an immedia reaction

I have now finished the really excellent Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. And although my initial reaction was that I should find a handy gun and shoot myself in the head before I become a part of the corporate news factory that he so derides, I have since hit upon a more constructive course of action. Spreading the word.

One thing Davies points out is how news is created by PR companies for specific interest groups who generate events and then let newspapers know about them. The newspapers then report them. My feelings on this is that it can be malign or benign in impact, depending on the nature of the organisation being promoted. However, I think if people are to read news intelligently, the best question they can ask themselves when reading a story is: whose interests are served by this story?

From that starting point, a whole series of questions begins: Who is speaking? What are they saying and why? What are they not saying and why? Who is being denied a voice? Why? What would they say if they were speaking? These questions are not exhaustive and may not need to be answered to give a complete story in every case. But in any story with a political slant, any semi-intelligent person should be asking them from the word go. But always begin with “Who benefits?”

And look out for those PR-created stories, those manufactured events. Do you really need to know that a few weeks ago, it was National Childminding Week? As designated by the National Child Minders Association. Or local towns entered in the Great Britain Clean Town Awards by local councils. Even the council officers aren’t entirely sure why they’re taking place and chose towns to be entered for them. They were sent a request to enter towns. At the end of the competition, there’ll be some judging somewhere and then a big dinner hosted by The British Cleaning Council. Who call themselves the voice of the cleaning industry. To quote a playground insult, who died and made you king? I’m all for a more hospitable living environment, but really, who needs to know? Think about it. Do you?

I didn’t include these anecdotes in the last post, as it was growing rather unwieldy, but today I ran into two obstacles to my attempts to avoid the PR trap.

The first was when I couldn’t explore an unusual angle in a story I received two press releases about because this particular aspect was related to another story our paper had written, which had resulted in a complaint. The complaints procedure is still ongoing and though the story I had in mind could easily have been a positive one, it was safer just to leave out that angle altogether. So I did.

And the second was when I attempted to follow up a remark that had been made to me while I was out reporting something else. A local organisation has appointed someone to a community outreach position. The person has not signed any employment agreement yet. However, I had news of the appointment from the head of the organisation himself. But both his deputy and the appointee were not happy to go on record until everything was official. This is fair enough, but what really took my biscuit was that they said once everything was confirmed, they would issue a press release. So I’m stuck in limbo, knowing this is a practically a done deal but unable to write anything about it. It’s got to the stage where I have to wait for a press release before I can write anything. By the time the story is confirmed, my deadline will have passed, it will be stale news and everyone else will know about it as well. So much for originality.

A good few years ago, I remember listening to a report about a London prison on the Today programme. At the time, my mum worked in that prison and was able to point out several inaccuracies in the report. I remember thinking then, if there were that many mistakes and half-truths in that report, how many were there in everything else that was produce as “news”?

When I was a bit older and on work experience at newspapers during my school holidays, and even for periods of time during my newspaper training, I was often given press releases to re-write. On one occasion, at one of the country’s most respected national titles, I was given the previous day’s editions of all the other main titles and told to check through them for any stories the publication I was at might have missed that would fit in with its news agenda.

At the time, I accepted these tasks as the lot of the work-ex, handed down by the real journalists who were obviously important and busy finding the real stories. Only they never seemed to do much. They would be on the phone a fair bit, read news wires and occasionally, it seemed, write something. A lot of the time I was bored. And reading grainy computer screens to find out what was happening was not my idea of what journalism was. Surely, journalists went out to find out was happening? They didn’t sit around for it to be told to them by someone else.

What I was seeing was something that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger mentioned in a lecture he gave my year of Cardiff University Journalism postgrads. That something has since been published as Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. Based on research carried out by colleagues of the tutors who taught me my trade, Davies has uncovered disturbing truths about the lack of original news published in some of the established beacons of the British national media. Using fairly conservative estimates, Davies suggests that only between 12% and 20% of news in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail is original work. The rest is either of press releases re-produced verbatim or stories where the work of PRs is noticeable to varying degrees. He doesn’t go into detail, but Davies does not believe this problem is limited either to those five papers or to only the print industry.

At first, this wasn’t as shocking as it would have been if I hadn’t already had a sneak preview of some of the book’s conclusions. But still, when I started work as a “professional” in my chosen field, I was surprised by the amount of submitted copy, but the colleagues I joined at the time seemed to think it was the way our industry was moving. Both of them, generated large amounts of original copy as well, and it seems to me that small regional offices like the one I am in are some of the few places where you still have the opportunity to do that.

According to Davies, both national newspapers and the BBC take a very high percentage of their stories from the Press Association which aims to cover the entire country with a staff of only 70 reporters. These correspondents are frequently shuffled around and are not specialists in the areas to which they are posted. The papers and broadcasters recycle each other’s stories and leave vast tracts uncovered. I’m about a third of the way through the book and it is truly frightening the extent to which major news outlets rehash each other’s output, due to the pressures of time and space. That is, a lack of time in which to check facts and research stories and a vast surplus of space which needs filling.

