Breaking News – the remaking of journalism and why it matters now

The media used to be described as one of the key features of democracy – for its ability to hold power to scrutiny. So much so it was actually called The Fourth Estate – with the Church, nobility and commoners being the first three and the earliest use of the term in a book by Thomas Carlyle in 1787: 

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." 

How quickly things have changed – with the mainstream media now dismissed as “fake news” - and social media being most people's first "go to" source of news.

I’ve just put down a superbly-written story of the challenges faced by Alan Rusbridger as editor ofthe UK’s most honourable newspaper - The Guardian - during his stint at the helm from 1995 to 2015. It’s in a 2018 book whose title I've reproduced to head this post. 

The challenges it explores include - 

- Dramatically declining advertising revenues – as experienced by all print media

- A more demanding and interactive readership

- of not only global digital and print editions but of a weekend title, The Observer – requiring three separate teams

- law suits, the most famous of which was conducted by a Minister of the Crown. Jonathan Aitken

- government pressures (the Britain media enjoys no protection such as the US Second Amendment)

- the infamous phone hacking perpetrated on both the public and major political figures by the Murdoch Empire and other “Tabloids” who pour their poison on British society

- the Wikipedia leaks in which The Guardian played a central part (with Der Spiegel and the New York Post)

- the Snowden revelations 

It reads like a political thriller - and should be read by everyone these days

I hadn’t realized, for example, that The Guardian was one of the first English-speaking newspapers to experiment, in the early years of the internet, with more interactive methods of reaching readers. Nor that it had received global awards for its various innovations…

The book gives a very strong sense of what it was like to live during this period of powerful technical change. 

Too many of the books we read are written in confident tones as if the future was knowable. Uncertainty is the name of the game – with experiments being one of the most useful ways of proceeding……This is how Rusbridger describes the situation as he felt it 15 years ago -

So this was what we thought we knew around the middle of 2006.

·         Newspapers were going to find their traditional revenues – particularly in classified advertising and, probably, in cover price – eaten into over coming years.

·         Many newspaper managements would naturally respond by cutting costs. At the same time they would need to invest significantly in the digital future against the day when new technologies might determine future reading habits; and when significant amounts of advertising might well migrate to the internet.

·         None of this would happen smoothly. There would be profound jolts along the way. We – and others – could expect to lose lots of money in the coming • • • • • years if we had any chance of making the transition.

·         In a rapidly converged world, newspapers would have to ask themselves whether they remained a purely text medium. And they were going to have to face the fact that younger readers, especially, were questioning previously accepted notions of journalistic authority.

·         We would have to get used to the idea that audiences were fragmenting and that many people were increasingly finding non-conventional news sources a valuable addition, if not a ready substitute, for mainstream media.

·         Newspapers had to decide how much they embraced these new forms of discourse and dissemination or whether they stood apart from them. Should we be of the web, or simply on it?

·         Thousands of websites would aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it up, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. We were going to have to be more transparent about what we did and earn trust in this new world.

·         But it was hard to see that many would actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim was to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogo-sphere, which was frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiqued, couldn’t ever hope to replicate that. That – assuming people remained interested in serious news – should give us a huge advantage. • • • • • •

·         Against that, the digital world could do many things much better than we could currently do – including niche fragmentation, multimedia, voice, diversity, connectivity, range, scale, speed, responsiveness and community.

·         Our cost base was simultaneously our best protection and a mill stone around our necks. Between them the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited employed well over 600 journalists, more than two dozen of them based around the world. That was half the size of the NYT and a tenth the size of the BBC, but still a significant investment in serious journalism. We could be sunk by our cost base, or it could make what we did difficult for others to replicate.

·         No internet start-up on earth would ever contemplate such an investment in expensive, noncommercially productive people. The Yahoos and Googles of this world were explicit: they had no interest in creating content. They did, however, want to do interesting things with other people’s content. That could be good for us. Or it might not. Google could be our friend or our enemy. Or both.

·         We could not survive into a newspaperless future as a UK-only news company. The audience simply wasn’t rich enough or large enough to support us – and an advertising-supported operation could only work if we could deliver much larger numbers.

·         That meant taking our non-British readers more seriously We would, in particular, have to expand our North American operation. There could be no hope of trying to build a US audience with a paywall.

