an immedia reaction

After finishing the excellent, if densely written, Unspeak by Steven Poole which analyses the hidden persuasiveness attached to various words and phrases commonly used in politics and the media, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the words I use when writing. Without wanting to sound egotistical, everything I write has the potential to alter how people see things. I have an ethical duty to be as neutral as possible.

Along with Flat Earth News, Unspeak should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in news and current affairs, whether as a consumer or producer. (Interesting side note: Both are campaigning books with a corresponding website, anyone know how much of a trend this is? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I hadn’t spotted something new, knowing my general speed of uptake on these things, but still… I wonder how many books of this type do this sort of thing?)

Anyway, I was dealing with a press release yesterday for a dance group that said it provided aerial dance workshops for both “disabled” and “non-disabled” people. I wasn’t happy with this wording. “Non-disabled” is effectively a double negative and jars grammatically. Yet, by adding the extra prefix, it implies that the non-disabled people are the ones who are different, who have the problem. “Non” is usually used to mark something out as different, as in “nonconformist”. For the “disabled” people to be seen as the norm makes a nice change. Yet I didn’t feel I could leave “non-disabled” in as it seems clumsy and unnecessary as a construction. Yet, I couldn’t really write “for disabled and able people” as that just draws even more attention to disability and marks it out. In the end, I substituted both with the phrase “for people of all abilities”. It wasn’t entirely satisfactory, as it could mean for people who have done aerial dancing before and those who have never done it in their lives, but hopefully the meaning was vague enough that anyone reading it would feel they could go and take part.

It may seem trivial, but I really feel these things are important. Attention to detail is important for good journalism. And don’t worry, I did get plenty of other things done as well.

I discovered something other day. It is very difficult to write a letter objecting to a planning or licensing application without sounding like a reactionary idiot whose common sense filter has been clogged with the dust of unwarranted outrage.

A friend told me she was planning to object to the conversion of a local pub in her area into a lap dancing club. She has lived there all her life and knows many people who feel pretty strongly about the issue. I advised them to write individually, as recent experience writing licensing stories has taught me councils consider numbers of letters rather than numbers of signatures at the bottom of them. Thus, a petition only counts as one letter. Even if lots of people have signed it. It might have some sway if the numbers are substantial, but there’s no guarantee of this.

However, there are only four criteria for objecting to the change of licence that a local council will accept as legitimate. As a result of the 2003 Licensing Act, lap dancing establishments only require a Premises License, like those granted to pubs. Under the Act, the only objections that a licensing body will take into account are those made relating to public order, public safety, protecting children from harm or creating a public nuisance.

As my friend discovered, when you actually want to object to a lap dancing club on moral grounds, it becomes very difficult to fit this into such a specific list. She ended up talking about the high probability of drunken stag night revellers increasing levels of crime and disorder and noise pollution and creating an intimidating environment for the large numbers of elderly people living nearby who might fear for their safety as a result.

I know the area where she lives, and while all these things are perfectly possible, the stunted nature of the acceptable objection criteria force any potential letter writers to adopt extreme positions that don’t necessarily reflect their actual views. Not all lads out on stag nights are automatically boozy twats, for example.

In the past, I have marvelled at the strident tone adopted by some letter writers whose objections I have read while looking through planning and licensing application notes while at work. What I also found strange was that the tone of all these letters was so similar. I can’t remember the precise criteria for objecting to planning applications, but I do recall that they are similarly prescriptive.

Yes, some people will object to anything given the chance, and a disliking for the colour of the landlord’s shirt should never be given precedent as a reasonable objection for opposing an application for late license. But surely there is room for a broader set of criteria? Or if there were no criteria at all, I would hope planning and licensing officers are competent enough to weed out personally motivated objections from reasonable ones.

As for the lap dancing clubs, I don’t think their licences should be on a par with that of pubs in the first place. Personally, I object to the idea of them, and don’t appreciate the workings of a licensing process which doesn’t let me voice these views in the way I would wish. In the past, I have thought some objectors rather barmy in their tone and choice of language, but having witnessed the complaints procedure from the other side, I now understand their frustration with a so-called democratic process that stifles their right to truly express themselves and fully take part in the licensing procedure.

