Are you going to stand up?: The NUJ’s - Stand Up for Journalism Day
Did you know that Monday November 5 is Stand Up for Journalism Day, the National Union of Journalists day of action against the “savage cuts” that are “hampering their ability to keep the public informed”.
Rhetoric aside, it certainly has not been a good month/year for news gatherers with a number of job cuts across the UK. The NUJ campaign website certainly paints a bleak picture of their profession in which:
“Journalists are reduced to a cross between call-centre workers and data processors. Stuck at their desks re-jigging press releases”.
What role(s) if any have the new media played in this state of affairs?
I ask this rather tendentious question because a recent article by Donnacha DeLong published in the National Union of Journalists has rekindled a long-running debate inside and outside the profession about the relationships between Internet authors and traditional news journalists. In this latest round, DeLong argues in an article called ‘web2.0 is rubbish‘ that problem with bloggers is that they are seen as “replacing traditional media”. DeLong argues that this is a bad thing because “professional media provide users with something that we need to fight to retain – truly authoritative content”. He then goes on to note that those who “argue that Web 2.0 is the future want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” In his way, therefore, DeLong provides another example of the ‘cult of the amateur’ argument presented by Andrew Keen (book review here) in which user-generated content is seen as ‘bad’ because it undermines professional output.
Do we really accept this argument?
This negative view of bloggers has not gone unchallenged within the profession. Roy Greenslade, for example, has announced (in his Guardian branded blog) that he is saying farewell to the NUJ. He notes that he still believes that “journalistic skills are essential” but he then goes on to argue that “the so-called profession of journalism has to adapt to vastly changed circumstances. In effect, every citizen is now a journalist”.
Members of the blogging community have also got in on the action. Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson writing at Strange Attractor note that this construction of a conflict between journalism and web2.0 is rather simplistic. They draw attention to “the journalistic benefits of Web 2.0 are not just about reader-facing stuff. Tools such as RSS, Google Alerts and social bookmarking help journalists efficiently gather and organise lots of sources of information when doing research”. However, Charman and Anderson also question the assumption that new media is being used as a management tool to replace journalists. They contend that
“Neither of us can think of any traditional news organisation with a strategy - stated or otherwise - of replacing all their journalists with content sourced from the internet and/or their readers”.
Charman and Anderson also take exception to claims made for the importance of journalists noting “setting up journalists, collectively, as some sort of bastion of democracy and truth is rather an exaggeration”.
Now the issue of ‘truthfulness’ is always a tricky one for professional journalists, mainly because it is inevitable that someone, somewhere will be perpetrating a deplorable con whilst using press credentials. For example, we have the case of the photo-shopped war image from the Lebanon. However, is this extreme case a fair characterisation of contemporary journalism across the globe? What about the work of Anna Politkovskaya for example?
I am not sure that an approach that singles out individuals is productive. Indeed, I think it is more worthwhile to look at the systematic aspects of the situation and to consider the claim made that many journalists are being reduced by economics to ‘re-jigging’ press releases. It is certainly a pet bug-bear of mine that corporate material is accepted and disseminated unquestioned as ‘research’. For example, I recently read on a Reuters feed that facebook could be costing employers billions of dollars in lost productivity. However, I was subsequently made aware that this research was based on a press release from a company that stood to benefit from the story being accepted (and so not really a terribly credible source).
I think it is fair to say that this was not a very ‘good’ story. However, it is also fair to say that the expertise and analysis needed to make this a good story would take time, experience and money. Would it not make more sense to construct a model of the public sphere where professionals draw on the expertise of fellow professionals and other contributors who are knowledgeable about their own areas of expertise? I am really looking forward to the day when the discussion is no longer constructed as a ‘journalists vs bloggers’ debate. However, I can’t help feeling that it is going to take take money, real money to make this vision come true.
Furthermore, I can’t help wondering whether it is ‘stated policy’ or ‘economics’ that is driving the changes witnessed in the news sector? Writing on the BBC website David Reid, for example argued that “the internet is hitting papers where it hurts, in their pockets”. Traditional regional print newspapers are struggling with reduced classified and personal advertising revenue (see ‘On the Internet, A Tangled Web Of Classified Ads’) which is shifting to sites such as www.craigslist.org. Similarly, other traditional media enterprises are feeling the effect of shifts in the emphasis in advertising budgets towards online outlets such as Google Adsense (click here some a summary of some changes in the US). Even public service broadcasters, such as the BBC, are subject to job cuts due to reduced funding. The cumulative effect of the great embrace of the Internet has had many and wide sweeping ramifications for media organizations across the globe. The cumulative effect of these changes has highlighted a number of weaknesses in our current systems of government.
