JOURNALISM: FT column on Journalism by Lionel Barber
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Subject: [saja-disc] JOURNALISM: FT column on Journalism by Lionel Barber
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:48:34 -0400
From: John Laxmi <johnlaxm...@gmail.com>
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Why journalism wins my vote
By Lionel Barber
Published: October 10 2008 21:59
In the summer of 1985, when I arrived in the capital of the United
States, The Washington Post was one of the finest newspapers in the
country. Ben Bradlee, its executive editor, who was best known for
driving coverage of the Watergate scandal of just a decade earlier,
dominated the newsroom with his gravelly voice and infectious smile.
Even the lowliest copy boy called him "Ben". Everyone was committed to
producing a great paper, around the clock, seven days a week.
I had joined the paper as the sixth Laurence Stern fellow, an annual
prize bestowed to a young(ish) British journalist in honour of Larry
Stern, a former Vietnam war correspondent and national editor who
died, prematurely , while jogging on a beach in Cape Cod, in 1979.
Bradlee, a close friend of the anglophile Stern, elected to create a
fellowship in his name.
Entering the Post newsroom was like walking on to the set of All the
President's Men , the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin
Hoffman as the Post's own Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with its
row upon row of reporters, each with their desk-top computers. (At the
FT, we still bashed away on typewriters.) Bradlee's glass office stood
in the centre of the newsroom. Woodward's investigative team was
tucked away at the back. There was a swagger about the place that was
irresistible.
To spend time as a reporter on the national staff was to experience a
rigour that was bracing – and unfamiliar. "Good story," growled Mike
Getler, foreign editor, reading my first front page piece, "but you
need to be more precise about your sources." Phrases such as "it is
understood" and "people close to the situation" – all grist to the
mill in Fleet Street – failed to cut the mustard on 15th Street in DC.
Reporters were given days, often weeks, to research stories. The
editing process was exhausting: copy passed through at least four
pairs of hands. The other eye-opener was the access that Post
journalists enjoyed. A fat Federal government directory provided
telephone numbers for officials, high and low. More often than not,
they answered the phone. This was heady stuff for someone used to
having Whitehall doors slam shut. At the end of my fellowship, I wrote
a commentary headlined "America, you have wonderful bureaucrats ... "
In retrospect, however, the Watergate scandal was a curse as well as a
blessing for US journalism. In 2002, Jonathan Yardley, a Post
columnist, noted how All the President's Men made celebrity a goal to
which many journalists now aspire. Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse's
account of how the press covered the 1972 presidential election when
Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern, may have had a broader and
deeper effect: "It turned the eyes of the press on the press itself,"
Yardley wrote, "and opened the way to the age of media
self-absorption."
Writing in The New Yorker in March this year, Eric Alterman went
further: "As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected ...
top reporters, anchors and editors naturally rose in status to the
point where some came to be considered the social equals of the
senators, Cabinet secretaries and CEOs they reported on. Just as
naturally, these same reporters sometimes came to identify with their
subjects, rather than with their readers."
An earlier generation of ink-stained newshounds saw life differently.
Like the iconoclastic investigative journalist IF Stone, they saw it
as their duty to expose establishment wrongdoings. The reflex reaction
of the new journalism, however, has too often been a defensive crouch.
Or how else to explain the uncritical acceptance of the Bush
administration's case for invading Iraq, based on bogus claims that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction?
Most damaging, the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at
the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically
lowering the barriers to entry. Whether this was an unhappy
coincidence or complacency is unclear. What is undeniable is that
public trust in newspapers started to slip, to the point where a
recent study by Sacred Heart University shows barely one in five say
they can believe "all or most" media reporting (well below comparable
British figures).
According to Michael Elliott, the British-born editor of Time's
international edition who has spent almost 20 years working as a
journalist in the US, the decline in US journalism can be summed up
thus: a broken business model overly reliant on classified advertising
revenue that has now moved online; a mistaken notion that post-1945
newspaper staffs of 800-plus journalists were the norm rather than a
historical aberration; and, crucially, a stultifying failure to
innovate because of the lack of competition.