One of the many things I admired in the book was Rusbridger’s generosity of spirit – evident in his tributes to the support foreign journalists and editors gave in his times of need (in stark contrast to British colleagues); his appreciation of readers’ feedback and loyalty;  and his frequent references to those books and surveys he found helpful.  

The State of the Fourth Estate

Journalists, ironically, don’t tend to get a good press – not according to various polls which rate public trust in various institutions and professions and which generally find journalism in the bottom of the league in such tables.

And Trump hasn’t helped with his constant refrain of “fake media!”

But, until recently, journalism (and the media generally) was recognised as such a crucial part of our system that it was known as the “fourth estate”….. But no more apparently….One recent article indeed referred to the “myth of the fourth estate”

This book chapter gives a good overview of the topic.

Over the years I’ve apparently devoted almost 20 posts to the subject – with more than half in the past 2 years (see below for a full list).  I know this because my very recent post on public services accused journalists of dereliction of duty and I used my “search” button to check out what I have been saying about them over the past decade,  In fact it’s remarkably measured – if not complimentary!

I recognise, for example, that the best writing generally has often come from journalists of the calibre of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin - well before the “new journalism” of the 1970s…….and writers such as Joan Didion and Svetlana Alexievich

Clearly there are journalists …and journalists…..The hierarchy probably starts with “writers” – with specialist “correspondents” having a certain prestige status - and the “run of the mill” sort traditionally known as….”hacks” (presumably from their habit of “hacking” away at the typewriter and with cigarette smoke enveloping them!!). I wonder, however, whether generalist television journalists actually warrant the title of journalist since they use images rather than words???

And people have switched from newspapers to television and the social media. The internet has decimated newspaper advertising and journalists’ jobs – to say nothing of killing investigative budgeting…….

Two other trends have been noticeable –

   -  first a growing number of people are turned off by the grimness of the news coming from their sets and want something more positive. A couple of years ago, for example, The Guardian started a series called The Upside with “good news” stories. But I confess my heart drops a bit when I spot such an item and I rarely click it!

-  And an increasing number of writers are turning to scientific or curious topics and producing fascinating books eg on things such as salt, silence, walking ….even history of economic ideas

Historian Timothy Garton Ash recently produced a large and worthy book exploring such themes (which, another mea culpa, I have not been able to persevere with). It’s called  “Free Speech – 10 principles for a connected  world” and attracted a long review here

We need also to be careful to distinguish journalists as individuals from the corporate structures which employ them.

Most of what might be called the ”sins of commission” (titillation, partiality, bias and downright criminal behaviour) are the results of owners’ and editors’ judgements which reflect their political and financial interests.

Journalists tend to more guilty of “sins of omission” (what they can’t be bothered writing about) and “sins of laziness” (living on press releases)

More specifically my posts have expressed the following concerns

·       Although coverage of what is too easily labelled “corruption” and the blunders of government is extensive, it is too often focused on titillating details - and fails to explore the underlying forces at work eg public spending cuts, ideology, government fashions…

·       articles recognising and exploring the possible effects of such coverage on public cynicism and fatalism are very rare. This raises wider issues about journalistic ethics..   

·       hundreds of thousands of academics and think-tankers (and a few consultants) have been devoting their energies to over the past 40 years to mapping the progress of reforming the public services. But only 2 of tens of thousands of books on the subject have been written by journalists

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.htmlhttps://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/02/bad-economics-and-journalistic.html

Hacks? Critics? Writers?What's in a Name?

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time these past few weeks going over the year’s posts (60) to try to give them a little bit more “shape” ie coherence. It was probably this post back in June which planted the idea of the need for some editing of my posts. For whatever reason, there does seem to have been more of a pattern to my writing this year..  The interest in organisational reform didn’t entirely peter out – but morphed into a larger concern about systems of power and the State..

I will, in a few days, be uploading this year’s collection of posts which also shows that an important thread running through the year has been the need for writing which – as one post put it - 

jolts me – not for its own sake but to help first identify minds which look at the world in original ways but which also understand that clear language is an essential tool for such originality…Recently deceased essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970 but the “creative writing” courses which have contaminated journalism in the past few decades have made me suspicious of even good journalists these days. James Meek remains an exception for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it.

