Column Tuesday October 7th . Dealing with disaster
Why is this banking disaster story so gripping?Personally, there are three possibilities. It might be because it is not just a disaster but a new beginning and therefore more interesting than misery. It might be that it is an anti-money story. By which I mean that in the overall balance of life, it delivers a long-overdue demotion to filthy lucre in favour of more important things: live events, family and ‘smart boredom’ as The Future Foundation calls it (i.e. knitting & crosswords). Or it might be that it has been powerfully good for newspapers.
If ‘good for’ is ambiguous, I mean it both ways - advantageous and improving. The story has been good for circulations since in confusing times people want to know what is going on. (Do not be surprised if the FT, for instance, is up 20% in September year on year when the ABCs come out on Friday). But it has also been good for print journalism. Why?
The answer is that the banking story, more than any other of the past 30 years, has been both electrifying and complex. The two do not often come together. Think 9/11 (electrifying but essentially not very complex) or Maastricht (complex but not completely electrifying). By contrast, the denouement in this drama of untrammelled market capitalism has delivered day after day of astonishing events that affect us all. It feels urgently important to try to understand them. In 14 days we have all had to learn some new terminology and some basic economics.
And it is this imperative, the impulsion to learn, that has been good for print. I have been conducting a personal media experiment by devouring everything I can on the financial crisis. Compared to print, radio and television have been woefully thin. There has been an adulatory fuss about Robert Peston but you could have listened to ten hours of him on the BBC and learned less than you would by reading one page of the FT.
It has been good for print because the British newspapers from the bottom up have had to take seriously something that the academics and poets (Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?- TS Eliot) have been saying for years: in highly developed media economies, it is not just ‘news’ that people want any more, it is understanding. I know that the smart people behind Thomson Reuters have ‘got’ this in a big way (”The end of think. The beginning of know”) even if they haven’t yet allowed it to make much difference to what they do.
It’s glorious to be, for instance, in Kampala where information is still largely only available in newspapers and they are as much a part of people’s lives as bread and water. But in London and Paris and New York those happy days are gone. No: what people want today is meaning (and fast). Delivering that is done partly through filtering and partly through interpretation. Does it mean loads of jobs for a new phalanx of journo-teachers, no longer tweed-jacketed and mortar-boarded but deeply learned and with the gift of communication? Actually, yes, it probably does.
The most successful titles in print already do this, namely The Week and The Economist. One does more filtering and the other more interpretation but they both get pretty close to the holy grail of making one feel in possession of a complete mental road map of current affairs.
Could websites do as well? Absolutely. But this type of work needs people. It can’t be done by algorithms. So far no-one has worked out how to pay for the necessary people with the relatively meagre income that web traffic produces. The Huffington Post? Not quite. But Tina Brown’s Daily Beast might do it. It looks very interesting. However it will have to make losses for a long time, which leaves the newspaper websites in pole position for the foreseeable future.
And the British newspapers (and their websites) have been doing an exceedingly good job. Take, for example, the day that the banking crisis story really went stratospheric - Monday September 29th when the bail-out package was dumped by the US congress. The story was not an easy one: there were no obvious photos, it led quickly into some fairly technical subject areas, it had a large ‘business’ element to it which meant that it had to be split between news pages and business pages and was tricky to package. And it was totally unexpected and broke in the (London) afternoon, leaving the papers with only a few hours to tear up their plans and start again.
Now look at the papers on the morning after. There can be no belittling the effort. Nine pages in the Guardian, ten in the Independent, eight (broadsheet, remember) in the Telegraph, seven in the Mail, thirteen (broadsheet) in the FT and a magnificent 14 in The Times. It amounts to over 80,000 words - a decent sized book - produced in four hours and packed with detail, history, analysis, opinion and colour.
Take another measure - not just at the sheer quantity of coverage but the degree of light that was shed on multilayered international events in a short time. If we accept that delivering understanding has become the hard currency of print, it was a golden day for what must still be the best national newspaper industry in the world.
The FT has always specialised in analysis (watch it flourish these days). So perhaps it should be no surprise that it rose so well to the occasion with a full deck of knowledgeable beaks, the best of whom were Andrew Hill, John Authors, Gillian Tett, Gideon Rachman, the Lex team and Michael Skapinker. Elsewhere on that Tuesday you could have been enlightened by Anatole Kaletsky, David Wighton, Valerie Grove and the best leader of the day in The Times. Or Alex Brunner and Peter Oborne in the Mail. Tracy Corrigan, Damian Pearce, Edmund Conway and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard were all excellent in the Telegraph. Even the traditionally non-business papers had some brilliant stuff: Sean O’Grady and Jeremy Warner in the Independent and George Monbiot , Ann Pettifer and Nils Pratley in The Guardian.
Prize for the highest wattage? Mike Skapinker in the FT. He first saw the 30 year pattern that everyone else has since pondered: 1978 to 2008 “Three decades of untrammelled free markets are over”. And he was wise and right to see the locus of business power shifting east. Above all, he was wise to see that New York and London will be back, with their advantages of language, law and brain power.
Print. Not dead yet.
1 comment October 7th, 2008