"The mainstream press in America is so conservative," Elliott says.
"Where are the DVD giveaways, where are the special promotions like in
Britain? Look at the sports pages! They write about sport like they do
City Hall. Where is the sense of fun?"
Elliott attributes the lack of playfulness to "the terrible burden" of
living up to the demands of the First Amendment, which guarantees free
speech under the US constitution. At its best, it imbues every
American journalist with a sense of moral purpose that views
journalism as a civic duty; at its worst, it has encouraged a stuffy
self-importance.
The contrast with British journalism is irresistible. At its best, the
UK press is a riotous carnival offering a panoply of news and views.
Obsessed with celebrity and often oblivious to privacy, the UK press
is part William Hogarth, part Damien Hirst. It can never be accused of
taking itself too seriously but it proved far more hard-nosed in its
assessment of the case for going to war against Iraq.
In a post to an FT.com debate this summer on British and American
journalism, Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, wrote: "The
London media ... is much less professional, much more sensationalist,
even in the so-called quality broadsheets ... and much less scrupulous
about sources."
Emmott added a caveat, however. The British media's willingness to
blur news and comment has allowed them to be more opinionated and,
therefore, more creative than their US counterparts. Thus, The
Independent metamorphised into a "viewspaper" with campaigning front
pages (though it now appears to be changing back to a more traditional
approach). The tabloids have remained in touch with a mass audience,
whatever the misgivings of the more politically correct. The Times and
The Guardian have experimented with new formats, which in design terms
put their American colleagues to shame (with the exception, perhaps,
of the pioneering USA Today).
It would be premature to suggest US newspapers are engaged in a last
roll of the dice. The arrival of Rupert Murdoch at The Wall Street
Journal may herald a bolder approach to design and more mischief in
news coverage, though I should probably recuse myself at this point.
There are plenty of opportunities for growth, starting with a renewed
focus on local news; a more sophisticated blend of online and print
content; and a more adventurous approach to what readers and viewers
want, particularly younger ones.
Overall, though, it seems undeniable that 2008 – and the coverage of
the presidential election – will be seen as a tipping point in
American journalism. The imperial status of the mainstream media – the
television networks, big metropolitan dailies and lofty commentators –
has been shaken. The lay-offs of hundreds of US newspaper journalists
are a symptom of a wider malaise. We are witnessing a shift in the
balance of power towards new media, with wholesale repercussions for
the practice of journalism.
The sea change was palpable at the Democratic national convention in
Denver in August. Hundreds of bloggers were present, many enjoying for
the first time much-coveted seats inside the convention hall. Close
by, the bloggers were installed in a "Big Tent", a 9,000-sq foot,
two-storey structure devoted to new media and offering free massages.
The mainstream press, one top New York Times journalist sniffed, were
obliged to register as visitors before being allowed inside.
The 2008 campaign has already earned the tag "The YouTube election".
Mass distribution of images online, exemplified by the wild popularity
of hip-hop artist Will.I.Am's pro-Obama music video "Yes We Can",
featuring Scarlett Johansson, has revolutionised the terms of
political engagement, especially among younger voters. This online
impact is also influencing news coverage, thanks to a swelling army of
amateur journalists and opinion-merchants. Mayhill Fowler, a
61-year-old blogger from Tennessee writing for The Huffington Post,
epitomises the new breed.
It was Fowler who broke the news that Senator Barack Obama had talked
about the bitterness of working-class Pennsylvanians who "cling to
guns or religion" and xenophobia as a way of coping with economic
distress. It was a seminal moment that foreshadowed the Republican
onslaught against Obama as an Ivy League elitist. Fowler later
unleashed a second storm by reporting Bill Clinton's "scumbag" rant
against a Vanity Fair reporter.
Yet, by her own admission, Fowler only gained access to Obama's
meeting at a private mansion in San Francisco because she was a donor
to his campaign. She agonised for four days before posting her scoop
on The Huffington Post website. At the Clinton rally, her status was
equally ambiguous. She failed to introduce herself as a reporter when
she asked innocently: "Mr President, what do you think about that
hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair?"