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.

The title of this blog post is my attempt to capture some of the confused, nay schizophrenic, thinking about children in our society that seems to be pervading both the media and political climates right now.

The genesis of this post came while I was listening to PM on Radio 4 while making dinner this evening. A slightly different version of this story followed by a potted version of this broadcast got me thinking.

Rowan Williams has articulated something I very much agree with. Proposed changes in how the police deal with young people found with knives and new advisory guidelines suggesting children shouldn’t drink alcohol in their parents’ homes until aged 12 (an attempt to deal with binge drinking) are part of a raft of measures that increasingly narrow the perceptions of young people. I think the Archbishop is right here, we are methodically, even if not consciously, demonising younger people.

I’ve written before here and here about particular aspects of this problem and don’t want to repeat myself as that’s not the point of the post.

The point is that, on the one hand, we are increasingly terrified of our “young people” and on the other, increasingly terrified for them. The murder of an ex police-officer suspected of being a paedophile appalls and sickens me. Yes, he may have been guilty of gruesome offences, but that’s for the courts to decide, not a vigilante loner. This man was subjected to abuse and forced to move house, he was being hounded at his mother’s house, where he was eventually killed. Convicted paedophiles deserve help, not abuse, and this man wasn’t even a convicted offender. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

As a society, we are keen to absolve ourselves of individual responsibilities and expect the police to do everything, including parenting. This is a dangerous mindset as it means we are willing to give up our freedoms piece by piece. A local police sergeant told me the other day the government were introducing legislation that would make it a criminal offence for “young people” to return to certain areas within in a certain time, having been moved on by police. He said it would be an arrestable offence. I said: “So you mean you’ll be able to arrest people for standing on particular areas of pavement?” His response was along the lines that such legislation would largely be irrelevant in Shropshire as “young people” round here are rather well-behaved when compared to places like London or Manchester. This did not re-assure me.

The thing is, the police shouldn’t need to be responsible for young people on the street at night. Parents need to accept that they have a responsibility to society to discipline their own children. A sensible parent would do their best to make sure their child wasn’t roaming the streets getting drunk or pulling knives on people. Likewise, a sensible parent would keep close tabs on their children if there was a suspected paedophile in their neighbourhood. But they wouldn’t kill this person.

I can’t currently think of a resolution that will marry these two attitudes towards children into some cohesive whole. Except that our society’s perception of children/young people/youngsters and the dangers from them and that they face is severely flawed and needs rethinking fast.

(Cross-posted to Pulpfact)

While my Christian credentials may be somewhat dubious, I am nothing if not a feminist, in the truest sense of the word. To me, feminism means simply this: that you believe in equality between men and women. Not subjugation of men by women, not compulsory castration of men by women, but a world of equal rights, equal pay and equal freedoms. Where women don’t ever have to be afraid of men and women’s behaviour is not limited by male expectation or prejudice.

That’s not an all-encompassing definition and could probably use a little work, but it’s the best I can come up with on the fly.

In the light of my feminist convictions, and my mother’s professional vocation as a chaplain, I would like to bring this to your attention. In a large part because of what she has achieved and had to put up with in her professional life, there is no one I have a higher regard for than my mum.

It’s a petition for lay members of the Church of England to be submitted to the House of Bishops asking that they appoint senior female clergy to bishoprics. In my view, the idea of women bishops was effectively sanctioned when they allowed the first women to be ordained. If you’re going to let them in at the lowest rung of the ladder and apply a meritocracy, it’s inevitable that some will eventually become suitably qualified for such positions.

