Murdoch wants to charge people to read what the PR industry spews out

Nick’s findings – actually from someone he paid to do the research – aren’t so killer… if you check the research he quotes you’ll find it a somewhat different picture. Always good to go back to primary sources. I wrote about it here.

I’m sorry Adrian but….

‘electronic databases
computers
mobile telephony
the Internet?
Haven’t these revolutionary changes all made life for journalists quicker and easier in the past 20 years? Shouldn’t we demand that reporters work faster, smarter and produce more given all this?
No cuttings libraries to sift through, no dial to turn on the telephone, or telephone books to wade through. No telex machines to service or wire copy to rip and read.’

I’m sorry Adrian but do you know any journalists? Do you know what the job is like nowadays? E.g. ‘Shouldn’t ‘we’ (and who is ‘we’?) ‘demand’ that journalists work faster?

But faster, in journalism, usually means worse. Good stories are slow, by definition. Look up Flat Earth News and look at how the Philby story was broken.

As for the crap about electronics making our lives better…my job is infinitely more complex and demanding due to computers, the internet and mobiles. Because work that would previously have been given to a secretary is now forced on me, which means I spend hours of valuable time learning how to use them and then waste my time on (e.g.) working out how to do dual columns in Word. But of course Murdoch likes this because it means that journalists don’t have the time to do ‘slow’ stories that threaten his powerful friends, and also because it means he can then sack the secretary.

Finally, mobiles etc. just mean that my boss can now reach me and shout at me 24/7. Nowadays when I start a new job I just lie and say I don’t have a mobile and refuse to use it for work related purposes (if they want me to have a mobile THEY can buy me one). ‘
(incidentally i’m not a journalist but my jobs is closely related).

Yes, “PR and/or wire copy” is a really sly move. Bit like saying “academics make an average of $15,000 a year from bribes from big business and/or book sales”.

The point is that they don’t go out and discover anything, they just recycle (usually without checking anything) what other people send them – hence “churnalism”.

Well, if true, that would indeed be a problem – but that is not in fact what Davies was saying. “At least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy” is the actual phrase. Not – repeat, not – “made up of newswire or PR copy without any additional checking or significant added material”. If you’ve got figures for that, please share. But there’s nothing wrong with taking a brief Reuters report that says “New president elected in Zambia” and adding 500 words of copy on the new guy’s background, his likely policies, changes from the old guy’s policies, comments from an economist on the main economic problems the new guy will face and why he may not be up to them, what this means for the region, etc, etc.

‘But there’s nothing wrong with taking a brief Reuters report that says “New president elected in Zambia” and adding 500 words of copy on the new guy’s background, his likely policies, changes from the old guy’s policies, comments from an economist on the main economic problems the new guy will face and why he may not be up to them, what this means for the region, etc, etc.’

Ajay
have you actually ever read The Sun or the News of the World? Honestly?

The Times, 69 per cent; The Daily Telegraph, 68 per cent; Daily Mail, 66 per cent; The Independent, 65 per cent and The Guardian, 52 per

How did the average get to be 80% ?

Well, if true, that would indeed be a problem – but that is not in fact what Davies was saying.

he goes into a lot more detail on this in the book – his contention is that the wire services are if anything stretched even thinner.

‘But why should I as a reader be bothered if the person doing the leg-work is employed by an agency or by the respective newspaper?’

As Davies points out in his book (which does go into a lot more detail of the kind people are asking for here), the agencies are quite open about the fact that they simply report what people say and do not, as journalists are supposed to do, check the truth of what is said or seek corroborating sources. So yes, it does make a difference.

‘As Davies points out in his book (which does go into a lot more detail of the kind people are asking for here), the agencies are quite open about the fact that they simply report what people say and do not, as journalists are supposed to do, check the truth of what is said or seek corroborating sources. So yes, it does make a difference.’

More to the point it changes the role of the journalist from being pro-active to being reactive: whereas before the key point of of a journalists job would be to be out of the office and discovering what the story was, now they sit in the office and wait for wire copy to come in and tell them what the story is. Moreover, many/most lack the language skills or (physical,human) contacts to provide the necessary contextualisation.

One might note, in a Chomskyan stylee…that companies like Thomson’s-Reuters are primarily businesses, whose primary role is to provide financial information to other businesses. ‘News’ is a sideline. Given their role, it’s also clear that they want to sell their product to as many outlets as possible: therefore, by definition, ‘controversial’ ‘comment’ is invariably left out, and the most obvious stories are the ones that are most covered. In other words, you are clearly using the word ‘journalist’ in a two very different ways when you say a Reuters staffer is a ‘journalist’ and when you say Seymour Hersh is a ‘journalist’.

I am baffled by Ajay’s point that ‘What we should be worried about is “percentage of stories that simply reiterate statements of interested parties uncritically.’. When has anyone, ever, read a piece in a news story that challenges a PR story? The whole point of these anti-stories is to provide covert advertising for some firm or person. Ben Goldacre has described frequently the scientific atrocities produced when newspapers uncritically relay PR stories (as they invariably do). Moreover, PR stories from state sources (e.g. the army, the police) are invariably stated to be true, even when they are blatantly lies (this was shown recently by the G20 riots: many of the cameramen for the newspapers who published the police’s lies, and even some journalists, had been beaten up by the police or had witnessed police violence, but PR from the police overruled evidence from paid staff at those same newspapers!)

