an immedia reaction

The prevalence of PR masquerading as newspaper copy has become a tub-thumping topic for me lately, but I really don’t think people realise quite how pervasive it is. We’re only a weekly newspaper and we get sent all kinds of bollocks that isn’t of any use or relevance to us at all. Some of the information, if it can be trusted, may be quite interesting and could provide for fodder for a national title. But I really wonder what the various PR reps are smoking when they send the following to the South Shropshire Journal newsdesk:

• MAKING A KILLING: Major new report exposes how drug industry greed harms people and animals.
  National campaign group Animal Aid today (September 3) calls on government to crack down on drug industry practices that put profits before all else. In a major new report, entitled Making a Killing: How drug company greed harms people and animals, the group exposes a catalogue of unethical practices beginning with misleading animal tests that are designed to drive up drug sales, which already cost the NHS £11 billion per year. The public’s health also suffers: in 2006, 1 million people were hospitalised in Britain due to adverse drug reactions.
• West Midlands ignored by House of Lords according to new figures.
  Research published today (Tue) reveals that the West Midlands region is vastly underrepresented by Peers in the House of Lords. The figures, released in a paper by the New Local Government Network think tank, show that only 23 Peers live in the region, compared to 123 in London and 100 in the South East. Despite this, the figures show that Peers based in West Midlands are more likely to attend the Lords than people living in London and the South East. Astoundingly, even Peers who register their main address as “Overseas” are more likely to attend the Lords than those living in London and the South East.
• Jane’s 2008 United Kingdom Defence Conference - Free To Media, Date: 28 October 2008, Location: The Radisson Edwardian Mayfair Hotel
  The Key Themes Of This Year’s Jane European Defence Conference Will Be:
  · Defence Technology / Defence Industrial Strategies of the United Kingdom and assess how these are being developed to enable its forces to operate effectively, both singly and in alliance
  · The role of airpower and joint operations involving sea, land and air
  · Inter alia, robotics, nano technology, encryption, biotechnology, the effects of the continuing explosion in ICT
  · The opportunities and threats in information warfare
  · Time lines in relation to the main scientific and technological developments which are and will be challenges to the defence efforts of the UK and its partners.
• The art of speaking without saying a word: what’s in a smile?
  The best and worst celebrity smiles revealed. New research released today by smile the internet bank has revealed that the original Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts has the best smile of all time.
  Eighteen years after her starring role as down-on-her-luck prostitute Vivian Ward almost half (47%) of the great British public voted for Julia as having the most beautiful and genuine smile around.
• Divorce figures for England and Wales have fallen to their lowest rate for 26 years because marriage has become such an unattractive option, a top UK divorce lawyer says.
  British matrimonial and family lawyer Ayesha Vardag (www.ayeshavardag.com) says celebrity divorces, changing social attitudes and an unhelpful legal system are all contributing to a decline in marriages and divorce.

And that was just a small sample. Local newspapers are not about this sort of thing. And while whatever angle the PR companies are pushing might well have some local resonance, we don’t have the time to chase them for it. The only one that came close was the one about representation in the House of Lords. But did I have time to look up who the peers representing south Shropshire were and, in effect, report they were doing a good job despite us being shockingly under-represented? Did I bollocks. There would have been no point in carrying that story, it wouldn’t have changed anything for local people. House of Lords reform is just not on the news agenda of a local weekly paper. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it should be, but I reckon that’s what people buy national papers for.

Secondly, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that nearly all of these so-called “news” items are pushing a commercial product from arms, to divorce lawyers, to internet banking. And if it’s not a product, it’s a point of view, in this instance, antivivisectionism.

And as for sending a delegate to an arms conference, I’m sure it would have been fascinating and I would have loved to have gone. But I couldn’t for the life of me think of a convincing local angle which might have persuaded the editor to let me go…

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 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.

As I was browsing through a discarded copy of The Sun on the train back from Shrewsbury this evening, I stopped to have a quick read of the extracts from Cherie Blair’s memoirs.

There was a box-out section on the left-hand page of a double page spread with a picture of an almost completely naked woman at the top. It turned out to be an account of how Alastair Campbell reacted to news that The Sun was going to publish topless pictures of Carole Caplin, Cherie’s lifestyle guru. Apart from thinking wow, she has really odd nipples, I was intensely amused not only by the brazenness of the paper in re-printing one of aforesaid photos which apparently caused dear Tone such a headache but mainly by the paper’s decision to star out the vowel in “t*ts”. I mean come on people, they’re right there, staring at you from the top of article. The damage is done. Have the courage of your convictions. Write the word “tits”. Is the effect of that particular, uncensored four-letter word really going to be any worse than a picture of a woman naked except for her knickers?

The main body of the extract dealt with dear Tone’s reaction to David Kelly’s death. Apparently it crushed him and he immediately ordered an investigation. Good for him. However, what struck me most was Cherie’s description of events leading up to this. She wrote about the BBC’s row with Downing Street, and how the allegations of dossier sex-upifying had been proved untrue by the Hutton Inquiry (Hannah’s inner monologue cuts in: “Yes Cherie, the Hutton Inquiry, that most unbiased of processes, which no one other than you is convinced by) and the issues surrounding the anonymity of Andrew Gilligan’s source. And then, as I recall, her words were: “Dr Kelly had been named.” She didn’t say who by.