But somehow, academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers – dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events and places. This made me realise, in turn, the fine line there is between such categories as journalist, novelist and travel writer. Or perhaps the distinction is, more properly, that between generalists and specialists – with the latter including not only travel writers but those who focus on books, films, drama and art (designated "critics") and sports (of each variety – including politics).  And the former covering essentially those we refer to, derogatively, as “hacks” – since what they do is to hack out “news” from the public relations handouts they receive

I accept that the focus of my table on the former type of writer is as a result somewhat elitist....

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. I’ve tried googling (in French and in German) to try to get a sense of who might be the equivalent European journalists but the google curse of neophilia means that only references to younger names are given….

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Masha Gessen (RU) Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein (Can)	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif USA Mark Lilla USA Perry Anderson USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron (France) Michael Pollan USA
Journal newspaper television	Oriana Fallaci (It) Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan (US) John Hooper John Pilger Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)

In Praise of Journalists

A “journalistic scrum” has become a sign of the times – reflecting globalization; the 24 hours new cycle; the merging of news-collecting with the entertainment industry; technological change; and the growth in the journalistic profession.

A recently-issued book by a German journalist of the 1920s and 1930s has had me musing about the journalistic craft down the ages…….

We all know about George Orwell who established his reputation in the late 1930s with Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and “The Road to Wigan Pier” (1937). 

But the Hungarian, Arthur Koestler, had been a prolific journalist for the Berlin-based Ullstein press since the early 30s before he burst on the British scene with his Darkness at Noon (1940) reflecting the totalitarianism of the times. Ernest Hemingway also started in European journalism in the 20s and wrote up his experiences of the Spanish Civil War - but was always the novellist. Martha Gellhorn made her name as a war correspondent (see her pieces here); was married to Hemingway for 8 years - and was the better journalist of the two

Victor Serge led one of the most amazing lives as an anarchist in France, Belgium and Russia in the first part of the 20^th century.  Memoirs of a Revolutionary is perhaps his most famous bit of writing (published posthumously in French in 1951) but he wrote extensively from the early 1920s about his experiences in Russia from 1919 (where he was initially hired by Maxim Gorky)

Vassily Grossman is another writer who mixed journalism and novels – becoming famous in Russia for his work as a journalist at the Soviet front (A Writer at War gave us a taste of this in 2005) but having his best work “Life and Fate” – modelled on “War and Peace” - banned and smuggled out of the country to be published 20 years after his death only in 1985

Joseph Roth was a less politically involved journalist – but a master of the feuilleton, a peculiar form of journalism that was especially popular in European newspapers in the early 20th century. Roth described it as “saying true things on half a page” and considered it “as important as politics are to the newspaper. And to the reader it’s vastly more important.” In his confident, controversial way, he added,

“What people pick up the newspaper for is me. Not the parliamentary report. Not the lead article. Not the foreign news….I don’t write ‘witty columns.’ I paint the portrait of the age.”

I am currently enjoying his The Hotel Years  which brings together 64 of Roth’s feuilletons, nearly half of which were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung – of which he was a star reporter in the 20s and 30s. Each of these little essays is a pleasure to read, and regarded collectively they present an invaluable portrait of life in Europe between the two World Wars.

And this we owe to a few brilliant translators …. In this particular case the poet, critic, and translator Michael Hofmann. Without him, the reader of English would hardly know Roth at all. The Hotel Years is the 14th of Roth’s books that he has translated. (Among the others are The Radetzky March, commonly considered Roth’s masterpiece, and Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, a significant work of scholarship that serves as an essential companion to all of Roth’s other writing.

Hofmann’s commentary is insightful and especially helpful in establishing a context for Roth’s life and work. In the introduction to What I Saw — a collection of feuilletons written in Berlin during the years of the Weimar Republic, and the first book of Roth’s journalism to be published in English — Hofmann describes Roth as “a maximalist of the short form.” In these reports from Berlin, as in the pieces collected in The Hotel Years, “What is small is inevitably made to seem vast, and vast things are shrunk into a witty perspective.” The literary journal The Millions has a good review of the book -