Fowler has no specialist training. She is one of several hundred
"citizen journalists" that The Huffington Post – a big media winner
this year – has let loose on the campaign under an initiative called
"Off the Bus" – an ironic reference to Boys on the Bus. In Fowler's
virtual world, traditional journalism has been turned upside down.
Alterman, in The New Yorker, summed up the change: "Whereas a
newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial
process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet
their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the
blogosphere relies on its readership – its community – for its quality
control ... Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false,
defamatory or offensive does an editor get involved."
As an editor myself, I find this prospect alarming – not so much
because it threatens to put me (and many colleagues) out of a job but
because it signals a departure from an honourable tradition in which
professional journalists do their best – through a process of
discovery relying on multiple sources – to establish something
approaching a rough historical record.
The question is whether this same journalistic rigour can survive the
current maelstrom. In Denver, it was striking how the television
channels, particularly cable, were happy to draw on partisan political
consultants – Democratic and Republican mercenaries from earlier
campaigns – to fill the airwaves. Seasoned political journalists, once
viewed as impartial oracles, were left on the cutting room floor.
In the new world of citizen journalism, the role of the trained
journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue
that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a neutral filter or objective truth,
and (print) journalists were imposters to suggest as much.
Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries
risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress
injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers,
especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a
counterweight. On both sides of the Atlantic, the line between news
reporting and comment is becoming increasingly blurred. That is
something that should give everyone in the profession pause for
thought.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
-
This is the SAJA E-mail Discussion List http://www.saja.org/lists
To switch to the articles only list, unsubscribe by sending a blank
email to leave-saja-...@lists.jrn.columbia.edu and then send a
note to sr...@sree.net asking to be placed on the articles list.
Give us feedback on the SAJA Stylebook http://www.saja.org/stylebook
--
FN M: 9970157402 or 9822122436 P:+91-832-240-9490 (after 1pm)
Skype: fredericknoronha Yahoochat: fredericknoronha
http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
Email fred at bytesforall.org Res: 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India
Subject: [saja-disc] JOURNALISM: FT column on Journalism by Lionel Barber
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:48:34 -0400
From: John Laxmi <johnlaxm...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: SAJA DISC <saja...@lists.jrn.columbia.edu>
To: SAJA DISC <saja...@lists.jrn.columbia.edu>
Why journalism wins my vote
By Lionel Barber
Published: October 10 2008 21:59
In the summer of 1985, when I arrived in the capital of the United
States, The Washington Post was one of the finest newspapers in the
country. Ben Bradlee, its executive editor, who was best known for
driving coverage of the Watergate scandal of just a decade earlier,
dominated the newsroom with his gravelly voice and infectious smile.
Even the lowliest copy boy called him "Ben". Everyone was committed to
producing a great paper, around the clock, seven days a week.
I had joined the paper as the sixth Laurence Stern fellow, an annual
prize bestowed to a young(ish) British journalist in honour of Larry
Stern, a former Vietnam war correspondent and national editor who
died, prematurely , while jogging on a beach in Cape Cod, in 1979.
Bradlee, a close friend of the anglophile Stern, elected to create a
fellowship in his name.
Entering the Post newsroom was like walking on to the set of All the
President's Men , the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin
Hoffman as the Post's own Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with its
row upon row of reporters, each with their desk-top computers. (At the
FT, we still bashed away on typewriters.) Bradlee's glass office stood
in the centre of the newsroom. Woodward's investigative team was
tucked away at the back. There was a swagger about the place that was
irresistible.
To spend time as a reporter on the national staff was to experience a
rigour that was bracing – and unfamiliar. "Good story," growled Mike
Getler, foreign editor, reading my first front page piece, "but you
need to be more precise about your sources." Phrases such as "it is
understood" and "people close to the situation" – all grist to the
mill in Fleet Street – failed to cut the mustard on 15th Street in DC.
