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Leveson / Media Economics / UK Press / Uncategorized — Comments Off
03
Sep 12

The Leveson Inquiry pre-positioning: editors a bit confused

The printing of naked photos of Prince Harry by The Sun exposed nothing very interesting about the prince but it did dislodge some very muddled thinking about the future of newspapers.

The short-term future for newspaper editors is dominated by the Leveson Inquiry, due to report in the autumn. The Inquiry’s chairman has been sending provisional summaries of his views to editors and they don’t like what they read, claiming that it hints at statute-backed press regulation. The government sounds wary. The opposition Labour Party is sitting on the fence on that issue, preparing to jump off on whatever side will cause the government most trouble, while keeping as much attention as they can muster on the issue of media plurality and ownership. These are all pre-publication manoeuvres. Nobody yet knows what Leveson thinks and positions will be amended or even abandoned when his views become clear.

The Prince Harry pictures gave editors a chance to rehearse their defences, which came in two varieties. The first is a broad press freedom argument which asks for licence to disclose anything which they deem interesting and which is within the law (and maybe a few things which aren’t). As a defence in court – prosecutions of News of the World journalists for phone-hacking and related offences are churning through the system in parallel to the Leveson Inquiry – this is unlikely to work (see this from the HuffPo by one of those arrested). We might christen this the “spacious elbow room” argument; popular papers need space to do what they do and to survive. A tincture of anti-establishment language is usually thrown in. Hence the ex-editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie:

“I’m unsure why the establishment hate newspapers so much but what I’d like to see is editors get off their knees and start pushing back against these curtailments in what will eventually, I promise you, lead to the closure of newspapers”.

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26
Jun 12

Making better use of journalism technology, take two

The first phase of the adoption of new technologies is breathless and unreflective. Vast and weighty conclusions are drawn about the meaning of change and future trends based only on the first phase.

This makes as much sense as it would have done to project the future of domestic architecture from the mud hut. Invention and innovation are important, but so is adaptation and particularly adaptation to how people react to new opportunities and seeing what they need and want. Steve Jobs wasn’t just good with code and gadgets; he was an anthropologist as well, and a very shrewd one.

We can now say, twenty years or so after the internet entered the mainstream, that we’ve got our breath back and we’re starting to see intelligent adaptation of new media in journalism. Straws in the wind:

  • Science journalists on mainstream media are starting to see that linking to sources is going to change their field in the next few years. Hotlinks make “footnotes” easy and simple to put in text. Yes, they’re chore to insert. But I’m as certain as I am of anything that footnoting will be a standard feature in quality journalism in a few years. The user can see the source and if necessary open a new window to look at the detail which lies behind. This came up this week at the UK Conference of Science Journalists.
  • In a few years time, young journalists will be astonished to hear that well into the second decade of this century, major news websites with pretensions to be taken seriously – particularly those with print legacies – did not routinely require reporters to link to disclosable sources. “You mean you just asked them to take it on trust?” the shocked youngsters will ask. One effect of footnotes will be less bad science in news media. Not instantly, but gradually. And the improvement needn’t be confined to science either.
  • The resistance to thinking in terms of jigsaws and encyclopaedias is beginning to break down. News websites are, still, largely driven and dominated by people who think of news as disposable, like the newsprint it was distributed on. Once it’s gone to the consumer and been read, it’s gone. Websites aren’t like that. They have rolling news which comes and goes. But that layer of fast-moving information sits atop and supplies a slowly-accumulating mountain of data, a digital encyclopaedia. A big site will by now have built up an online archive of several million pages. The best sites carry links to related stories. But the linking is automated and crude.
  • So far. If a big story breaks in Syria or Burma, you want to read the correspondent on the spot first. But it would be great to have the backstory, the background, opinions and analysis from other sources, other versions of the same event all laid out and labelled. A richer menu of ways of seeing the story; a better jigsaw, in short.
  • TV companies and websites have noticed that young consumers of sport and entertainment often watch TV while using smartphone or tablets to discuss what they’re seeing. We’re not very far from editorial content which is designed for two-screen consumption. (I’m supervising the Masters dissertation of a student who is currently on an internship at a major news website in London studying just this). An independent report the other day criticised the BBC for failing to use its own depth of knowledge properly in reporting the Arab Spring. They had a huge website with lots of cool stuff on it and didn’t point enough people towards it. Here’s Alfred Hermida, who used to work in BBC Online, lamenting this.
  • Lastly, comments. I’ve long thought that simply making comment space available at the end of articles is an overblown advance. Navigating your way through the abuse, duplication, one-on-one squabbles is simply too time-consuming. The problem is partly technical – how do you sift for what’s worth reading? – and partly exaggerated deference to the idea that everyone’s opinion is equally valuable. Comment software has destroyed that illusion. Here’s Clay Shirky noticing that Gawker have begun to do something about this.