"Roth is perpetually engaging, whether he is decrying the Third Reich, criticizing clichéd notions of Russia, enumerating the unpleasant realities of travel, or simply commenting on the quirks of a hotel cook. They are works of satire, driven by Roth’s bristling sense of irony and his unsparing eye for detail. He was a keen observer of everyday life, and he had an ingenious knack for capturing a person or place with a few brief sentences. His essays reveal an obsession with physical descriptions and a fascination with the habits and appearances of the people he encountered, as demonstrated in “The Dapper Traveler:”

 The traveler is clad in a discreet gray, set off by an exquisite iridescent purple tie. With complacent attention he examines his feet, his leather shoes, and the fine knots in the broad laces. He stretches out his legs in the compartment, both arms are casually on the arm rests to either side. Before long the gray traveler pulls out his mirror again, and brushes his dense, black parted hair with his fingers, in the way one might apply a feather duster to a kickshaw. Then he burrows in his case, and various useful items come to light: a leather key-holder, a pair of nail scissors, a packet of cigarettes, a little silk handkerchief and a bottle of eau de cologne.

" So much attention and enthusiasm are given to these kinds of details that it often seems as though Roth is creating a world rather than describing the one that already exists. Taken out of context, in fact, many of the pieces in The Hotel Years could pass as fiction. Some resemble sketches for novels, travel notes, diary entries. It is remarkable that they were published in newspapers — not because they are uninteresting or poorly written, but because they are so different from the kind of work one expects from a journalist.In an essay on the German city of Magdeburg, Roth explains his writing in the following way:

"What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory."

"There is, of course, a transitory nature to this kind of writing. It is short and often very specific, tightly bound to the time and place in which it was written. Roth travelled across Europe, lived in hotels, and wrote essays that were inspired by what he refers to as “the great blessing of being a stranger.”
He is whimsical and frivolous at times, prone to exaggeration, and indulgent of superficial details that fail to leave the reader with any lasting impressions. But many of his essays endure, as mere ephemera do not.

"……..For Roth, writing was not merely a way to make a living, it was a way of life. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, he left the country and never returned. 

“Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean,” he wrote at the time. “Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination…”

" Six years later, at the age of 44, Roth died in Paris from the effects of alcoholism. It is frustrating to think of what he might have written had he lived longer, but not because the body of work that he left behind is lacking. As the present publication of “The Hotel Years” proves, much of Roth’s writing has been neglected. Although he has come to be remembered mostly for his novels, his journalism is equally as impressive".

Who is it, I wonder, who best embodies this sort of work these days? 

There have always been war correspondents – although I was fascinated by this article which explains why no british journalists were on the Waterloo battlefield 200 years ago. Robert Fisk is for me the greatest of these - with his The Great War for Civilisation - the conquest of the Middle East.

As the writing craft has become the subject of university course in recent decades, its practice has perhaps become more precious – although this collection does give a very positive flavour of what has been produced in recent years.

Travelogues have always been popular but globalization giving an added zest in recent decades..…with another interesting trend (at least in the UK) being for novelists such as James Meek, John Lanchester and Andrew Greig to give extensive treatment to political and economic matters….

For my money, three names stick out from the rest of the bunch – Chris Hitchins despite his apostasy, was a powerful and extraordinarily well-read writer…..Clive James’s wit may sometimes be a bit forced (not least in his television coverage) but the range of his (European) reading and analysis has rarely been bettered, with Cultural Amnesia as the jewel in his crown,

Geert Mak is my final choice – not only for his tour de force In Europe – travels through the 20^th Century; but for the creative focus he used on his village (in “An Island in Time – the biography of a village”); his city (“Amsterdam – a brief life of the city”) and his country “The Century of my Father”)

 A Joseph Roth Resource

https://newrepublic.com/article/100482/joseph-roth-letters-michael-hoffman

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/books-interview-michael-hofmann-anglo-german-poet-critic-translator

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/24/joseph-roth-letters-michael-hofmann

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/book-excerpt-the-letters-of-joseph-roth

http://www.ronslate.com/hotel_years_joseph_roth_translated_michael_hofmann_new_directions

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/06/joseph-roth-genius-exile/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/books/review/the-hotel-years-by-joseph-roth.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/jan-morris-joseph-roth-hotel-years-michael-hofmann/

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/joseph-roth-the-hotel-years/#!

A Michael Hoffman resource

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/metric-conversion-why-poet-michael-hofmann-stopped-wreaking-destruction-on-his-family-in-verse-832527.html

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2000072/michael-hofmann