Reporters were given days, often weeks, to research stories. The
editing process was exhausting: copy passed through at least four
pairs of hands. The other eye-opener was the access that Post
journalists enjoyed. A fat Federal government directory provided
telephone numbers for officials, high and low. More often than not,
they answered the phone. This was heady stuff for someone used to
having Whitehall doors slam shut. At the end of my fellowship, I wrote
a commentary headlined "America, you have wonderful bureaucrats ... "
In retrospect, however, the Watergate scandal was a curse as well as a
blessing for US journalism. In 2002, Jonathan Yardley, a Post
columnist, noted how All the President's Men made celebrity a goal to
which many journalists now aspire. Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse's
account of how the press covered the 1972 presidential election when
Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern, may have had a broader and
deeper effect: "It turned the eyes of the press on the press itself,"
Yardley wrote, "and opened the way to the age of media
self-absorption."
Writing in The New Yorker in March this year, Eric Alterman went
further: "As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected ...
top reporters, anchors and editors naturally rose in status to the
point where some came to be considered the social equals of the
senators, Cabinet secretaries and CEOs they reported on. Just as
naturally, these same reporters sometimes came to identify with their
subjects, rather than with their readers."
An earlier generation of ink-stained newshounds saw life differently.
Like the iconoclastic investigative journalist IF Stone, they saw it
as their duty to expose establishment wrongdoings. The reflex reaction
of the new journalism, however, has too often been a defensive crouch.
Or how else to explain the uncritical acceptance of the Bush
administration's case for invading Iraq, based on bogus claims that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction?
Most damaging, the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at
the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically
lowering the barriers to entry. Whether this was an unhappy
coincidence or complacency is unclear. What is undeniable is that
public trust in newspapers started to slip, to the point where a
recent study by Sacred Heart University shows barely one in five say
they can believe "all or most" media reporting (well below comparable
British figures).
According to Michael Elliott, the British-born editor of Time's
international edition who has spent almost 20 years working as a
journalist in the US, the decline in US journalism can be summed up
thus: a broken business model overly reliant on classified advertising
revenue that has now moved online; a mistaken notion that post-1945
newspaper staffs of 800-plus journalists were the norm rather than a
historical aberration; and, crucially, a stultifying failure to
innovate because of the lack of competition.
"The mainstream press in America is so conservative," Elliott says.
"Where are the DVD giveaways, where are the special promotions like in
Britain? Look at the sports pages! They write about sport like they do
City Hall. Where is the sense of fun?"
Elliott attributes the lack of playfulness to "the terrible burden" of
living up to the demands of the First Amendment, which guarantees free
speech under the US constitution. At its best, it imbues every
American journalist with a sense of moral purpose that views
journalism as a civic duty; at its worst, it has encouraged a stuffy
self-importance.
The contrast with British journalism is irresistible. At its best, the
UK press is a riotous carnival offering a panoply of news and views.
Obsessed with celebrity and often oblivious to privacy, the UK press
is part William Hogarth, part Damien Hirst. It can never be accused of
taking itself too seriously but it proved far more hard-nosed in its
assessment of the case for going to war against Iraq.
In a post to an FT.com debate this summer on British and American
journalism, Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, wrote: "The
London media ... is much less professional, much more sensationalist,
even in the so-called quality broadsheets ... and much less scrupulous
about sources."
Emmott added a caveat, however. The British media's willingness to
blur news and comment has allowed them to be more opinionated and,
therefore, more creative than their US counterparts. Thus, The
Independent metamorphised into a "viewspaper" with campaigning front
pages (though it now appears to be changing back to a more traditional
approach). The tabloids have remained in touch with a mass audience,
whatever the misgivings of the more politically correct. The Times and
The Guardian have experimented with new formats, which in design terms
put their American colleagues to shame (with the exception, perhaps,
of the pioneering USA Today).
It would be premature to suggest US newspapers are engaged in a last
roll of the dice. The arrival of Rupert Murdoch at The Wall Street
Journal may herald a bolder approach to design and more mischief in
news coverage, though I should probably recuse myself at this point.
There are plenty of opportunities for growth, starting with a renewed
focus on local news; a more sophisticated blend of online and print
content; and a more adventurous approach to what readers and viewers
want, particularly younger ones.
