I have closed this blog. I am starting a new personal blog Jung@HeartUK at jungatheart.co.uk
My media education blog is still eJournUK at ejournalism.co.uk
Aug 272011
May 222011
Insightful piece by Peter Preston in The Observer
And this section sums up the reality:
…the basic dilemma, by chance, has been brilliantly encapsulated in a recent essay by Professor Geoffrey Stone, the distinguished editor of the Supreme Court Review in the US.”Just as the law can no longer effectively deal with obscenity because of social and technological change, so too can it no longer deal with non-newsworthy invasions of privacy,” he writes. “For all practical purposes”, the defences of privacy “have been gobbled up completely.” So, whether in Seattle or the Strand, we had “better learn to live with it”.
Apr 192011
Here in Australia I read that the LATs are on the rise. That’s to say “couples” who Live Apart Together.
I use the inverted commas because I’m not quite clear if it’s accurate to describe two people with this lifestyle as “a couple”.
Before I’m accused of following the Phillips-Hitchens road to reactionary perdition, I’d like to point out that, in UK at least, being “in a relationship” is not just a Facebook tag.
It can affect one’s state financial support, insurance arrangements and even property tax allowance.
If a woman calls herself “single” in a tough middle England council estate, she can be “grassed up” by an angry neighbour and spied on by the authorities to see if she’s sleeping with a “partner” (and thus potentially affecting her income entitlement).
If her sister is a professional living in a fashionable London borough and making a “lifestyle choice” she’ll probably find herself the subject of a case study in a glossy newspaper supplement.
The vocabulary used to describe relationships has always been loaded.
“Dating” has become a synonym for having sex. And we boomers taught our successors that having sex regularly with the same person does not necessarily mean one is in a relationship with them. Facebook provides the option: “It’s complicated.”
However, states throughout the world have not quite caught up with this reality: or they choose to ignore it when dishing out taxpayers’ dosh.
Societies and their journalists are also double-headed when reporting the subject. A LAT in the latte belt can regularly sleep with a partner, call herself “in a relationship” on FB yet be single for all fiscal purposes.
By contrast, a lager drinker in less salubrious circumstances might find hereself described as a “benefits cheat” in a national newspaper.
Societies and states need to think more laterally about how they pigeon-hole citizens’ lifestyles.
And journalists need to be more even-handed in their choice of nouns and adjectices when describing these arrangements.
Apr 152011
Maybe it’s because I’m half a planet away from its production base, but I’m seeing the News of the World in a different way: perhaps as a social agent and moral barometer as well as a commercial product whose internal workings currently vex the UK’s chattering and political classes.
My new perspective was triggered by developments in the paper’s “phonehacking” saga which emerged while I gave university seminars and a radio interview in Sydney, Australia. (Clarification: I was Chief Production Editor of the NoW, never Editor).
Some personal background: the NoW is my professional alma mater. It is an entity with which I have an emotional connection. It employed me as a 26-year-old journalist in 1977 and brought me to Fleet Street (the real one). One way or another, I remained involved with it for a further 28 years.
I joined it before most working-class families had acquired their perceived current cynicism for popular newspaper journalism.
My father was as a street trader whose only connection with journalism was the three Sunday newspapers I would fetch for him as a child: the NoW, People and Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror).
His sensible career advice to me was: “Get a job indoors, son.”
But whenever his South London extended family had a particularly knotty sports argument to settle (and pay out on), say: “What round did Sonny Liston refuse to come out for in his first fight with Cassius Clay?” they’d call the NoW sports desk to adjudicate.
My point is that what the journalist ruled was taken as true in that Eden-like, pre-Google age. My dad’s folk weren’t stupid, gullible or deferential..they simply felt they had cause to trust the man from the NoW (and it was always a man).
So when I phoned my dad to tell him I’d clinched my NoW job he was impressed by a career move of mine for the first and last time; if I’d told him I’d got a job on The Times, Telegraph or BBC, he wouldn’t have been.
During the few weeks I’ve been in Australia the NoW has continued to impress; it won a top award for Mazher Mahmood’s brilliant expose of the Pakistan cricket team’s cheats.
Sports betting again and, yes, it was a sting (whisper the word).
The Metropolitan Police also congratulated the NoW for bringing to book some appalling baby traffickers.
And the paper – still Britain’s biggest Sunday seller – also continued its 168-year-old tradition of less spectacular but socially useful invetigative journalism such as its exposure of a food-date changing scam.
It is true that the paper’s investigations are sometimes, but not always, criticised by my esteemed colleague at City University London, Professor Roy Greenslade.