I’m not saying you have to sign it and for some of you, it might not accord with your own religious beliefs, or lack of. But I thought I’d throw it out there and see what happened…

(cross-posted to Pulpfact)

The BBC Radio Listen Again service is amazing and wonderful and useful, but in this instance, it is frustrating, because although I can find the programme I want, the section of it I want to highlight is not available to be heard again. But this proves that Dr Elaine Storkey was the speaker on Thought for the Day on Thursday last week, and you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that what she was saying was broadly this:

In a time of global economic uncertainty, government policies are performing an about face. Up to now, our economic concern has been with expansion, acquisition and globalisation. It’s all about having more. Dr Storkey’s argument was that we need to learn to be satisfied with enough. She talked about “the economics of enough” saying that we had to change our economic model to one of contraction, rather than expansion and that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

She didn’t go on to make what I think is the next logical point, that we have to change our entire lifestyle if we are to have any hope whatsoever of avoiding self-destruction. My boyfriend is an engineer who designs interior heating and air conditioning systems for the construction industry, while trying to make them as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. He specialised in renewable technologies in the final year of his degree and tells me it’s impossible that all our current energy needs will be met by renewable energy alone. It will have to be nuclear or nothing, unless we’re prepared only to use computers when the sun is out or when it’s particularly windy.

Driving back from an assignment yesterday, I was listening to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 and while I’ve noticed that Jeremy Vine doesn’t always go in for the most nuanced of discussions, it was hard not to listen to his studio guest who said most of the usable oil would be gone in 30 years and Vine’s own comment that he’d heard somewhere that the planet could actually only support 3 billion of the current global population of 8 billion.

If any of this can be accorded any significance, we need to start changing our lifestyles now. I know we’re all going to die anyway, but I’m feeling increasingly millenarian about the whole thing. One of my worst nightmares is that civilisation will collapse and I’ll be forced to eat those around me to survive. I honestly don’t think nuclear power is either a safe or sensible option given the current political tensions across the globe that show no sign of diminishing.

We should be building big wooden sailing ships so we can still travel when the only power we have is the wind. We should be slowing down our drive for economic growth and start doing things because they are the right thing rather than because they will make us money. We need to live in smaller communities with facilities close by so we can walk and cycle. We need to, as they do in Ludlow, collect all food waste separately from everything else and compost it and use it as biofuel. Locally, we also recycle cans, paper, cardboard and plastic. One of the best things about where I’m living at the moment is that practically everything is recycled. My flatmate and I get through one black binliner of waste that isn’t recyclabe or reusable a month. We need to get used to the idea that things will take longer, that travel takes time and the pace of life will have to change.

And then yesterday evening, I drove to my boyfriend’s house in Birmingham all alone in my diesel-powered, air-conditioned car. I felt guilty with every roll of the wheels. I still did it. I use energy saving lightbulbs, unplug everything when I’m not using it, walk to work and back, shop in the local butchers, grocers and bakers and avoid going to the supermarket at every opportunity. But I think we’re still doomed.

(cross-posted to Pulpfact)

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?

The exchange between Frank Field and Alistair Darling in this article on the BBC News website gives me one more reason to love Frank Field.

A promising figure in the early Blair administration, Frank Field was re-shuffled out of cabinet fairly early on, due to actually having good ideas and daring to challenge the leadership. As I remember anyway.. I was only 13 at the time, so I freely admit I may not have perfect recall of this. However, he went on to become an active backbencher, the kind of politician who actually makes a name for themselves by working to improve things for people. Something of a maverick in his party, but one that raises their own profile by actually doing their job as a representative of the people. Rather than by being appointed to high office and having no time for such trivial things as they’re too busy cocking up national policy. Ahem.

And while admittedly he was onto something of a winner with his fight against the proposed scrapping of the 10p tax rate, which Everyone with a capital E seemed to consider A Bad Move^TM on the part of the government, the fact that he admits that personally dislikes Gordon Brown only increases my admiration of him.

Genuine honesty is so rare in politics. We’re reduced to the meeja telling us: “We’re fairly sure X hates Y”. I can’t help feeling that politics would appeal so much more to the general public if politicians came out and said “Well actually, we dislike each other intensely, but we’re doing our best to work together.” And then, when policies didn’t work, we’d know why and who to blame. And we wouldn’t have to put up with all this waffle about circumstances, funding, political climate and so on.

Alistair Darling was very gracious in his acknowledgement of Frank Field’s apology, but if only he had had the balls to say: “We made a mistake, and now we’re worried you’re going to trash us in this by-election. We’re very sorry, please vote for us. Everyone knows the Tories I rubbish.” Or something.

You never know… it might just work…