For example, I would also take issue with the idea put forward by Roy Greenslade that every citizen is now a journalist, mainly because I don’t think there is such an entity as ‘a journalist’. I work with experienced political journalists and I am painfully aware that I have different skills (and a different CV) from them. This is not to say that I don’t believe that I have a role to play in the public sphere, I am after all an advocate of academic blogging. The work that Jason and his colleagues are doing in Australia at the moment certainly presents an interesting challenge to the status quo. However, I am also aware that I, like many others, rely on those who have time, money and access to the corridors of power (be they journalists, bloggers or academic) to provide analysis of issues that are critical to the public sphere. The ‘corridor’ metaphor is, of course, an interesting one as it suggests that democratic societies need to think anew about architectures of power as well as architectures of participation if they are to do away with professional political commentators.
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I guess the obvious interest in this story for the nmrg comes from what role (if any) that the various cultural activities associated with the new media are playing in this state of affairs. However, I am also acutely aware that at University of Beds we are training the next generation of journalists and we need them to be aware of some of the issue that they might face when they begin to engage in their chosen career paths. Furthermore, I am also aware that there are uncomfortable parallels between the journalists and academic researchers. What is the future for the professional journalist? Will professional academics go the same way? Are citizen bloggers enough to maintain the public sphere?
I welcome your thoughts!
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November 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I just wanted to say thank you for a very considered and obviously well thought out piece. Obviously, my views are known (and will be expanded on when the NUJ’s Multimedia Commission issues the full report).
November 5th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I think there are two issues I’d like to respond to (well, there are more, but I don’t want this comment to get too long!). Firstly the discussion about quality is one that frustrates me no end, as frequently we see the best of journalism being compared to the worst of blogging, when in fact, quality in both journalism and blogging is a continuum, from fabulous all the way down to utter rubbish. Quality is not dependent on medium - there’s a lot of rubbish TV and radio as well as in print and online. But what frustrates me is when people take an abstracted view of the ideals of journalism and present that as representative of journalism as a whole, then compare it with incorrect assumptions about the quality of blogging.
Yet however much we point this discrepancy out, there are journalists out there who continue to portray bloggers as some sort of unwashed mass with no expertise to call their own. Anyone who has spent any real time reading blogs knows that this simply isn’t true.
I think this behaviour is a reflection of the low status that online has in the journalistic world. It’s as if the words that you crafted on your computer became less valid, just because they never made it off the computer. This attitude, that online is substandard, has to change both because it’s incorrect, and also because the move towards online is inevitable and it deserve to be treated as a valid medium just as those who work in online deserve to be respected based on the quality of their work, not the newness of their medium.
The other thing to remember is that the decline in newspaper sales predates the internet, and certainly predates Web 2.0. As Steve Yelvington points out, the General Social Survey documents a decline in newspaper readership starting around 1970. That predates the Internet by more than a few years, and means that the problems being faced are neither new, nor is the Internet, whether in the form of Craigslist or Web 2.0, entirely to blame, meaning that we have to think much more broadly about how we rescue the industry from its decline. I happen to think that the net and Web 2.0 is a part of that rescue package, but we need to be thinking much more clearly about what the problem are, and need to be willing to experiment and take risks with new technologies.
November 9th, 2007 at 1:46 am
Suw, you’re missing the point again. The Internet/Web 2.0 isn’t what I was pointing to as the threat, but rather how some, including media owners and others, regard it as replacing traditional journalism. So, you’ve got Trinity Mirror sacking journalists en masse and then starting websites followed by newspapers full of “citizen journalism” contributions. You’ve got Gannet in the US replacing reporters with “crowdsourcing”. You’ve got OFCOM talking about the “community” feeding content into their PSP at the same time as signing off on ITV slashing their regional coverage and the BBC talking about cuts.
The web challenges the mainstream media, yet rather than meeting the challenge, much of the proprietors of mainstream media have given in to the challenge. Rather than upping their game, they’ve either decided that “the community” can do their own news or have cut capacity so badly that journalists can do little more than rejig press releases and produce video that’s no better than the average Youtube entry. And what does that mean in real terms? No-one covers council meetings or health board meetings, the boring stuff no “citizen journalist” wants to do. And democracy suffers as a result.
