Climate change camp good, prejudice bad

Tory boy called off and shot in a corner... I've just walked up to the climate camp (yes, it's that near) and had all my prejudices confounded. The camp is small and tidy and contained, with not a scrap of litter visible and the campers are friendly, articulate and committed. I'm going to pop back again later in the week. What this has made me realise - again - is how important it is for journalists to get out and see what's going on with their own eyes. This isn't going to make them "objective" - nothing can do that - but at least they'll get some context and realise that what they've assumed isn't always right. All the more worrying that the trend in newsrooms is to have journalists chained to their desks churning out press releases and repeating distorted stories which they could report truthfully if they were allowed out of the office.

No objectivity over climate camp

A big story is unfolding on my doorstep, which is why I don't dare to tear myself away from my contextual chapter to go and see what's going on. I just know I'm not going to be able to behave with journalistic impartiality -precisely because it's on my doorstep. It's the climate camp, which seems to think it's a good idea to come and camp on Blackheath, just down the road. The very thought brings out the worst of my middle-class, Tory boy side (I'm ashamed to discover I've still got one). All I can think of is how much litter and mess and chaos they're going to cause. Never mind about saving the planet. If I was assigned to cover this story, I like to think I'd do a professional job but it very neatly illustrates the total fallacy of journalistic "objectivity". The very idea that journalists don't have any agenda and they can somehow report from a blank slate is complete rubbish.

The first draft...of many

After three months of reading, I'm now going to force myself to write a draft (doubtless the first of many) of my "contextual" chapter, in which I try and make sense of everything I've read and link it to my research. I know it's going to be good for me when I start, like five-a-day, or going for a run before work. And it's not as if I'm not used to deadlines. Maybe what's putting me off is that every time I try to summon up some of the arguments and ideas from what I've read recently, it all slides out of my head. Maybe it's because my journalistic instinct would be to start by going into newsrooms and interviewing people about how their jobs are changing in an online environment, rather than reading what other people say about it. But academics clearly work the other way round - lots of reading, then some drafting, then the fieldwork, where you might start to find out something new. Sometime next year.

I never thought I'd say this but too much reading may not be a good thing. Order will come through writing. Or at least I hope so. Otherwise the next six years are going to be hard going.

Journalists under the microscope

One surprise to me when I started my research was how big the gap was between what academics wrote about journalism and journalistic practice and what I knew from experience actually happened in a newsroom. I've blogged about this before but I'm coming back to it because I've spent the last week reading the small number of ethnographic studies carried out in newsrooms, in which academics actually spend significant amounts of time in a newsroom absorbing and questioning what goes on, as opposed to just dropping in and carrying out interviews. Valuable though the latter is (and I'll be doing interviews as part of my field work later), ethnographic studies must provide a deeper insight, especially for academics who have never worked as journalists. As ethnographers suggest, such studies provide important insights into the process of journalism, as opposed to the end product.

But with a few honourable exceptions, including my colleague at Brunel University, Sarah Niblock, ethnographies seem thin on the ground, especially in the UK. Why is this? Money, possibly. It's pretty difficult to spend months in a newsroom if you have to earn a living at the same time (a problem I'm already confronting when thinking about the shape of my research). A generous chunk of external funding, of the sort US academics seem to be able to access, is very helpful. Time, definitely. And access. Many academics haven't had the newsroom contacts necessary to persuade journalists to let them observe and interrogate them for long periods of time. But as Niblock and Machin (2006) suggest, this is changing as more journalists move into the academy bringing with them useful contact books and access to newsrooms

This must be a good thing.

Shattered glass

In a bid (how's that for journalese?) to get back into a journalistic mindset after my holiday, I've just watched a DVD of Shattered Glass, in which New Republic reporter Stephen Glass is painfully and gradually exposed as a liar who makes up contacts and stories. I've seen this film before but this time the manic Preppie playing Stephen Glass was almost too painful to watch. And the central question is never answered. Why didn't any of the deskloads of staff (this was the 1990s, so there were still staff) notice what was going on? So much for the layers of US-style fact checking and shots of journalists covering each others' copy with vindictive red pen. If the rival online news website could check out the "facts" that Glass supplied in his copy and discover they crumbled on investigation, why couldn't the editors at the New Republic?

Back to the PhD research.

Journalism, the exclusive middle-class profession

Journalists has become "one of the most exclusive middle class professions of the 21st century", according to a government report on social mobility to be published tomorrow. This will come as no surprise to anyone working in journalism or teaching it at university level. The depressing reality is that journalism is fiercely competitive but the industry is also contracting. There are few graduate jobs around this year. Often the only way recent graduates can get a job is to spend months working as an unpaid intern in a newsroom which has lots of vacant desks after a sweeping cull of reporters and is delighted to have someone keen and competent who the company doesn't have to pay. As long as this exploitation continues - and why shouldn't it if demand continues to exceed supply and companies can take advantage of new journalists who have paid for their own training? - the middle classes will dominate the industy. What working class graduate can afford to work for free?

Having got that out of my system, I'm off on holiday to the Lakes, with no internet and no mobile reception. For the next two and a half weeks, I'll be experiencing the restricted rural broadband access which so concerns Gordon Brown. I suspect the first thing I do when I get home will be to log on.

The future of national newspapers

Do national newspapers have a future and if so, what is it? If any of the commercial managers, advertising managers and marketing people making up the bulk of the audience at this morning's seminar on the Future of National Newspapers was hoping for a clear answer they'd have left disappointed.

Panellists, including News International commercial MD Paul Hayes and Guardian managing director Tim Brooks, agreed that the traditional print newspaper model was dead and that the industry needed a new approach. But what? As Brooks said: "There's incredible excitement and challenge in the industry we're in. We need to make a transition to a new model...but I'm hoping to get some suggestions from the floor to find out what this new model is."

The future may be online but the big sticking point, as the industry's been saying for years, is how to make it pay. Media analyst Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, also on the panel, produced figures showing that the value of a newspaper reader to a publisher is £155 (made up of £65 generated from advertising and £90 from newspaper purchase) while an online user is worth just £5 a year in advertising and nothing in purchases, because online content is free.

And as if that wasn't bad enough news for online enthusiasts, Enders revealed that users went on news websites for an average of just 10 minutes a month, while readers spent 12 hours a month reading print newspapers (a confusing statistic for those who thought no-one read newspapers any more).

Readers who do engage online can generate great stories and information for journalists prepared to work with them, argued Brooks of the Guardian. Guardian journalists have a total of 900,000 people following them on Twitter and they supply material for stories which journalists either couldn't get or would take too long to get. Unfortunately, the Guardian hasn't yet figured out a way to make money from this reader interactivity.

What publishers like News International would of course like to do is to start charging people to access their websites. NI's Paul Hayes declined to discuss the company's plans to set up a separate Sunday Times website and charge for it, repeating Murdoch's formula that it was reasonable to charge a "fair price" and to "value content". But the Times would have the same problem doing that as the Guardian. The company would "never" charge for access to news on its website, said Tim Brooks, partly for the pragmatic reason that if it did, readers would just go to free news, namely from the BBC, featherbedded by the licence fee.

Stalemate. Maybe the notoriously competitive newspaper industry should fling caution to the winds and follow media journalist Ray Snoddy's suggestion that they should actually collaborate. Snoddy, also on the seminar panel, urged newspapers to think "outside the box" and introduce subscription cards, along the lines of an oyster card, which would be good for accessing any news website. Watch this space. PCs may come equipped with swipe readers in 10 years' time.