I was powerfully reminded of myself as a small child, after having had a fight with my younger sister, being asked by my mother why the younger child was crying, saying: “She got hurt.” Got hurt by who was obvious, even if I could never bring myself to say it.

I’m tempted to infer from Cherie’s choice of phrase that the decision to release David Kelly’s name to the press, even if not a decision made by Blair himself, was a decision made by his administration that backfired horribly. It’s good of Cherie to let us know how contrite he was. Wasn’t he a nice man and a wonderful Prime Minister?

So between holidaying in Thailand and acquiring a new boyfriend (which has necessitated a lot of commuting to Birmingham and London), you might have noticed I haven’t been posting much. I will do my best to rectify that over the next few days, though this weekend will be suitably hectic with trips down to London then back up to Brum, returning to Ludlow early on Sunday in order to sing in church.. but I digress.

Although, I haven’t been living in London for a while and the whole mayoral election saga has largely passed me by, I would be interested in the thoughts of anyone who is currently living there (or has reason to spend a lot of time there) on this article in The Guardian, which basically accuses The Evening Standard of conducting a highly biased campaign against Ken Livingstone. Was this the case? Did anyone notice? Or are none of you city sophisticates reading newspapers anymore?

Incidentally, for those interested, there is now a “Boris: Not in My Name” group on Facebook should anyone feel the urge to gather in large groups and commiserate that the capital will shortly be going to the dogs…

However, let’s wait and see. A friend of mine has interesting theory. The Tories know Boris is a political nightmare, but he’s a popular one. A Tory mayor is a considerable asset, which they won’t want to screw up. Boris may become little more than a puppet mayor, with the real decisions being made by advisors. That’s not much comfort if you’re still not on side with most Tory policy.. but it may at least mean he is prevented from implementing some of his dafter ideas.

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.

This piece which appeared on the BBC site last week touched on a lot of issues that I feel very strongly about.

I’m only going to deal with one in particular here, but it’s also worth noting that I feel vindicated by the description of a climate of “managed fear” where “children” are constantly texting parents to re-assure them they’re safe. I feel it’s an extension of the problem our society has with its constant obsession with paedophiles. And we all know what Hannah thinks about that. Humph. A second issue raised that I have strong views on is the place of “good” news stories in today’s media agenda, but more on that another time.

The main thrust of the article is about the perception of “children” by the public and the media. Research has shown the most common portrayals of “young people” in news stories are as victims, celebrities or criminals. All three categories have the potential to be degrading to “young people” (given the “value” attached to “celebrity” these days…) and none are hugely useful labels for society as a whole.

In my professional life lately, I have written a number of broadly positive stories about “young people.” This included a feature where I went on a police drive around to meet the local hoodie population who, if you believed certain local councillors are to be found regularly shagging in local greenery and are constantly plastered. Yes, some of the people I met were slightly drunk, but none of them were being hugely anti-social. Three lads even broke into an impromptu dance routine for us, playing an mp3 file on one of their mobiles. Happen in London, it would not.

There are certain sections of Ludlow who like to think there is an anti-social behaviour problem here. If you ask me, they have no idea. Ludlow is a paradise compared to numerous larger places. Yet, negative coverage of “the young” nationwide has had a trickle down effect on perceptions of “the yoof” here and though there are some troublemakers, the majority are guilty of nothing more than wanting something to do.

So, where I can counter this with positive stories about “young people”, I do.

Now, you are probably noticing the proliferation of quotation marks as I have attempted to describe that section of the population which is not adult. The problem is this: it is incredibly difficult to write about anyone under 21 without sounding patronising/stupid/just plain wrong.

In my experience, and I was one once, young people don’t call themselves “young people.” At the age of 23, with a full-time job, I would happily refer to myself as a young professional. But I tie myself in knots when trying to refer to people younger than myself.
Children - only covers people upto the age of 12
Teenagers - only covers people aged 13 - 19
Kids - patronising
Youngsters - even more so
Youth - has connotations of referring only to males and, at a push, Nazi brainwashing
Young people - too generic, too constructed, I’m technically a young person, (I know I am, everyone I meet over 60, and there’s quite a few of those around here, tells me I am) but I’m not convinced that term is meant to apply to me.

You see, back then (and now, if I’m honest), I didn’t think of myself as a young person. I was (and am) Hannah. Hannah likes watching Have I Got News For You and reading Discworld novels. Hannah likes going to the theatre and to the cinema and watching live bands. And concerts. Hannah has a diverse range of interests not linked to her age.

I think what I’m trying to see is that we need to start seeing people who aren’t legally adults as people, before we see them as anything else. Yes, some of their needs will be specifically related to their age, but they are human first and foremost. And they should be treated as such rather than demonised on the one hand or hedged around with patronising jargon on the other.

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.