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Lectures / Leveson / Standards / UK Press — Comments Off
01
Jun 12

Summing up what we’ve learnt on Leveson, Murdoch and law

My loyal band of Twitterati may have noticed that I’ve been in Australia, where I gave a talk in two universities trying to sum up what we’ve learnt from the Leveson Inquiry. British readers of this blog might well want to stop right here because a good deal of the talk below will be familiar. There’s a very short version on the Australian-based The Conversation, a site which acts as a web publisher for opinion and analysis on public affairs by academics. But in case anyone wants to see the full text, here it is:

Phone-Hacking, the Leveson Inquiry and Rupert Murdoch

Public inquiries – often thought of as deliberate, careful, rational procedures – often provide examples of the operation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. They don’t always work out as their instigators hope or intend.

So it is with the Leveson Inquiry, now running most days of the week in London. The Inquiry is formally into the “culture, practice and ethics” of something quaintly called “the press”. The inquiry’s terms of reference are very broad indeed. They cover standards, accuracy, regulation and law, media plurality and ownership, relations with both the police and politicians.

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16
May 12

Adam Boulton at Leveson: a lapidary exchange on the press

 

I reproduce without much need for comment a short exchange which occurred in the evidence given yesterday by Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News, to the Leveson Inquiry. Other things which Boulton said may have generated more headline attention, but his clear-headed analysis here is more useful than hundreds of other such dialogues in explaining (while not excusing) the events which gave rise to the Inquiry in the first place. The questions were being put by one of the Inquiry counsel, David Barr, who starts by referrring to Boulton’s evidence statement.

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Leveson / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press — 2 Comments
30
Apr 12

Leveson: how to avoid the pitfalls of “better mousetrap” press regulation

Towards the end of next month, the Leveson Inquiry into the British press will turn from its current, revelatory phase about media relationships with politicians and address again the knotty question of regulating journalism.

The inquiry’s most basic dilemma hasn’t changed: how to prevent and discourage the wrongs which have occurred without tipping over into state control of the news media. When he has grown bored and irritated with an editor waffling vaguely about how things will be improved by a few light adjustments to the present rules, Lord Leveson usually asks one of two questions and sometimes both: what would you actually do? will what you suggest command public confidence? Next month will bring forth a slew of ideas for regulation designed to work better than the much-abused self-regulation of the past. Legal and media experts are busy putting the finishing touches to better mousetraps.

The problems of “toughening” regulation are much greater than supposed, as I’ve argued here (£). Not least because regulation deals with sorting out things that have already gone wrong. What the Leveson Inquiry should also be concentrating on is how to encourage, in the culture of newsrooms, good practice which lowers the odds that bad things will be done. It should also look at whether the issue of regulation isn’t as much a question of legal process as much as one of regulatory machinery. That is to say that contributory factor in the accumulation of problems and resentment has been the cost and delay of taking legal action over libel or invasion of privacy. In this article I suggest that there is a way to interlock the rules of both law and a regulator to create a powerful incentive for journalism to rely less on tricks and illegalities.

If journalists were offered fuller and more consistent public interest defences in both criminal and civil law, those defences could be made available only to news publishers or broadcasters who could demonstrate transparent and enforceable editorial integrity and standards. With that incentive, websites and papers (broadcasters are separately regulated) would need to organise regulation among themselves which would show that they deserved the protection of a public interest defence. Trivial, sloppy or bad journalism which can’t claim a public interest justification gets no protection; better journalism at least has that line of defence available. That strikes me as the best way round the knotty dilemma: incentives not state-backed regulation.

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20
Apr 12

Local newspapers: sentiment, logic and the experiments of the future

Local newspapers: sentiment, logic and the experiments of the futureJohnston Press’s new boss Ashley Highfield set off a row which will erupt again and again in the coming years when he announced that the company is turning some its daily local papers into weeklies. Local papers are so long-standing and (mostly) loved that we find clear thinking very hard.

There is no general, worldwide “crisis” of journalism or even of newspapers. Newspapers are declining in North America and Europe but not in South America; they’re doing fine in Asia (numbers here). There are countries where journalists are badly treated and physically under threat, but that’s not new. The convulsions of the phone-hacking scandal are so far confined to Britain.

