the idea the world is flat and that the prominence of print journalism over online remains unquestionable. But like UFOs or James Blunt fans, I am not sure that I ever thought they existed.
Adam Tinworth, Head of Blogging at RBI, gave a lecture this week on the role of blogs in the brave new media world. He is at the vanguard of the changes, and outlined how blogs are key for media organisations hoping to connect with this overwhelming, ever-evolving “distributed space” of which you are so disdainful.
He told us that choosing the most appropriate medium to present our stories is crucial to maintaining the bond with our audiences which we are so desperate to cling onto. If Samuel Pepys were alive today, surely even he would embrace the blogosphere. It would look something like this.
Blogs are the future Smithy. Earlier this year the Observer published a list of the top 50 most powerful blogs and it makes fascinating reading. As a “proper news journalist” you will undoubtedly be struck by the presence of five celebrity gossip blogs in the list.
But eight of the sites are political, like Talking Points Memo which specialises in investigative reporting that the big papers, lacking funds, inclination, or both, no longer undertake. Last year a report published on the site about the White House firing several attorneys unsympathetic to the Bush agenda led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The blog’s creator, Joshua Micah Marshall, received the prestigious George Polk journalism award for the piece, the first time ever the prize had gone to a blogger.
How’s that for proper news?
Or what about Beppe Grillo, the Italian comedian and commentator railing against corruption in a state where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls much of the mass media?
Is he less of a journalistic force than you Smithy, slumped on the pavement, cutting and pasting BBC reports?
Adam Tinworth said for the first time this year online revenue overtook print revenue at RBI. It is a watershed and one that may well be replicated across the industry over the coming years. Blogging is an essential way for the 21st Century journalist to connect with his readers, which is what journalism has always been about.
Although the methods of reaching out to readers are changing, the need to do so does not. The fundamental rules of journalism remain the same. Like the one about how hacks should be able to hold their drink…
I love the film Braveheart. It may be sentimental. It may be historically inaccurate. And with its misty lochs and forlorn bagpipes it may fetishize Scottish nationalism to the point of the absurd. But it is a rip-roarer of a film complete with plucky Celts, a sexy French princess, and in Longshanks a cartoon English baddie who steals every scene he is in.
But back to the film. This is Longshanks’s best line by a mile…
In the debate on the digital revolution, it sums up an attitude that I have come across time and time again, and it maybe articulated like this: The problem with the internet, is that it’s full of people. (If it helps picture me saying this with long white hair and wearing chain mail).
We can look at network maps and debate relevancy alogorithms but strip it all away and you’re left with people.
In today’s lecture, Antony Mayfield, Head of Content and Media at iCrossing UK, put people firmly back in the picture. He pointed out that Google’s seemingly unassailable hegemony can be explained largely by their insistence on putting the user first. Relevancy of results is king in Googleland and therefore we all remain loyal subjects.
Like Jessica Elgot and Jemima Kiss, I too have become a convert to the iconoclastic teachings of Michael Rosenblum and was lucky to see his lecture, nay sermon, at the Society of Editors Conference this week.
Leaving the stage to stalk the conference floor, Rosenblum extolled the virtues of video journalism, but the implications of his tour de force went much further. It is no longer possible to cling onto ideas of how we as journalists think things should be done. Our users will from now on tell us how they want things done and it is up to us to fall in line.
Mr Rosenblum tore into the idea that necessity is the mother of invention, asking whether anyone in the mid 1990s sat around in newsrooms saying, “Shit, we really need an Internet. I wish someone would invent that. Cos when the internet came along let’s be honest, you all went, ‘Fuck get that thing out of here.’ “
But Rosenblum and Antony Mayfield both believe in creative disruption, and see the seemingly cataclysmic upheavals bought about by the internet as a great thing for journalism, not least because it refocuses our industry on people, their wants, their needs and their ideas.
It struck me during today’s talk that though we tend to toss around technical terms when discussing journalism and the internet, the key values we come back to are intrinsically human. Today Antony Mayfield talked about etiquette, reputation and attention-seeking. In previous weeks we have talked about trust, storytelling and connecting with people.
Let us not lose sight of this. As Antony Mayfield concluded:
“Don’t be distracted by technology. Find and follow people.”
Without people, the internet is nothing. And like William Wallace and his army, kilts raised, genitals a-wagging, the people have laid down the challenge.
We can ridicule their blogs. But we can never take their freedom.