But the bombshell came in 2007 when my friend and former NoW colleagues, Clive Goodman, was jailed for illegally incercepting phone messages. And now three more NoW journalists have been arrested.
News International published a grovelling apology effectively conceding that Clive was not a “rogue” exception as they had once claimed.
The saga had already led to the departure from Downing Street of the PM’s right-hand communications aide Andy Coulson (a former NoW editor) and now casts a shadow over News International’s CEO Rebekah Brooks (another former NoW editor) as News Corp seeks to recapture the whole of Sky amid a potentially fatal maze of commercial, political and diplomatic mirrors that would have given Bruce Lee a run for his money.
Society does not always condemn illegal practices by journalists; the Telegraph paid for a stolen CD and produced a brilliant series of scoops that altered the structure of MPs’ finances and led to criminal convictions (of MPs not journalists).
Citizens, quite rightly, applauded. Glasses were raised at Islington dinner tables..and in public bars throughout the land.
It is the outcomes of journalistic “dark arts” that UK society seems to question, not the arts themselves.
“Public interest” is apparently what counts with us, not the “interest of the public”.
Thank heavens there are politicians, lawyers, media owners and journalists confident enough to tell one from the other and decide what is in the interest of “ordinary folk” to read or watch.
Alas, I don’t share that moral certainty. And I admit it.
So, the News of the World: a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
Saint or sinner?
One thing’s for sure, if it wasn’t there the British “conversation” would be missing a crucial element.
And, sadly, there are not now many UK national newspapers I could comfortably say that about.
Mar 242011
Day2 what a lovely venue
Here’s the thing: fish don’t ride bicycles.
Printed newspapers and magazines exist by selecting and presenting a package of contents which they and their advertisers believe will attract customers.
Each product hands this menu of the day, week or month to its readers, confident that its editorial and commercial skills have constructed the right package for its consumers.
Cosmo woman? Guardian reader? Sun van man? We know what you really, really want…and here it is. That’s the claim of every editorial team.
It’s the bicycle model.
And, by and large, magazine readers are still on their bikes. Mags have always lived or died by identifying and serving a cultural niche. Every word and image in a successful magazine serves that purpose.
Every few years (or decades) the niche dwindles, the mag closes and another is born to feed a newly identified cultural sub-tribe.
Newspapers have never been quite so nuanced. News is news is news whether given a Daily Mail ‘spin’ or a Guardian one.
A report of the Japan earthquake, expert interpretation of it or insightful commentary about it cannot, in any commercially effective way, be ‘niched’ by an online newspaper.
Online news consumers are fish. They don’t ride bicycles.
They are their own news editors and they don’t need an editorial conference hundreds of miles away to select that day’s content for them.
A Leyton Orient fan need not navigate acres of Premiership minutiae to spot a word or two about her team.
Acres of printed newspaper content have always been left unread by the paying reader. I should know, I am one. Most of the words in my daily Guardian go unread after a cursory glance at the headlines. I read on only if I am interested in the subject or the author. And I am the archetypal leftish, professional Guardian reader.
Online, I and millions of other news consumers have our Daily Me: a selection of content from sections of newspapers (mediaguardian.co.uk), trusted bloggers (order-order.com) , twitterfeeds and other content preselected by me using RSS and Android phone apps.
I predict that this fish will never pay to ride a bicycle, however hard the New York Times or News International try to design one for me.
Feb 202011
I’m agnostic about the suggested change to the way in which the UK elects its MPs.
But I know that the result of May’s referendum on the Alternative Vote will not be determined by dispassionate evaluations of the political and statistical arguments.
As ever, the winner will be the story that resonates most effectively in the few days before the poll.
So I thought I’d look at the key messages being delivered on the Yes and No websites.
The No corner’s opening sentence is: “Our current tried and tested voting system gives everyone one vote and delivers clear outcomes.”
Er, like the current “clear outcome” of a governing coalition whose deputy prime minister is viewed by the apolitical as Mr U-Turn incarnate.
(Sure, I can hear No folk screaming back: “But AV makes this outcome even more likely!” They miss the point: a corollary is not a story.)
The No narrative is not helped by its sub-plot: its website accuses AV of being “complicated, expensive and unfair…a politician’s fix”.
“So, tell us something we don’t know,” replies Ms Floatingvoter. “We’ve been shown by MPs’ expenses and the coalition’s cartwheels that every political initiative is an unfair, complicated, expensive politician’s fix. That’s the status quo. You’re telling me to vote for the status quo by arguing that not to do so would usher in more of the same. Call me politically naïve, but that makes no sense.”
What does the Yes party have to say? When I looked at its story, I was surprised, and then impressed.