There is a crisis affecting journalism in the US and Europe, but it is worth being clear-eyed about exactly what it is. It is the ruin of the business model for printed daily papers in which news is cross-subsidised by advertising income which is leveraged on circulation numbers. That way of doing things is in trouble. That decline in circulation and income is a deep, long trend.

The lines on the graphs have been drifting down for years. As one of the analysts at the Enders consultancy pointed out (£) in the wake of Johnston Press cutbacks, the circulations of local papers have been going down for 40 years: this is nothing surprising or new. A graph of the total aggregate circulations of all British national papers across the whole of the 20th century shows that the combined sales peak for all of those papers was in the 1940s (see slide 5 here). The internet may have made the headaches of newspaper publishers much worse, but the rot started well before the web was ever thought of. Finding a new way of financing news matters even more than phone-hacking and the Leveson Inquiry.

One of the most basic foundation ideas of the newspaper was its separation from the state. Free news media choose to live out in the cold of open economies. When the society, economy or technology changes, the media must change. Digital communications alters all three and turns a lot upside down. Information doesn’t require capital to move; news no longer goes one-to-many but one-to-one; printing isn’t required. And so on. The history of news reveals endless experimentation amid chaos and fast-changing conditions. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that news media in Europe and America enjoyed a stable, institutionalised era which gave journalists the impression that secure employment in large organisations was the norm. Historically, it isn’t.

There was a piece last weekend in the Sunday Times magazine (£) which captured the paradox of much gloomy pessimism about newspapers sitting side by side with experimentation. The paper’s writer Tim Rayment assembled many grim statistics recording the falls in circulation, jobs and reach. To illustrate the problems he had gone back to Cleethorpes, the north-eastern town in which he had been a cub reporter. The local paper was having a tough time, to be sure. But Cleethorpes has a new fledgling weekly paper challenging the incumbent and a local news blogger, who annoys and provokes the powers that be in the town. So the risk of decline was there – but so were the seeds of future change. Something is lost in the transition chaos. But new energy is released as well.

Update 23.4.12: (lengthy) defence of the value of local papers via a survey of what the major British owners are up to by the knowledgeable Liz Gerard and interview with me about pressures on local papers on BBC Radio 4′s Broadcasting House yesterday (item starts 32 minutes in).

 

 

 

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19
Mar 12

News = technology (and vice versa)

News = technology (and vice versa)A headline sparked off by the annual Pew report on the state of news media caught my eye. “Tech companies control the future of news“, said a Forbes blogger John Dube.

This is the kind of headline which is designed to frighten people. Just think, the headline implies: nerds, geeks and new media tycoons messing with news which was once lovingly prepared by noble journalists who have lost control of their business. The news industry, the Pew report says, “finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”

But technology always has shaped news media and journalism and always did. The two are so closely intertwined that it couldn’t be otherwise. If journalists were not so distracted by the distress of watching the business model for printed news crumble before their eyes, they’d remember that technology and the people who make money from innovations often shape, make and lead developments in journalism.

The newspapers which dominated news for at least a century – face it, a pretty good run – took their present form around the middle of the nineteenth century. These developments didn’t depend on somebody having a blueprint for serious daily journalism. They were evolutions driven by the arrival of better newsprint, fast rotary presses and, last of all, “linotype” typesetting machines. Then journalists set about exploiting these new possibilities as best they could. Many editors of local papers were technologists – or, as they said in those days, master printers.

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Law / UK Press — 2 Comments
02
Mar 12

Courts, news and the record: a shocking information gap

Occasionally, you are woken up by a collection of facts which you ought to have known but which reveal that you’ve been asleep. So it was this week when I dropped into a seminar on the transparency of the British court system.

Justice isn’t as open and visible as we might think. In fact the extent to which we don’t know what is happening in courts – particularly magistrates courts – up and down the country is shocking. The reason that this has got as bad as it has isn’t exactly down to the secretiveness or obstruction of the people who run the courts, although they aren’t going to win any awards for openess any time soon.

The problem lies in the decline of local papers. Some local papers have closed and any websites trying to replace them are not likely to have the resources to report courts day in, day out. But most local papers have survived by endlessly slimming down their newsrooms and the amount of news they print.

In the early 1970s, when I worked as a local reporter in the city of York, the evening paper there sent one (and often two) reporters to the magistrates court every working day to the end of the session. I remember writing up, sometimes in a single paragraph for the dullest, every case that was heard. Most of this material, parochial as it can seem, made it into the paper. That paper, the Evening Press, carried enough news every day for it truly to claim that it was the “paper of record” for that city of around 100,000 people.

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