Every episode of Alan Partridge is brilliant but this may just be the best scene in the whole series. Desperate to impress the visiting Irish TV executives, our hero launches the most incompetent, patronising charm offensive ever seen, culminating in the wonderful section where he lists things people associate with Ireland (horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons etc).
During today’s excellent lecture by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, it struck me that when we the media establish, manage and discuss online communities there is a danger we, like Partridge, struggle to think outside our prejudices and preconceptions.
What do people really want from us?
Shane Richmond told us that the values treasured by journalists and the values users expect in online media sites are very different. He hammered home the reality that in a media landscape where the very concept of brand loyalty has been fractured and users can pick their news à la carte on an article by article basis, reassessing readers and reflecting their wants is paramount.
Part of the new role of media organisations is to facilitate the workings of online communities, which the My Telegraph site is very good at, currently hosting 30,000 bloggers. The Telegraph cottoned on quickly that most of their bloggers did not want to “be bloggers” as such when they signed up, they really just wanted to talk to other Telegraph readers.
Once again when we strip away grandiose theories about people embracing the power to publish, we are left with something much more simple.
If you were to go into any pub in the country and wander around listening to people’s conversations, you’d probably be barred. But as you were manhandled out the door, you would marvel at the range of topics that get people talking. It’s the same on the Internet.
A random look at MyTelegraph today brought up links to posts with the following titles; “Towards a typology of delinquent public service employees”, “What is your favourite recipe?” and “Will Muslims go to Heaven?”.
None of these topics would have been covered in today’s papers and yet at one point this afternoon they were three of the most read postings. The point, as Mr Richmond explained, is things that might seem unimportant, un-newsworthy or uninteresting to a hard-nosed hack have engaged thousands of people.
This 2007 article written by American digital technology professor Rich Gordon urges newspapers to think of their websites as networks rather than destinations.
Add all these network-building ideas together and I think a news site can increase its site traffic significantly — attracting new audiences, making current users come back more frequently, and increasing the time spent and pages viewed per visit.
The same ideas underpin big organisations like the Telegraph managing online communities. It struck me as telling that although Telegraph readers inundate Shane and his team with complaints about the website, they still come back again and again.
Readers’ expectations are clearly changing. Next time we reel off what we think people want from newspaper websites, we would be wise to stop and think. To paraphrase Partridge, “Der’s more to the website, dan dis.”
In this week’s lecture Rick Waghorn, founder ofMyFootballWriter mapped out the future of journalism as he sees it – for journalists to flourish in the digital age they must develop individual brands.
There is nothing new in this idea. AA Gill, Charlie Brooker, Henry Winter and (mind-bogglingly) Jeremy Clarkson have all built up large, loyal followings and as a result they have developed powerful media brands. Previously this was the preserve of a rarefied group of star names, now even journalist students like myself are being urged to think about our brands.
Why? Because the internet has changed all the rules, making individual’s brands easier to establish, maintain and measure.
This fantastic article from the New York Observer points out that once it took decades for a brilliant journalist like Tom Wolfeto become a brand.
“That was before anyone with a blog and a Flickr account could burrow into a writerly niche and, if all went according to plan, come out burnished by the soft glow of Internet fame. The days when a writer actually had to have a body of significant work in print to be famous are over. Now, a sort of equivalency gets established between Tom Wolfe and … Perez Hilton?”
And this is where I start to get a bit nervous. As much I as I can admire perezhilton.com as an exercise in gossip-mongering, I baulk at the suggestion that he stands toe to toe with an epoch-defining journalist like Wolfe.
This is the problem I have with journalists as brands – it threatens to make self-publicity more important than journalistic ability.
Think I’m being paranoid? This 1997 article, one of the first to spell out the philosophy of self-branding, is explicit: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.”
The whole piece is toe-curlingly excruciating, using the kind of motivational psycho-bullshit that even David Brent might draw the line at.
For example:
“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to the seismic scale of the changes our industry is currently going through and in the current climate I am more than willing to do whatever I can to sell myself to employers.
But let’s not lose sight of the values that underpin journalism and avoid the irreversible drift to becoming just another business.
So what if the newsroom of the future isn’t a room at all but an open network of journalists who succeed or fail by the value of what they do and their reputations and credibility?
What a grim future that would be. In an industry where fierce competition and egoistical point-scoring render ridiculous the idea of teamwork in a newsroom, do we really need to go even further and reduce newspapers to a disparate collection of individual journalists, working by themselves and for themselves?