I’m not sure I’m happy with being cast as the defender of the NOTW’s Zambia desk…

“When has anyone, ever, read a piece in a news story that challenges a PR story?… Moreover, PR stories from state sources (e.g. the army, the police) are invariably stated to be true, even when they are blatantly lies…”

Invariably, eh? Will you give me a tenner for every counterexample I find?

Let’s assume that, if Murdoch decides to make Times/Sun/etc. readers pay, he will only accelerate the destructive creation process that will replace his Empire of Muck with something marginally more sound.

Why would anyone want to stop that happening?

I notice,reading back my posts, that the point is being missed here. The point, as I see it,is the move from pro-active journalism to re-active ‘journalism’.

But the other,even more important point is that the real subject of the post was:

‘So why would people pay for that?’

And the answer is: I have no idea and I don’t think they will.

24: quite. Hidari assumes that this move is actually happening, whereas in fact the only hard facts are these: 1) newspapers have fewer full-time staffers than they used to 2) there is a lot of bad (or at least “reactive”) journalism out there. There’s no evidence that 2) is more true now than it used to be, far less that 1) is responsible.

And you raise another interesting point, which is: why should we assume that a dwindling of what we define as “good” journalism – proactive, investigative, etc – will necessarily mean the commercial doom of the newspapers?

Just before reading this article, I was reading on the Telegraph website about Glyndebourne, an interesting article for the opera buff about how the place is surviving the recession and how it is planning to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Attached to the article were two clips from Glyndebourne’s ‘smash’ production of Guilio Cesare, supplied by Glyndebourne. The article was written by a respected opera critic who had clearly had a dose of PR which involved going down to Glyndebourne (such hardship) and having a chat with its current chairman.

The article was much enriched by the Handel clips. It made me think about the pleasure of being able to surf the net to read opinions and articles from the newspapers and made me wonder how running the increasingly sophisticated websites that newspapers offer can be made to pay. Murdoch is on a hiding for nothing if he thinks he can suddenly turn his websites into subscriber only stuff: both the FT and Economist have tried that one with limited success – it simply turns readers off those websites, and as other commentators above have noted, there are plenty of specialist websites on just about any subject you care to study in depth on the net that offer much more insight and depth than the news sites. For snapshot stuff, people will use free sites like Huffpost and the BBC, and then follow the links or do their own searches. Where does that leave the Times and the Sun? My guess would be unvisited.

As for getting news off the wires and from PR – twas ever thus…I was last a journalist 18 years ago, and quite a lot of stories started out as puff from the PR machines…but a good journalist will go out and work the angles. The journalist under excessive time pressure will do a bit of rewriting and regurgitation. Mostly, you can tell the difference.

In the golden age people subscribed to their local paper or maybe a national one, that presented them with a view of the world restricted by its specific political and selection bias – and that was that. Today we have access to a gazillion news sources from every corner of the world covering every angle and journalistic format at the click of a button. I simply don’t see how we are less well informed than 30 years ago.

Do I know any journalists, Hidari? Now there’s a question…

Randolph, I have around 50 sites bookmarked for news and politics and they all feature for the most part original reporting and commentary. If they were all repeating each other, I wouldn’t read them. I only have enough time to read a fraction of them on a regular basis. Maybe you are limiting yourself to too few and similar sources?

Incidentally, Novakent also believes that

‘Goodheart is to be taken with a grain of salt, but is anybody here seriously deying that the LRB is a tad biased when it comes to Israel or that large parts of the population in middle eastern countries are blatantly anti-semitic?’

Which makes me think that his definition of ‘original reporting and commentary’ is different from mine. It also makes me think that when he argues that Randolph is limiting himself to ‘too few and similar sources’ this should be interpreted in a highly specific sense.

For snapshot stuff, people will use free sites like Huffpost and the BBC

I wonder what Murdoch would like to happen to the BBC…

So much journalism has been free or ad-sponsored for so long that I don’t think most of the public even knows what for-pay journalism looks like. I’d be interested to see what kind of correlation there is between the percent of revenue from issue sales and the proportion of original content in news sources.

Ryan Tate actually has a very good answer for Simon‘s points here:

With so much quality civic reporting already being done online for little or no pay, it stands to reason we could eventually get quality government reporting entirely from bloggers, both professional and amateur, rather than depending on a federally-coddled cabal of conspiring nonprofit newspapers, as Simon envisions.

And there are reasons to think the quality would actually be better, since so many of the writers are deeply invested residents, rather than the sort of superficially-engaged, careerist professional journalists portrayed so well by Simon in The Wire and all too common in American newsrooms.

But Hidari, are we sure there was a golden age?

There never was. Just look e.g. at A. J Liebling’s report of the American newspaper industry of the late fifties and early sixties, which doesn’t differ all that much from Flat Earth News…