Why Journalists Must Get Out More
Guest post by Richard Horsman (@LeedsJourno), a former Bradford-based radio news editor and current Teaching Fellow in Journalism at Leeds Trinity University College.
The internet is a wonderful thing. You wouldn’t be reading this if it didn’t exist. But I’m worried a new generation of journalists is emerging that seldom, if ever, ventures beyond cyberspace to find stories or conduct research, and that’s a bad thing. Because the internet is very good at telling us what’s on the internet, not what’s happening in the real world.
The essence of good journalism is keeping eyes and ears open for the unexpected.
That’s how I created a twitterstorm – OK, a twitteripple – with a bit of classic observation on the way home from a Radio Academy event in Leeds last Monday night.
I was walking past Jessop’s on The Headrow when I noticed the above sign.
I tweeted it, got a bit of reaction. The social medium of Twitter might be new, and no-one paid me to take the pic or to post it, but in its own little way it’s the essence of community journalism. Keeping alert in the street for something out of the ordinary, maybe something not quite right, and bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.
That’s something that happens much less in today’s newsrooms than it did when I started my career back in the 80s. We used typewriters and carbon paper and edited radio interviews with razor blades and sticky tape. My first editor chain smoked, and had an actual spike on his desk. There was a big red telephone in the newsroom that was meant to ring to give us the four minute warning. It rang six times a day, the number being one digit adrift from the Lookers of Bradford service department.
Most importantly, seven of us worked there. When there was a sniff of ‘something not quite right’ in City Hall, or reports a Guiseley nurse had been murdered in Saudi Arabia, or suggestions that a book could be burned at a demo because some people found it offensive, a reporter could spend some time checking it out. Often, it turned out to be nothing. Other times it was a national lead.
In today’s slimmed down, efficient newsrooms two or three people are typically responsible for the same output. The tools make editing faster and there’s an ever growing range and variety of inputs, most of them coming from the internet. From being newsgatherers journalists are becoming news processors, endlessly re-versioning material to hand to fit different formats of text, audio and video.
Like the eternal flame they never go out. Or hardly ever.
Council stories are fed in from former journos working in multi media press offices. Crown Courts are staffed for the openings and conclusions of cases, Magistrates’ Courts only if a murder remand is due. The idea of walking a beat and chatting to people with no actual ‘media event’ scheduled is a rarity.
Instead ‘issues’ are picked up from social media. I had a call recently from a radio journalist who had no idea of my personal history. He’d seen a tweet I posted about my 86 year old dad being ripped off by a directory enquiries service and wanted to interview me about it. It’s a valid way of working, but it reminds me too much of the science fiction dystopia in which a ‘connected’ elite live in air conditioned worlds with every luxury to hand whilst excluded barbarians, and those who choose not to conform, inhabit the wasteland beyond.
That’s where, very often, the real stories, the real scandals and the unexpected events happen. With no-one there to report them.
I’m doing what I can, in my own practice, to battle the trend of web-fed, web-led journalism. Every year my postgraduate journalism trainees are given a task as part of their induction to track down people and places round Leeds that remain ‘off the grid’. Every year it becomes more difficult to find the targets, but even a ten-minute walk round the city centre will prove there are still plenty of good stories waiting to be told.
And for our undergraduates I’m using my Leeds Trinity teaching fellowship appointment for 2012-13 to work in partnership with East Leeds FM and the LS14 Trust to give radio students an insight into the community, working between now and Christmas to each produce a ‘community news’ bulletin reflecting different aspects of community life in Seacroft; health, education, sport, arts activities, childcare, transport, faith communities and so on.
It’s a small start. I hope by planting the idea that stories come from you and me, not URLs, these journalists will be better placed to report the communities around us whatever happens in the development of new technologies.
Good stuff, Richard – and keenly appreciated by someone like me who’s sat on their arse much of the day on the internet.
Have you got an idea where this ‘off-the-grid’ reporting – a great skill and experience to have – will find an outlet in the local media?
The YEP has been having a go at doing something similar over the past year with its “community” specials, but who knows whether that will continue. And what you’re proposing in Seacroft sounds similar to what South Leeds Life does so well with a mix of paid and volunteer reporters.
But they’re not broadcast.
Aren’t local radio newsrooms too strapped to have staff out plodding their beat like the journalist equivalent of Dixon of Dock Green – “alert for something out of the ordinary, maybe something not quite right”?
What we tend to get from radio is more akin to sending the Police HQ’s squad car round the morning after they’ve been told by someone else that “something out of the ordinary” has happened.
Or am I listening to the wrong radios?
Cracking post, Richard. Sums up a lot of the frustrations I have.
I’m only too aware that most newsrooms are so tightly staffed that many journalists are just tied to a desk, recycling endless press releases due to a lack of time and deadline pressures.
I also worry that because of a lack of investment in journalism by media proprietors over a number of years there’s a ‘lost generation’ of journalists who don’t know or understand the value of going looking for stories in the way your describe – or understand the values of old-fashioned patch reporting and cultivating contacts.
Investment is desperately needed – but while the audience has migrated from print to online the advertising spend hasn’t and news operations are facing further pressures on numbers in future years.
While I agree with Leeds Citizen and applaud the YEP’s ‘at home’ series, it’s only going to be a success if there’s ongoing coverage of those communities once the week’s focus has finished. Anecdotally, my mum – who lives in Bramley – started buying the paper again while they were doing ‘at home in Bramley’ last year. Within a month she’d stopped buying it again. The reason? She said the coverage of her area had dropped back to a few nibs (news in briefs)a week again.
I’m conscious I’m sounding off here. So what’s the answer to the finacial woes facing media operators? Frankly, I haven’t the foggiest … and if I did know I’d be sunning myself on a beach in Barbados right now as I’d probably be a wealthy man.
For the record, I do think social media is a terrific source of news and views which I often find incredibly valuable as a journalist.
I’m currently doing some part-time lecturing in digital journalism at Leeds Met to a group of first year students. My latest sessions have been about RSS feeds, democracy sites like Openly Local and My Society and, of course, finding stories via social media.
But I do always stress the importance of meeting people in the real world, attending public meetings, talking to people and generally making contacts.
And I always hold up the work of Culture Vultures as an example of how story/idea gathering online and offline can combine to produce something special – the work of Emma, Phil and the team online is there to see. There are times Emma seems to be permanantly tweeting to her thousands of followers!
Yet the real success of this blog (and one of the reasons I read it and hold it up as one of the most important in the UK) isn’t just down to blogging and tweeting, it’s the work that goes on in the real world. The setting up of debates on elected mayors at the Rose Bowl, the numerous cultural conversations and actually turning up to events to cover them. That’s what makes Culture Vultures so great. It’s not rocket science but it works.
And long may its tweeting and event-hosting continue!
Thanks John
It’s funny as yesterday we were discussing how technology can be a great vehicle for getting us closer to people, and a great way of short cutting some of the ‘getting to know you’ bit. But for me it’s always a loop, it’s a research tool, it’s a feedback mechanism, it’s a chance to test out ideas, gauge sentiment, then proceed with meeting, or investigate something further, plan an event and then report back and keep the conversation going. It’s a commitment to an ongoing conversation.
So to respond to both Richard and yourself, it’s a wonderful thing to be in the conversation online both by listening, sythesising a disparate/diverse range of sources, asking questions, or even leading a debate.
What do you then do next? Hopefully being in the conversation allows you to create networks, decide where to get off your bum, and then to continue your investigations.