Besides, I feel this whole idea of journalists as brands has been overstretched. Mr Waghorn cited Robert Peston as being a bigger brand than the BBC during periods of the credit crunch, but one of my colleagues pointed out that without the BBC branding behind him would Peston have been able to gather anywhere near the same number of leads?
A savvy New York Times journalist is quoted in the New York Observer article cited above as saying:
“When people are kissing me on both cheeks, one of those cheeks says New York Times.”
So let’s not get too wrapped up in this idea of us as brands. At its most innocent it may be distracting, at its worst it could be poisonous.
The challenge for the media organisations is to make sure their recruitment processes are able to recognise and reward talent above all. The challenge for us as trainee journalists is to ensure that we develop that talent.
I was dreading BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones’s visit to Cardiff University last week. I know we have heard over this series of lectures that the online revolution is not going to render everything which has gone before it obsolete, sweeping away old journalistic values and practices in a tidal wave of new technology. Hell I have even written blogs saying as much.
But Rory Cellan-Jones, I feared, might think differently. He is one of the high priests of online journalism, mightn’t he demand an end to all the old ways and demand in fire and brimstone terms we convert or be damned?
In my head I was actually imagining a situation like this.
Red/blue pill time, the starkest of choices, wake in my bed believing whatever I want to believe or stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?
Thankfully there was no such decision to be made. Quite aside from the fact that Mr Cellan-Jones was not an insufferable poser, wearing sun glasses indoors and waffling on in empty pseudo-intellectual platitudes, he made it clear that much of what is currently important to journalists will continue to be so.
He talked about, “the old endurance skills..many of which are still relevant to this day.”
He insisted that those in editorial positions should not be swayed by “Most Read” sections on websites and should retain a sense of pride in their own editorial judgments.
The biggest thing I took away from his talk was the vital need not to throw the journalistic baby out with the old-technology bathwater.
It seems he is not the only one keen to get this message across. On the same day he was addressing us in Cardiff, the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) was beginning a two day conference in Manchester, the centrepiece of which was to reveal the findings of a major survey into how journalism training should evolve to meet the needs of the multimedia newsroom.
The survey found overwhelmingly that the skills most concerning employers were traditional. They included the ability to find one’s own stories, use of language, writing, media law and newsgathering.
Perhaps most startling of all was the employers’s insistence that shorthand should remain a key part of journalistic training. This article on holdthe frontpage.co.uk highlights this particular issue but more generally the tone of the piece reflects the continuing obsession with traditional skills, summed up by Manchester Evening News editor Paul Horrocks:
Things that can be given away may be less time on modern processes such as video journalism. We can teach that.
Similar sentiments are expressed by Colin McKinnon, learning and development manager for editorial at The Age newspaper in Australia, quoted in this Press Gazette piece:
McKinnon warned against getting too “hung up” on technology and forgetting the basics of journalism, such as fact-checking, fairness and balance.
Of course it could be argued these news editors and training managers are hopelessly out of touch, clinging onto the past with the same misguided zeal with which people tried to pack suitcases as the Titanic went down.
Look at the title of the Press Gazette piece, “Decade of hell”, or this Economist piece “Who killed the newspaper?”
With its tales of young Brits turning away from newspapers and investment banks attacking even the most revered papers for their tumbling share prices it makes pretty gloomy reading.
But back we turn to Mr Cellan-Jones and in fact the recurring lesson I have learnt from this series of online journalism lectures over the last few weeks.
Yes things are changing. But if we forget who we are, what we do best and why we do what we do, then we might as well start waving the white flag right now.
Oh God that sounded like something Morpheus would say..
Like many students Poppy needed a part-time job to pay her way through university. Unlike many students, her job involved dancing naked in front of strangers for money.
“The most difficult part is flirting with people who make your skin crawl. But if someone comes into a shop and you don’t like them, you still have to serve them and be nice to them. It’s just like any other job in that way,” says Poppy, 21.
This idea of normality comes up time and time again. When asked why, unlike other dancers, she didn’t switch between clubs she says: “I had my own locker and my own spot in the dressing room. I felt comfortable there.
“Everyone thinks of stripping and thinks of drugs and prostitution and while it does go on it’s not something the majority of dancers have anything to do with.”
Poppy (not her real name) never thought she would work as a lap dancer. She describes herself as “a nice middle-class public school girl” and moved to Cardiff from Ireland during her gap year to find work. She went for a bar job at strip club For Your Eyes Onlybut crossed wires meant they thought she was applying to be a dancer.