Davies believes this malaise affects the whole industry, as the commercialisation of news has led to staff cuts to increase profits. This has been accompanied by an expansion in the amount of space to fill so adverts can be sold alongside it to maximise profit. The growth of the internet has also meant that reporters are now trying to produce enough copy to fill multiple platforms and have less time than ever to do it. The result is what he calls “churnalism”.

I try my hardest to find original stories, but I couldn’t tell you how much of my output is 100% completely original. And I had a realisation yesterday that I am about to become incredibly complicit in the problem. Because I have agreed to address a networking meeting of local charities and voluntary organisations on how to write better press releases to help improve their relations with local media. They have advertised this event, partly on the basis that I am going to be there, and I don’t see how I can now pull out, without making things awkward for them and, at the same time, inconveniencing some of my contacts.

We receive an enormous amount of submitted material from all sorts of people and organisations. A lot of it badly-written, uninteresting and frequently buries the most interesting angle of the story. This is not deliberate. The majority are not glossy releases produced by shiny, hyper-efficient PR outfits. And not everything we are sent makes it in to the paper. But when a well-written, concise and accurate press release drops into the inbox, it can be dispensed with quickly, leaving time to get on with other things. Yet looking at the story in the copywriter, I feel no sense of achievement because I have little role in producing it. When we receive a press release that is poorly-constructed, it can be an unwelcome effort to try to untangle what the hell it is actually talking about, but at least if I ring someone up to find out, I’m checking up on what I’ve received, but this takes time.

I have written before about my ideal journalistic world which would actually give people the chance to find proper stories free from commercial and time pressures. And I have come to the same conclusion as I did in a recent post about the state of the environment, as caused by free market capitalism. It doesn’t produce a healthy world in which to live. And I agree with Nick Davies, these commercial pressures do not produce healthy journalism.

So what can I do about it and about my own role in this system?

Well, I will be addressing this small gathering on Thursday and doing my best to stress the importance of face-to-face communication. And interviews rather than just releases. That takes some of the predictability out of the occasion and at least allows the journalist a chance of finding out something different, genuine and interesting. And I made a resolution at the end of my working day yesterday that I would find something to query in every press release I was sent. Some fact to check, some angle left unexplored. Something, anything, to add to or correct the wisdom I received over the e-mail… And I will make a conscious effort to take time out to investigate. For a start, the Freedom of Information Act is there, I should make a lot more use of it.

I can’t guarantee I’ll find all of the truth. But I’ll keep trying my best.

Somewhat surprisingly, I have been asked to contribute to a friend’s group blog, possibly to stop me hanging around bitching in the comment threads. So if you’re interested in ranting of a slightly different kidney (i.e. completely random), you can check out Pulpfact where I shall be occasionally posting and cross-posting depending on how well I think what I write for them fits in with the ethos of this site, and vice-versa.

I’m hoping that having two blogs to write for will generally encourage me to be more productive, rather than put me off doing so altogether. And hey. Practice makes perfect right?

I’ve not had my new mac very long and it’s very different to the ones I trained on when doing my journalism course. I remember a lot of how the interface is set up and where you have to go to do certain actions, and even the ancient macs we have at work follow the rule that closing the programme window itself doesn’t mean you have exited the programme.

However, I think I have finally managed to work out how to copy photos from my photo library into a separate file and edit them without the changes I make being applied in the original folder to the original file. But it was rather annoying that this didn’t happen automatically. And when I open each file to edit it, iPhoto opens it as a new “event”. When you download images off your camera, it groups them by date taken, which is very useful, but calling the copied image a whole new event, really isn’t. But, it’s early days yet and I’m still quite taken with it.

Since persuading my ex that he really wanted to give me a pro Flickr account as a Christmas present, I’ve been quite taken with the site, but still use Facebook more. Flickr’s management of photos is infinitely superior, but I haven’t dared get sucked in to all the networking aspects of it, for fear of losing even more of my soul to the internet.

However, I noticed today that it lets you create badges of your images and thought I would draw your attention to some of my photos of the balloon flight I enjoyed yesterday morning, as a feature assignment for the paper.

I wanted to edit the source code to condense the rectangle widthways and expand it heightwise but couldn’t see where in the code it might be written. I think it’s written in css, any suggestions what I might be looking for..?

Edit: After copy-posting some code The Telf suggested, I’ve now got this a more manageable size, and managed to change the height as well as the width…

I then generated some more source code in flickr to see if I could work out whether I could change the number of photos you’re allowed to display. The options are something like 1, 3, 5 and 10. I I’d like something like 12 or 9. But either I wasn’t looking in the right place to see where the numbers changed (I generated code for 10 pictures and then 5 and tried to compare the two… I guess I could always copy past them into a word document and go through it line by line.. sigh.) or they won’t let you modify it to that extent…

Still, the current display is better than was. So I shall continue messing for a while longer

The idea that badly behaved children could have their DNA placed on a database to monitor them before they become full-blown criminals, as it were, horrifies me.