Overall, though, it seems undeniable that 2008 – and the coverage of
the presidential election – will be seen as a tipping point in
American journalism. The imperial status of the mainstream media – the
television networks, big metropolitan dailies and lofty commentators –
has been shaken. The lay-offs of hundreds of US newspaper journalists
are a symptom of a wider malaise. We are witnessing a shift in the
balance of power towards new media, with wholesale repercussions for
the practice of journalism.
The sea change was palpable at the Democratic national convention in
Denver in August. Hundreds of bloggers were present, many enjoying for
the first time much-coveted seats inside the convention hall. Close
by, the bloggers were installed in a "Big Tent", a 9,000-sq foot,
two-storey structure devoted to new media and offering free massages.
The mainstream press, one top New York Times journalist sniffed, were
obliged to register as visitors before being allowed inside.
The 2008 campaign has already earned the tag "The YouTube election".
Mass distribution of images online, exemplified by the wild popularity
of hip-hop artist Will.I.Am's pro-Obama music video "Yes We Can",
featuring Scarlett Johansson, has revolutionised the terms of
political engagement, especially among younger voters. This online
impact is also influencing news coverage, thanks to a swelling army of
amateur journalists and opinion-merchants. Mayhill Fowler, a
61-year-old blogger from Tennessee writing for The Huffington Post,
epitomises the new breed.
It was Fowler who broke the news that Senator Barack Obama had talked
about the bitterness of working-class Pennsylvanians who "cling to
guns or religion" and xenophobia as a way of coping with economic
distress. It was a seminal moment that foreshadowed the Republican
onslaught against Obama as an Ivy League elitist. Fowler later
unleashed a second storm by reporting Bill Clinton's "scumbag" rant
against a Vanity Fair reporter.
Yet, by her own admission, Fowler only gained access to Obama's
meeting at a private mansion in San Francisco because she was a donor
to his campaign. She agonised for four days before posting her scoop
on The Huffington Post website. At the Clinton rally, her status was
equally ambiguous. She failed to introduce herself as a reporter when
she asked innocently: "Mr President, what do you think about that
hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair?"
Fowler has no specialist training. She is one of several hundred
"citizen journalists" that The Huffington Post – a big media winner
this year – has let loose on the campaign under an initiative called
"Off the Bus" – an ironic reference to Boys on the Bus. In Fowler's
virtual world, traditional journalism has been turned upside down.
Alterman, in The New Yorker, summed up the change: "Whereas a
newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial
process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet
their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the
blogosphere relies on its readership – its community – for its quality
control ... Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false,
defamatory or offensive does an editor get involved."
As an editor myself, I find this prospect alarming – not so much
because it threatens to put me (and many colleagues) out of a job but
because it signals a departure from an honourable tradition in which
professional journalists do their best – through a process of
discovery relying on multiple sources – to establish something
approaching a rough historical record.
The question is whether this same journalistic rigour can survive the
current maelstrom. In Denver, it was striking how the television
channels, particularly cable, were happy to draw on partisan political
consultants – Democratic and Republican mercenaries from earlier
campaigns – to fill the airwaves. Seasoned political journalists, once
viewed as impartial oracles, were left on the cutting room floor.
In the new world of citizen journalism, the role of the trained
journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue
that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a neutral filter or objective truth,
and (print) journalists were imposters to suggest as much.
Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries
risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress
injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers,
especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a
counterweight. On both sides of the Atlantic, the line between news
reporting and comment is becoming increasingly blurred. That is
something that should give everyone in the profession pause for
thought.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
-
This is the SAJA E-mail Discussion List http://www.saja.org/lists
To switch to the articles only list, unsubscribe by sending a blank
email to leave-saja-...@lists.jrn.columbia.edu and then send a
note to sr...@sree.net asking to be placed on the articles list.
Give us feedback on the SAJA Stylebook http://www.saja.org/stylebook
--
FN M: 9970157402 or 9822122436 P:+91-832-240-9490 (after 1pm)
Skype: fredericknoronha Yahoochat: fredericknoronha
http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
Email fred at bytesforall.org Res: 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India
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