Talking with the managers, and especially with the other girls working there, she came round to the idea that this was something she could do. The clincher was the money on offer. Working three to four nights a week, dancing topless on the pole and doing nude private dances, Poppy would take home between £400 and £600. If there was a big rugby international at the Millennium Stadium, she could take home double that in a single night (although even strip clubs are not immune to the credit crunch)
Poppy is not atypical in combining studies with stripping. Jamie Willison, general manager of the Fantasy Lounge on St Mary Street, has eight full-time students among the 40 dancers on his books. If you include further education of any sort, that figure rises to 20.
Of course there are downsides. Poppy wants her real name withheld as she hasn’t told her family about it.
“Three or four of my friends cut contact with me when I started doing it. They thought it was disgusting and told me as much. One girl I’d been friends with for seven years hasn’t spoken to me since, she’s appalled by it.”
Several people have accused her of letting down her gender, a charge she articulately rebuts.
“I identify myself as post-feminist. I am all for empowered women but I am for using your sexuality to empower you.
“Besides,” she laughs, “There are many feminists out there who would find it hard not to be swayed by that much money.”
Hear Poppy’s story...
Then there’s the preparation. “It’s an ordeal to get ready. If you’re paying £30 you don’t want a girl with stubbly legs.”
Club owners are quick to point out if a girl has put on weight, or needs to wear more make-up. “The girls understand it’s a glamour industry,” says Mr Willison.
It’s clear that the hair, the make-up and, paradoxically, even the skimpy dresses place a barrier between dancers and clients. It’s not Poppy dancing, it’s a stylised, doll-like part she played for the evening. “It’s pure fantasy,” she says.
Mr Willison agrees. “The girls are very far removed from it. It might be about sex for the punters but it’s not about sex for the girls. It’s about money.”
The extent to which lap dancing clubs are about sex was discussed last month in Whitehall at a surreal hearing of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. A current overhaul of the licensing laws proposes to upgrade lap dancing clubs to “Sex Encounter Establishments.”
Councillor Ed Bridges, Chair of Cardiff Council’s Licensing Committee, says he would welcome the change if it meant people had more of a say about what went on in their communities.
“We wouldn’t necessarily agree with the moral arguments put forward by those passionate proponents of the change,” he says.
When councillors leave morality aside in this way, then arguably formerly unacceptable activities are losing their stigma. These twoarticles reflect the tensions caused by this process of social evolution.
She says: “It’s important to differentiate our members from sex workers. Our girls see themselves as entertainers. And the idea of sex encounters is anathema to most club owners. It’s not what they see going on in their clubs.”
Poppy agrees. Since breaking her foot a few months ago she has stopped working as a stripper but she is adamant she never had a great moral dilemma about it. If anyone overstepped the mark security were always swift to kick them out.
“I think a stripper provides a good service, the same as a taxi driver, a doctor or a fireman. They fill your needs, you pay them and everyone’s happy.”
She wouldn’t consider what she did as sex encounters. “I wouldn’t want anyone touching me, no amount of money is worth that. It’s the difference between selling your body and selling your soul. That’s quite poetic!”
It is not the most startlingly original theory to suggest Max Clifford might not be a good thing for journalism.
But there was an excellent debate on today’s PM show about Mr Clifford’s role in representing the first British swine flu victims (note to the World Health Organisation – we will never give up this name in favour of H1N1a. Never!)
The thrust of the argument was that whereas Max Clifford’s usual clients are concerned with stories which interest the public, this is without doubt a story of real public interest (a distinction anyone who has ever been in a journalistic ethics lecture is all too familar with).
So the argument ran, he had no business getting involved and the Askhams’ story must be available to everyone, immediately.
The thing which struck me about the debate was that Max Clifford accepted the public interest/interest to the public dichotomy – and still maintained he should get involved.
This could potentially be very problematic for the industry. We have accepted kiss and tell hussies and Big Brother “stars” using men like Mr Clifford to maximise their shelf-life and prolong their media stay.
But if that now becomes the rule rather than the exception, if everybody caught up in current affairs now turns straight away to a PR manager, then our work is really going to be cut out.
We have got used to celebrities and business people holing up behind press officers and spkespeople and we have becoem accustomed to playing their (often) tiresome game.
But if we cannot even get access to ordinary members of the public then the game starts to become impossible.
But why might this be happening? Journalism students are also used to lectures about our abominable trust rating as a profession. Perhaps this is far more damaging than we previously realised.