I was surprised because it wasn’t the story I’d expected; I thought its protagonists would firstly appeal to my ethical sense of fair play.
But no. Their story is: “AV will force MPs to work harder to earn – and keep – our support.”
It could be argued that a weakness of this narrative is that, to many readers (voters), it is not immediately obvious. But isn’t that often true of the very best stories?
The Yes crowd quickly and plausibly explains: “MPs need to secure a real majority of voters to be sure of winning, not just the 1 in 3 who can currently hand them power. They’ll need to work harder to get – and keep – their jobs.”
Mmm. Yep, that story rings true.
Even more so when it’s told by Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter as opposed to Paul Heaton (yep, the Paul Heaton).
“Seems a no-brainer to me,” thinks Ms Floatingvoter. “Can’t be bothered to read any more. Can I get on with finding a job and a home now?”
I moved house recently after living in my previous one for 30 years. So I had to give many individuals, businesses and institutions my new address in Lavenham, Suffolk.
But my overseas friends and contacts might reasonably ask: where is this Suffolk?
What’s the appropriate response: England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom, Europe..East Anglia?
The internet’s answer is very clear, and it’s none of the above; I live in UK (without full stops or a definite article).
And that’s fine by me. It doesn’t mean I live in a kingdom, united or otherwise; it’s simply a brand like UCL, GMB or BP and it no longer matters what those initials once stood for (unless you’re a US president trying to deflect national responsibility for an environmental catastrophe).
The domain suffix .co.uk is set in virtual stone: it ain’t going to change any time soon. So we’d better learn to love it.
Personal geography is important; it’s part of our psychological story, part of the persona we present to the world.and to ourselves.
“Where are you from?” is usually the first conversational icebreaker at any social gathering.
If a stranger asks me where I’m from, I reply London, more specifically South London; yet for over 30 years my main postal address has been in another UK region, one of which I’m very fond and where I raised my family.
But I’m very definitely a Londoner: not an East Anglian, not an Englishman, not a Briton.
However, if asked to provide a personal geographical adjective, I’d say British and, depending on the social context, European; I’m uncomfortable saying English (I’m not quite sure why).
Another person born in London but living in Suffolk might give different answers; the reason for those answers would be located in her persona: in that personal story she presents to the world..and herself.
For the persona (in Jungian terms) is a psychological entity, an archetype; it inhabits and relates to one’s inner life as well as one’s outer “mask”.
If you dream of a scarecrow, that probably represents your persona.
And where it’s from will be important.
A former newspaper colleague recently asked me how I felt about teaching undergraduates journalism when there appears to be a diminishing number of jobs available in that field.
He asked me if universities are running courses in “fantasy journalism” simply to satisfy a growing demand from wannabe hacks all over the world.
These were fair questions and they prompted me to explore five collateral ones:
1. What exactly is journalism now?
2. What constitutes a job in journalism?
3. Whatever journalism is, are there now fewer opportunities to earn a living (or partial living) from it as my friend claimed?
4. Should I and other journalism educators be teaching students to be journalists or to define and understand journalism by showing them journalistic techniques and teaching them communications history? Such an education, some argue, would increase their intellectual knowledge of media and give them skills useful in industries and disciplines other than journalism such as public relations, business communications and education.
5. Are universities perpetuating “fantasy” journalism as my former colleague suggested.
Taking those five points in order, the Oxford English Dictionary should deal with the first swiftly and unequivocally:
Journalist
1. One who earns his living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals.
2. One who journalizes or keeps a journal.
(Second edition, 1989; online version November 2010. <http://0-www.oed.com.wam.city.ac.uk/Entry/101740>; accessed 15 February 2011.)
So much for escaping equivocation; these definitions (like so much lexicography) are inadequate; they provide little more than a starting point.
Earns his living: despite the possessive pronoun this applies to women as well and, arguably, to people who partially earn their living from this activity.
As for writing, the definition would appear to preclude visual journalism and some other, less obvious, applications of the discipline.
Public journal: both these words need to be liberally interpreted to include semi-public, paywalled content and multimedia and/or broadcast material that does not sit comfortably under the rather antique heading of journal.
2. One who journalizes or keeps a journal. This definition might be considered “secondary” now, but it may not stay so for long. One who journalizes in 2011 can fairly be called a “blogger”. This in itself is a fluid term still seeking a definition.
James Hatts is a journalist who created and runs the rightly celebrated, self-described community website London SE1.
I recently heard him explain to an audience how he harvests news from the postcode he covers; it was exactly how I did when I was a cub reporter covering another London patch for a weekly newspaper in the 1970s: meet people and encourage them to trust you and send you news.
