In the gloom before the storm it is tempting to be nothing but depressed. There are many reasons to be sad or sorry. Each friend who receives a call for an appointment with the HR director is another reason. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. Here are five mutually reinforcing points, unscientifically presented.
One
Why we should be cheerful: There’s a growing public demand for serious journalism.
What’s happening: There are signs, real signs, that people are getting more demandingly curious about the world. More people want to understand; fewer people want to be titillated. We need meaning, not just information. This might be because when things go wrong, you look for wisdom. But it might also be a reaction against the past 20 years during which we fell in love with the technologies that undid our capacities to think. In the West we became a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. Many people became addicted to being constantly amused; and if they were not, they sulked.
Evidence? Intellectually, not only the uncanny truth of some of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but also some of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The essay Overload in the November 2008 issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism. Empirically, the success of The Economist, The Week, The Spectator and Alain de Botton’s School of Life. Also, the galloping sales of non-fiction books that in some way or other “explain the world”.
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Two
Why we should be cheerful: In the next three years media owners will start to support “good” journalism. They’ll have to.
What’s happening: Media owners are at different stages but they are all going to have to take the following four steps 1) Stare mortality in the face. This is happening everywhere from Wasilla to Lugansk and from Porsanger to Brownsville. 2) Realise the future’s with the web - whatever platform you use now 3) Work out that the only journalism that will flourish on the web will be networked 4) Discover that networked journalism has to be better journalism because a post-modern, post-industrial, multi-faith, neoEnlightenment world demands it. Journalism that remains even a little bit out of touch, cumbersome, prejudiced or inaccurate won’t survive and a business that can’t take these four steps is heading for the turn-off to Valhalla.
Evidence? Intellectually, Charlie Beckett’s book SuperMedia which is the text for networked journalism. The more you peruse it, the more it emerges as a very good book indeed. Empirically, which would you put your money on: Huffington Post or the LA Times?
Three
Why we should be cheerful: It’s an open field. Anyone can be the next Joseph Pulitzer.
What’s happening: In the next few years being a big media company is going to be beyond grim. Costs are going up. The most important source of revenue, advertising, is going down - probably by 25%. The only way to survive is cuts. Shrinking not only hurts, it disfigures. Shrunk businesses are tomorrow’s dead businesses. Meanwhile: the media business models that work are a) cheap to start and b) baffling to mainstream media. If you have been working in TV or newspapers for 20 years and got to the top, you have not had time to pay attention to the new media ecology. It is a great time to be young, to be daring, to be unafraid of failure.
Evidence: A site such as Glam - already huge and based on (relatively) little funding.
Four
Why we should be cheerful: Attractive populism is a real possibility
What’s happening: Populism is good for journalism. It connects journalism to large audiences. It is good for society; it keeps powerful people honest. It balances the pervasive curse of elitism. What interests the public is, in the end, in the public interest. We must learn to love our Daily Mails. But, historically, populism has been so damned ugly, mean, spiteful and nasty. Now, however, there’s a sign that a new populism might catch fire in the West that’s highly attractive: the populism of hope, of reason, of tolerance and of confidence in human ingenuity. Behind this lies a massive cultural shift to a post-materialist sensibility in which values replace stuff and happiness is only tenuously linked to wealth. Did anyone else notice Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writing this month: “The media business is about the glory of stuff-stuff to buy, stuff to envy, stuff to dream about. But for the first time in modern media memory, stuff is now the enemy. The consumer is in retreat from consumerism.”? What a manifesto for a new Beaverbrook.
Evidence: Barack Obama
Five
Why we should be cheerful: Print has a great future.
What’s happening: It’s just a matter of getting it right. This doesn’t contradict the four steps mentioned above. When I say the future’s with the web and journalism will be networked, I don’t preclude that journalism being published in print. The best newspapers of the next 10 years will create powerful online networks and use them to help create the words and pictures that they put into print. Print is not just a technology to be replaced by a newer one. Print is a genre with a soul of its own. But to survive, it must change. There’s no future for 126 page papers filled with a mix of heavy, light, UK, foreign, business, arts and sporting news. Papers will have to focus ruthlessly on what they do best and leave the rest to others. What they do best is to edit. (Some use the word “curate”). It boils down to this: taking a huge heap of confusing stories and reducing them to a package with meaning. Distilling, synthesising, explaining, designing - that is what papers must focus on. They will have to do it with fewer pages and far smaller staffs. But when they do it right they will usher in another golden age of print. Of course printing machinery may evolve to the point where we have digital paper or e-paper. In my view that still counts as print.
Evidence: “Unlike the doom-and-gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights,” - Rupert Murdoch last week.
The Editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre does not need defending. He will never a) read this article or b) give two hoots about what it says. Nonetheless, this is a defence of Paul Dacre.
There is a personal reason for writing it, which is that I spent three enjoyable years working closely with Dacre at the Daily Mail when he was new to the editor’s chair. It was the time when he was remoulding the paper to his own image after the long rule of David English, and I suppose I had something to do with the shape of the paper which emerged and which has continued successfully to this day. So I am in part defending myself.
There is however a more important reason. In the circles where I live and work - typically middle class, non-ideological but educated - the Daily Mail needs a voice. Almost to a man and woman, these people identify the Mail with disastrous and deluded demagoguery. So powerful is the latent antipathy that any position the Mail takes is automatically rejected out of hand.
And yet the speech that Paul Dacre made at the Society of Editors last Sunday (Nov 9th 2008) will, I believe, come to be seen as a landmark in the contemporary discussion about journalism - containing the lineaments of a path to recovery for an industry that desperately needs re-invigorating and, without which, Britain would be massively worse off. Philosophically it belongs to a tradition of emotional populism that has had many champions in the West, from Wesley to Dickens to Philip Roth and the fiercely intellectual contemporary American scholar Martha Nussbaum. It is nothing to be ashamed of and still less to be sneered at.
The reaction to Dacre’s talk has been evidence of a shocking lack of attention, or perhaps just lack of intelligence (and this is from the supposed British intelligentsia).
On The First Post, the writer Neil Lyndon huffed and puffed about coverage of the McCanns and national papers that “traffic in degradation” without any sense that he had listened to Dacre’s argument for a rumbustiously entertaining press.
On his blog, Observer columnist Henry Porter criticised the Mail’s ‘inconsistency’ (the intellectual snob’s favourite word) in defending the right to expose the private antics of Max Moseley and attacking the government’s plans to store data on phone and web use, without appearing to understand the huge difference in principle between the misdemeanours of public figures and the innocent business of private citizens.
Charlie Beckett, the director of the media think tank Polis, merely pointed out that “many people do not think S&M is depraved”, forgetting perhaps that the Mail is not about ‘many’ it is about ‘most’.
Peter Wilby, the Guardian media columnist, says in his brilliantly acerbic style, that it is pernicious to attack the most trusted news source in the land (Beeb) and that without it we’d only be left with the distortions of the Mail. He must have missed Dacre’s previous assertions that he would “die in a ditch” to defend the need for a BBC but that he was trying to take a stand against its incursion into every nook and cranny of national life.
Most vehement of all was Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column. Among other things she attacked Dacre’s twisted logic for saying that Mr Justice Eady, the judge in the Moseley case, might have felt very differently if his wife or daughter had been one of the prostitutes in uniform. No logic was intended. Dacre’s point is an emotional one. He does not think that anybody’s wife or daughter should be treated like Moseley treated his willing accomplices in S&M. Indeed the twisted logic is Toynbee’s argument that there is an equivalence between torturers and newspapers who expose people.
The Guardian letters page today contains a clutch of readers cockily pointing out the difference for the millionth time between ‘interesting to the public’ and ‘public interest’. But whenever Dacre defends the press right to expose public figures he is patently clear. He is talking about public interest. Joe Calzaghe would as likely confuse ‘punch’ with a fruit drink.
The headlines after the speech focussed on Dacre’s attack on Mr Justice Eady and on the expansion of the BBC. But the speech is not primarily about either of these points. It is primarily a defence of populism.
The emotional populist, such as Dacre, believes that ordinary people have instincts and reactions which, if properly tapped, will be sufficient to provide guidance and authority to the statesman. He supports the people versus the elites. Long passages of his speech last Sunday were a tribute to the great populists who shaped his career; a previous generation of newspaper editors such as John Junor and Arthur (We never waste space saying, “On the one hand.” We just state an opinion in a Godlike voice) Christiansen, legendary editor of Beaverbook’s Express and tireless champion of the little man.
Of course any of these editors will take a stand again the pink-cheeked judge and the smug BBC. Of course they will rail against the loss-making liberal-left papers that think that they know best and have a right to stick their views down people’s throats (however good these papers actually are, and they are). What is shocking is that this should offend so many people so deeply. Why? Are we still so class-ridden that we are afraid of the convictions of around one in three of our countrymen? Do we yearn so strongly for the infinitely more elitist culture of continental Europe?
I believe that the press, in its current crisis, is betraying itself. It is so distracted by commercial, technological and cultural problems that it is very seriously missing the point. I bemoaned last week the shocking lack of innovation and inventiveness among newspaper managements. However it is just as important to recognise the shocking lack of ability among editors and journalists to connect with a readership and write with sufficient passion about anything worth caring for. The British press is still among the best in the world. But the steady growth of flimsy, pointless opinion writing combined with predictable, turgid and irrelevant news is the real problem. Blaming the internet, the advertising downturn and the price of paper is a lame excuse.