It sounds like something out of Minority Report. DNA testing has proved a remarkable tool for solving crimes years after they took place. Leaps in technology have meant many people have been brought to justice who would have otherwise avoided detection. This is a good thing. But we must draw the line somewhere. This is a gross violation of civil liberties. Innocent until proven guilty? Anyone?

If you think someone is at risk of turning into a criminal, change their situation. Educate them, give them opportunities. Discipline them early so they get the message that bad behaviour is not rewarded. Anything but this.

Fortunately, it seems the comments were an individual’s personal views and not those of the establishment. But God help us if Gary Pugh ever gets into any kind of position to implement such crazy ideas. There are enough children on that database already, who have committed no crime and have no criminal record.

This wasn’t the article I originally wanted to link to, but I couldn’t find the one I read earlier. That article had some random statistic in it saying something like 72% of ASBOs were given to people aged under 21. I know nothing about the credibility of such a figure.. but in the light of my last post, I can’t help wonder, if that statistic is true, whether it reflects society’s general criminalisation of people under 21, rather than a genuine problem with potential young offenders.

And while this next video may not meet my exacting standards for being as good as the original, the use of so much fruit for such a purpose has to be met with, at the very least, a great deal of respect.

I also admire the humour created by the wanton destruction of a window and the toad falling out of the drain pipe. And I find it very fitting that an advert which uses a cover version of a song is then parodied itself in this fashion.

I’m not usually a fan of cover versions. Unless the the new version does something completely unexpected or creates something new, interesting and a work of art in its own right I’m not interested. Especially in Madonna’s cover of American Pie and whoever it was in the last few years who covered The Weakness in Me by Joan Armatrading, whilst having a voice nowhere near as good. They sang it too fast as well, whoever they were. It was so much worse than the original that I can’t be bothered expending energy on finding out who it was.

Anyway, when I first saw this, I was a massive fan, of both the track and the ad, they work together so well:

What I didn’t know until last weekend was that the song was actually a cover. See below for the original.

The second video is, I think, less effective. But I love the original song. It’s by a Swedish band, consisting of a brother and sister, called The Knife.

I just love the fact that the cover took the essence of the song and did something completely different with it. And they’re both fantastic. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But the original artist should only be flattered if the imitation is any good.

Those of the four, perhaps five, of you who read this thing on a regular basis will be aware of my thoughts about attempts to get pictures of children published in newspapers without giving their names. Because of apparent paedophiles. I know that’s an awful lot of self-linkage there, but I don’t want to repeat myself too much with this post.

Before I start, let me make it quite clear this is my personal opinion, on a topic I have experienced professionally, but I am not expressing this opinion on behalf of my employers.

But, I was amused, though mostly annoyed by what I consider the stupidity of the school which decided to cover up the faces of children pictured on its website, with smiley faces. The Daily Mail has copies of the pictures. The BBC explains that the smiley faces were used because, due to a technical glitch, the school could not blur the children’s faces.

I’ve looked on the school’s site. I can’t find the pictures with smiley faces, but they certainly blur out the faces on other group photos on the site.

I can barely begin to articulate why I find both these actions so completely ridiculous. However, I shall proceed to try at some length: Firstly, the smiley faces are simultaneously stupid, while being distinctly unnerving. The blurred faces are just downright creepy. “Come to our school, where we don’t have real children, but some kind of blank automaton!” they seem to say.

The pictures I could find were small pictures, of large groups, probably at low resolution, like most web images, and there are no names on them anyway. Why do you need to blur these faces? These are nameless children in a school uniform. They are not identifiable to begin with. All you could say about an individual child is that they go to this school and have a certain colour hair, as do a lot of other children.

Moving on; the teachers’ faces aren’t blurred. Don’t they deserve equal protection from rampant sex offenders with a taste for more mature flesh? The perverts of this world don’t just restrict their activities to preying on those under 18 dontcherknow? In fact, apart from those involved in the alleged care home scandal in Jersey, recent cases in the media have dealt with murderous rapists targetting fully grown women. Steve Wright anyone? Tell you what, let’s blur their faces out too, or replace them with clown masks. That way, no one can be identified and potentially raped.

Not only are the school’s actions ridiculously over the top as far as child protection measures are concerned, but they defeat the point of the pictures entirely. Pictures are supposed to accompany, enliven and illustrate text. Pictures with blurred faces are boring and do not do this.

I understand that the internet is a big scary place where a lot of the bad guys hang out, and that internet publication is seen as different from print because it’s permanently accessible. But not everything out there is bad and there are better ways to protect children, such as password-protected site areas, as the BBC points out. But even those can be thwarted by the outwardly respectable father-of-three who actually browses the web for child porn in his spare time, while sending his darling daughters to the local comprehensive.

I don’t want to belittle the suffering of victims of abuse. I am fortunate never to have been abused and I can’t even begin to imagine what it is like for those who have. But as a society, we are looking in the wrong place for the risk. I think most visitors to the website are likely to be prospective parents, not prospective perverts. If I was such a parent, I would feel offended and disconcerted. Such measures only add to the unnecessary fear surrounding the issue and demonise the general public for no good reason.