Some thoughts on Journalism

It’s been a while since I last went on a school trip- especially one that didn’t involve asking middle-aged mums from Kent about parking in their dreary town centers.

As part of the NCTJ course (an accredited journalism training programme) that I’m taking at Lambeth College, I had the opportunity to attend the Society of Editor’s conference, an annual meeting of the industry’s top editorial staff, freedom of information campaigners and veteran journalists, to discuss the most pressing issues that currently faces journalists working in the print medium. The day consisted of panel debates relating to reforms in press regulations, the relationships between journalists and the police as well as the conduct of ‘responsible journalism’- and how to address the balance between reporting and national security.

There’s a collection of really good blogs (most by fellow Lambeth students) here

While I won’t go through each of the debates with a fine comb (the blogs do have more details regarding them anyway)  I thought it might be worth highlighting the key points from the conference, which may help those working in the industry, or others wanting to join it.

 ‘Journalism is changing’
A point that almost everyone knows in theory, but not so much in practice.

Journalism is going through a transition stage at the moment. While the UK still has a very healthy amount of newspapers and magazines in circulation, the medium of mass printing is dying; in other words, people are less likely to spend a large % of their daily income on newspapers.

As the Press Gazette reports here most national printed papers have seen a rapid decline in their readership in less than a decade- in part because of steep increases in price, but more because news is more accessible- and free- online.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s keynote address made this quite clear, stating that the biggest challenges facing the press were that of advertising revenues and monetizing content. At the same time, she said that the challenge of the local press came from larger institutions like the BBC, who could lift local content and broadcast it to a much wider audience. 

In this case, the ‘media’ face a number of problems at once;

(a) To reassert its relevance to local and national democracy.
(b) To build better brands, particularly on digital platforms
(c) To compete against bigger agencies and broadcasters with larger audiences
(d) To find the funding needed to continue journalistic practice.

Proposed regulations aren't ideal- but it might be better than the alternatives

 I’ve blogged previously on why the Royal Charter would dilute the roles and responsibilities of the press- something I still believe. But the conference did hold a terrific debate on how journalists might work under the new system.

The panel discussion- which featured  the Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti and Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke, highlighted the difficulty for British journalists in acquiring information. One example given related to the difficulty she had in getting information relating to MPs expenses- which the Telegraph eventually broke thanks to a whistleblower. Brooke said: “Information that should be in the public domain t is suppressed and it creates a sort of black market”

Chakrabarti said she had no desire for ‘absolute transparency’, acknowledging that secrecy was essential for a state to protect its national interests, but also argued that there was a need for oversight and public accountability, saying that in our current state, security services “wanted no secrecy for us, and no accountability for them.”

The question is, under a new regulatory model, how free are journalists to do investigative work?

As editor of the Press Gazette Dominic Ponsford argues, the Press Complaints Commission’s new incarnation, the Indepdendent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) may be the ‘best worst solution’ on the table. The stick behind the PCC’s replacement is coercion to the newspapers, which comes from harsh pay-outs by newspapers in libel cases. However, as many of the oversight bodies will only really change in name, and publishers will still oversee the conduct of journalism, there are some who argue that this is far more desirable than a Royal Charter.

That said, the Media Standards Trust aren’t too happy, as Gordon Ramsay, researcher at the LSE media project shows.

 Monetising media is still uncharted territory

Paywalls, re-branding, going digital etc. Lots of ideas on how to make journalism pay (important for budding reporters), no real agreements on how to do it. A panel debate featuring the Sun’s new editor David Dinsmore and Peter Barron, former editor of  BBC Newsnight, argued their methods of making journalism pay.

I won’t go into this as it’s quite long winded, but my personal opinion would be that paywalls are likely to become the default setting of most media outlets. The debate will then shift from one of ‘how to pay journalists’ to a more diverse one on the balance between monetizing content and easing access to information for the public.