Dacre’s speech was a call to arms. His paper practises populism his way. There are other ways. Did anyone listen?
We were in Amsterdam last week (thus, lazily, no column) at the main annual gathering of IFRA, an acronym that according to the organisers “no longer means anything”.
It used to be the event for newspaper publishers to meet and talk about printing. It is now trying to turn itself, with only partial success, into the event for publishers to meet and talk about everything from software to websites (as well as print).
So it was a good place to take the temperature of the patient that is the newspaper industry and to talk to the people that run it. Here were the commercial bosses from newspaper companies in all the major economies of the world.
I had some meetings arranged in advance with outstanding people that I respect and admire. However out on the floor of the conference what a dismal experience it was. If it had been a parade ground these were emphatically not the Marines. Dad’s Army perhaps.
With the benefit of a few days’ reflection I would put it more temperately. There were, as I say, some very interesting and vital voices there. But to convey the raw emotion that I felt on Day Two of IFRA, I find my notebook contains the following:
“What a gathering of jobbernowls! Seldom have I tuned into a more lifeless, jargon-filled, half-baked, self-pitying, poorly-digested, left-over rice pudding of thoughts about the state of journalism. If we want to know why our business is in such a state we must surely start with this: the management is not up to scratch”.
I have a friend who is on the board of a top international business school. “Journalism attracts some top young intellects,” she says. “It is still seen as a really exciting and respected role. Publishing is not. People who get jobs in publishing are people who were not smart enough for retailing, advertising or insurance.” I don’t agree with her but, apparently, plenty of her peers do.
It seemed that nearly all of the 10,000 people there were in a deep funk about print. The recession, falling currencies, newsprint prices, advertising downturns, free papers, aging readers and the incursions of the web were all cited as reasons. Hall 10 (I think it was) where the big print companies had their stalls was either referred to as the Dinosaur Park or the Natural History Museum.
I was shocked by the pessimism. Maybe Roy Greenslade is right. His arguments about the inevitable death of print are always lucid and powerfully put and his is a voice to be taken extremely seriously. In an excellent blog today about the BBC and the regions he rams it home:
“Old media - whether it be newspapers, magazines or straightforward radio and TV broadcasting - has accepted that it must move on to a new platform, the internet, if it is to survive.”
I have spent two years, so far, struggling to start a newspaper in the UK so I am under no illusions about how tough it is. I have not one trace of rose-tinting left on my old and battered spectacles.
However I have always believed that printed newspapers have lives still to live. I have always believed that there are new types of newspapers we haven’t imagined yet that will excite readers all over again.
Let me try and clarify the two contrasting views here. First there is the view that newspapers are a format. An oft-used metaphor is from the music industry. Anyone over 50 has seen the market move from vinyl to digital (and everything in between) in rapid order. As a society we still love music. We simply store it and play it in a different way. According to this view, newspapers are the vinyl of news. News will continue but papers won’t.
The second view is that newspapers are a genre. This view holds that there is something about newspapers that makes them a category of their own, with a distinctive form, content and technique that can’t be replaced - such as theatre or oil painting. These genres have not been replaced by possible substitutes such as film or photography. On the contrary they have been inspired by them to new directions. According to this view the internet will not replace newspapers but will enable a reinvention to take place inside newspapers, creating myriad new opportunities for journalism and for entrepreneurs.
Anyone who loves newspapers and has seen them function well will know what I mean when I talk about the sum of print, paper, type, words, pictures, history, opinion and character adding up to more than the parts. This is what makes a genre. By contrast there was nothing about a cassette tape of Leonard Cohen that made the listening experience any different to a CD of Leonard Cohen.
There are plenty of newspaper master classes to be had currently in Britain. (How to run a campaign - Daily Mail. How to design a page - Guardian). I would posit that there are hardly any to be had in the USA which might help explain why the industry is doing so badly there. It’s interesting that web evangelists such as Jeff Jarvis are becoming increasingly excited by the idea of editors - or “content DJs” as he suggested we might call them earlier this week.
In the aftermath of the financial collapse, people are looking for simple realities and hard truths. Real journalism, analysis, reportage and explanation can live better on the printed page than on the screen. Advertisers that want to share that authenticity also seem to prefer print. No stand-alone website has yet found a way to fund journalism.
All this requires more thought, I know.
But perhaps, if newspaper managements were as innovative and exciting as, say, Google’s - we wouldn’t be quite so glum.