SE1 makes money but its mission is not purely commercial as it tagline implies. Many respected and undeniably journalistic bloggers do not “earn a living” from their craft, but does that make them less “a journalist” as the OED insists.
Their craft is socially engaged, electronically executed and entrepreneurially financed or semi financed; hence I use the tag eJournalism when describing this phenomenon to students.
Journalists as unpaid, or partially paid, social facilitators? Why not? In truth many of us have been that at one time or another; some commentators’ current preoccupation with monetising new media appears to forget this.
In fact, in the UK, journalism has never consolidated itself as a profession in the way that law and medicine has; there is no consensus for that epithet (if you doubt it, just ask any three journalists).
So muscular champions of the press citadel who rush to the ramparts to repel the hordes of wild-eyed “untrained” citizen journalists are defending a mirage; they should expend their energies on revising their skillsets and mindsets. After all, not every untutored science blogger can match the evidence-driven rigour of Daily Mail and Express journalists.
Perhaps an answer to the first of my five questions is: a journalist is a skilled communicator of current events.
This throws a different light on my second question: what constitutes a job in journalism? Need it be a fully or even partially paid post? A job in journalism might be a role – paid, partially paid or unpaid – involving news harvesting and dissemination; that would include bloggers, online social networkers and others.
Question 3: are there fewer opportunities to earn a living from journalism? That depends on what regions of the world we examine. The answer to that in South Asia would probably be very different to the UK response.
For a respected 2010 report indicated that the number of mainstream journalists in UK shrunk by between a quarter and a third in less than a decade.
However, it is not possible yet to categorise or quantify the impact of journalistic activity thrown up by seismic shifts in the new media landscape: hyperlocal sites like SE1, headlining blogs like Guido Fawkes’ and multi-million dollar enterprises like the Huffington Post and The Daily.
As an educator, these fluid developments prompt me to check the declared mission of the BA Journalism course on which I teach at City University London:
This course is aimed at the many students who have decided to make a career in journalism. (BA Journalism handbook 2011)
Question 5: Fantasy journalism? I do not know a UK J-School that deliberately encourages hopeful youngsters to develop skills for which some argue there is a dwindling domestic demand; traditional courses and modules in photo-journalism and investigative journalism remain popular.
But clearly it is imperative that journalism educators remain actively engaged in the practice of their discipline so they can monitor and communicate to their students the industrial, technological and societal shifts reshaping aspirations in profound and unpredictable ways.
In 2010 Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger asked: does journalism exist?
The answer is Yes.
But not as we know it, Captain.
Jan 242011
A quarter of a century ago today in Wapping, East London, my life, and that of every newspaper journalist I knew, was changed forever.
As far as I and most other journalists on The Sun were concerned, it was the morning of an overnight revolution; I choose those words with the care and precision expected of a proud former member of the best subbing team on Fleet Street.
Until that day, for nine years I had worked in the actual Street, not the nominal one. As a sub-editor I rewrote stories with a pen on slips of copy paper which were revised by a chief sub-editor, handed to a “runner” who took them to print supervisor who allotted them to a typesetter or “tapper”.
The metal type produced by him (it was always a man) was read and fact-checked on a galley proof by one of an army of trained journeymen “readers”. Corrected copy was reset and the metal slugs put into an iron-like page on the “stone”. I have omitted from this account many stages and many people.
Overnight, I and my sub-editorial colleagues found ourselves looking at flickering green type on a black-screened computer.
In the following weeks, floor-walking experts from Australia, the US and Scandinavia taught us how to typeset as we adjusted to the mind-blowing reality that we were now compositors and correctors as well as sub-editors.
One by one, as we became proficient enough in our training pods, we were sent to the subs’ desk to “go live”.
Oh, and every night for a year our workplace was besieged by thousands of very angry displaced craftspeople; fist fights were not uncommon, as I and two subbing pals discovered later.
As an active trade unionist and a member of Labour Party I recall my mixed emotions and those of many of my colleagues.
I also remember how quickly the print craftsmen’s faith in the indispensability of their skills dwindled heartbreakingly when, night after night, the giant TNT lorries, emblazoned with the instruction “Keep On Trucking”, did just that.
The juggernauts were jeered by increasingly incredulous protesters as they rumbled mockingly through the gates, virtually unscathed.
“They can’t get out a paper without us. It’s impossible.” That was the print workers’ confident – critics would say arrogant – prediction on January 25, 1986.
They were wrong.
It concerns me that I hear that same boast made today by craft workers engaged in the current newspaper revolution – an online one, less violent but far more transforming than its East London predecessor.
Only this time the mantra is chanted by sub-editors.