Far too many in this debate have seen the cuts in the media as inevitable and as being completely separate from the “brave new world” media companies are heading into. There’s nothing brave or new about asset stripping for ever-increasing profits until the media is squeezed dry and no amount of user-generated content will make up for the thousands of journalists who’ve lost their jobs over the last couple of years from local newspapers across the UK to AOL.
I’ll end with quoting a bit from my article that most critics have seen fit to ignore while they compare me to Andrew Keen:
“The Internet has always contained the potential to change the media. The ability to challenge authority, to provide an alternative narrative and to present a variety of points of view is what the Internet provides.”
November 10th, 2007 at 11:45 am
This is a very interesting debate and I’d like to add some thoughts bsed on my own research. My PhD thesis examined the way information was transformed across a series of stages (Reporting, Reviewing, Attraction, Preparation and Dissemination) from the first formulated account of a phenomenon to public dissemination in the press. I focussed on print journalism and the way the national newspapers reported stories on BSE. What I found suggests that most journalists enter the chain of dissemination at the stage of attraction - when sources make it known, one way or another, that they have ‘a story’.
For me, this whole debate about the nature of journalism and the role of the journalist can be encapsulated in the debate between Jonh Dewey and Walter Lippman in the 1920s. In a nutshell, Lippman believed in ‘organised intelligence’ because no one could go and retrieve all the information they wanted or even know of its existence, so a layer of people to help organise that information were needed - press/pr people like Lippman himself, of course. Dewey, on the other hand believed that people just needed to be educated to retrieve information (hence the Dewey decimal system). I don’t think journalism is dead nor that journalists are excess to requirements. But I DO think they (and journalism in general) need a big kick up the backside. By reporting what sources want them to report they do a disservice to the public. If the ‘threat’ of the citizen journalist makes them think more deeply about the ‘news production process’ and their role in it, then I say this debate is CRUCIAL.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Hi Sam,
There are an awful lot of journalists who agree with you, myself included. Unfortunately, all the cuts going on in the media are leading to an ever-worsening decline in quality that has journalists themselves up in arms (that’s what the Stand Up for Journalism day last Monday was all about). You might be interested in this even next Saturday if you’re in London - http://mwaw.net/conference/ (The First Casualty - war, truth and the media today).
November 12th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Dear Sam,
I was really interested in your Reporting, Reviewing, Attraction, Preparation and Dissemination model. I was wondering whether you did any work on blogging using this model. I ask this question because I think it might be a useful way to think about the way in which the story passes around the public sphere. It is my impression that many technological blog postings are actually comment/analysis rather than pure reporting (if I understand the model correctly). However, it would be good to do some research in support of that impression. It might also be fun to develop some tools to studying the time-based element of this model because in some cases the process can occur very quickly.
regards
G
PS - Is your PhD available online? May I have a link please
November 12th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Dear Donnacha,
I wonder whether looking at web services other than blogging might helpful in developing our thoughts on the value of web 2.0.
For example, I think you set an interesting challenge when you note that “no-one covers council meetings or health board meetings, the boring stuff no citizen journalist wants to do” as I have three tiers of local government in my area (town, district and county) which present a considerable obstacle when trying to figure out what is going on. To be honest, I don’t think the local news desks stand a chance of covering all the details with the resources they currently have at their disposal.
However, it is possible that a dedicated group of co-ordinated volunteers working with an appropriate dataset provided by the councils themselves might be able to rise to some of this challenge. For example, you might be amused to learn that one of my favourite ’sources’ of political information is http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ because it provides me with a regular e-mail detailing the parliamentary activities of my local MP ( a gentleman who flies below the radar of the national press). I think, therefore, that it is possible to imagine a similar ‘open government’ service for county and district councils, based on official minutes taken at council meetings. [I wonder whether something of this sort is in beta somewhere as I write!]
However, despite my obvious enthusiasm for this kind of web service I also believe that providing data on voting habits etc. is only part of the issue, as investigation and analysis are also necessary (mainly because many of the processes of government do not happen in open forums). Similarly, I think that it is essential that there is a significant degree of social engagement with these kinds of services by the wider public for them to have any real effect on politics. This is where I expect that the well-informed bloggers and the professional journalists to play a role: focusing the debate and providing links to the relevant web-based data services.
I welcome your thoughts
Gavin
July 8th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
[…] sustained my interest mainly because of the response I received to my post about the NUJ’s ‘Stand-up for Journalist’ Day back in November […]