One of the many accusations thrown at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is that he’s not a journalist. This is important in America where hacks enjoy some protection under the constitution. In the UK being described as “not a journalist” would perhaps be regarded as a compliment.
The definition of journalist is confusing anyway and Assange doesn’t help. In a Guardian online chat he says that he co-authored his first book before he was 25, then worked in TV and newspapers. The implication is that “journalist” is synonymous with “writer”. It’s not. Although it’s an easy mistake to make. And why should anybody care?
Most readers are probably no more concerned with how their daily paper is created than they are about the production processes involved in making a tin of beans. In fact, behind every by-line there are many more unnamed editors, sub-editors and production staff. That’s just in editorial, excluding printers, ad sales, circulation, accountants and all the rest.
The process of deciding what goes into a newspaper, magazine, broadcast news bulletin or website is equally opaque, but important in terms of channelling consciousness. You can’t have an opinion on something unless you at least know it exists. So, what is news?
By at least one popular definition Assange is definitely a star. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”
At first glance that seems a noble journalistic aspiration. But it comes from Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail. If you think about it, the papers with the highest proportion of “news” by this definition are the Sunday tabloids. There’s no shortage of minor so-called “celebrities” who’d want to suppress the salacious stories of sex and drug-taking that fill their pages.
This is certainly not to say that investigative, even muckraking, journalism is a bad thing. I’m sure there’s nobody at the Caledonian Mercury who wouldn’t want to see more of it, provided it’s exposing the powerful institutions and individuals that are abusing their positions. In fact we are looking at mechanisms such as OpenLeaks which will encourage whistle-blowers while protecting their identities.
But, really what’s been lost in the slow death of printed media is not so much the glamorous exposé, but the mundane. We feel we know more about Egypt or the US presidential campaign than we do about Holyrood. That’s because the economics of the supermarket are applied to information. It makes financial sense for news organisations to focus on what will attract the audience with the greatest spending power for the lowest cost.
The counter-argument is that an increasing amount of information is available online, undistorted by the bias of journalism. I just wonder how many people, for instance, actually read through the council committee minutes or lists of expenditure which are available online. Again, it’s the information supermarket situation, providing massive choice doesn’t necessarily mean people are better nourished.
In what some regard as a golden age of journalism there simply wasn’t the technology available to distribute this sort of information widely. For better or worse, the only source for most people was what had been chosen by the media. That process of selection was and is editing.
At its best editing is carried out as a team with individuals arguing about, for instance, the key points of a story and how important it is relative to what else is going on. Reporters, the visible face of journalism, provide the quotes and other raw material which then goes through a sausage machine of sub-editors and editors who will cut, rewrite and perhaps ask for more detail before a story is published. It’s a system that has worked for perhaps 200 years in print and, later, broadcast media. But its labour-intensive nature means it’s disappearing fast certainly from newspapers.
The transparency that technology can bring is, however, beginning to create alternatives to “traditional” editing. Most come under the heading “curation”, horrible word, but I didn’t choose it. In many cases it’s a reaction to the growing feeling that Google is broken as so-called “content farms” fill search results with spam. Even Google admits there’s a problem and has released an experimental tool to deal with it.
But the heart of the problem is that search engines are machines. To really create meaningful search, human intervention is required. Let Google do the sifting, then real people can edit the results. This isn’t new. It’s almost identical to the process carried out behind the closed doors of newspaper offices. Who knows, people might even read through those council minutes if they know they’re going to find something interesting to them.
There are similarities between curation and the way Wikipedia has developed into a surprisingly accurate work of reference. There is no reason that “news” shouldn’t be treated the same way with suggestions for alternative or additional sources, challenges to conclusions and so on. The idea that a news story has a beginning, a middle and an end is a convenient fiction created to fit the days when newspaper presses had to roll at a particular time.
I’m currenly testing a number of curation tools including Storify, Scoop.It and Qrait to see which one or ones would be most appropriate for the Caledonian Mercury. I’m not sure whether the rest of the contributors to this site would agree, but I’d love to see a greater socialisation of news making it accessibly bite-sized, but with an option to go deeper.
As for whether this will lead to the demise of the professional journalist, that’s partly a matter of definition. What remains true is that you don’t need to be able to write to be the source of a news story. Whether you’re Julian Assange being emailed thousands of secret diplomatic cables or a whisky-soaked hack mingling with gangsters or politicians, it’s the raw material that’s vital. The writing can be entirely separate.
Related posts: