A Ten-point London Guide to journalism's chances of survival

by William Horsley

London the soon-to-be Olympic capital can also claim to be the world capital of jaw-jaw about the future of journalism. Especially about the survival chances of something called "good" or "high-quality" or "investigative" journalism. What lies ahead for this endangered species: a slow death? a rapid death? a glorious future? or re-incarnation in new forms on the net? Opinions are sharply divided but everyone has a point of view.

Intelligence Squared staged an debate on the Future of News in central London on 24th March. It was discursive, since no formal motion had been proposed. But a strong cast of speakers all spoke their minds. Simon Jenkins, in the chair, suggested the key issue was whether the "economics of free" associated with the shift of the news media onto the internet was "killing serious journalism". A good starting-point.

I found ten points in the ensuing discussion that shed light on the prospects for the future of news and journalism on the internet:-

1) Andrew Neil: the UK has the most competitive and vibrant press in the world, and millions of Britons are still prepared to pay to hold hard copies of their chosen title in their hands. Consumers would be willing to pay to read stories in online editions of The Times and the Sunday Times, just as millions already do for the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. The end of the world of journalism is not nigh.

2) A.A. Gill: The Internet is an "e-box of nothing". The economics of free was not and could not be serious journalism. And without investigative journalism parliamentary democracy could not work.

3) David Elstein: a big confusion in the journalism debate lies in the mixup in too many people's minds between information and journalism. Press owners and editors made a great mistake by handing over their content to the "aggregators" like google which have earned fabulous riches by selling access to journalism done by others. Nick Davies' "Flat Earth News" analysis had made people aware of a general decline in journalistic standards under the combined pressures of lack of time and resources. Yet the Daily Telegraph's extended exposure of the MPs expenses scandal proved that the quality of serious journalism was "undiminished."

4) Matthew Parris: News values will survive the means of transmission. The "chaff", whether on the Internet or in print, would be blown away. News hierarchies that are good would win trust and survive, just as in the past. Sooner or later, those bloggers and solo artists who win a serious following on the web would pool their expertise, find an editor, and form something very like the successful model that we all know -- the newspaper, news agency or magazine.

5) Claire Enders, a leading analyst of the media industry, warned about the real hollowing out of journalism that's under way. The collective expertise of successful news organisations costs a great deal of time and money, and those resources are getting think on the ground. The logic was that "the big will get bigger", but their numbers may be very few.. Meanwhile, new "blog experts" were successfully weaning sizeable followings away from journalists working in the conventional media. Tom Ricks in the US, a writer and reporter with a blog on ForeignPolicy.com, was one such example. But he's an established name and Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist already. Anyway, will Britain necessarily go the way of America? It's a moot point.

- Representatives of new web-based news businesses, who live from the internet, believe of course in the wisdom of crowds. They also pay full respect to the textbook values of journalism; they emphasise the need for accuracy and added value, not just unsifted information, but they see a very different future. The key difference is that they want citizens themselves to choose the stories and believe that force is changing the whole news media landscape.

6) "The free model works", said Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate and other US websites. Examples include the participatioin of large numbers of people as bloggers, Twitter or other social network

sites in China, Iran and Italy. The logic of this deserves closer examination: he said a hundred staff and freelances were involved in producing Slate internet magazine "and we pay them". So, how "free?"

7) Turi Munthe of Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and photo agency, made a case that countless bloggers and internet entrepreneurs were now cracking important stories, so breaking into what used to be the exclusive domain of the mainstream news outfits: bloggers in Egypt successfully exposing police brutality; WikiLeaks breaking stories through anonymous leaks. But Munthe acknowledged that "it's hard for citizens to learn journalistic skills", and the wholesale closure of foreign bureaus by traditional media titles was a bad omen for foreign coverage. Will that gap ever be filled by new-style websites like Demotix which boasts "over 12,000 contributors in over 170 countries?" That's a very big ask. Watch this space.

8) Members of the audience put other very uncomfortable points to the barons and columnista of British journalism lined up in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster: the "guild system" of journalism was a barrier to inquiry, inhibiting the mainstream media from speaking truth to power. The craft (or profession) of journalism might be doomed because many of the young generation no longer know what "real" news is or even what they may be missing if they never see it. They just expect to get it free. One member of the speakers' panel mentioned the large number of what he called "asinine" comments that appear in response to online articles and blogs, by contrast with the Letters page of the nationals. Basic editing, really...

9) Matthew Parris said people should realise that journalists in Britain were fortunate. In large parts of the world journalists face constant danger from physical or legal attacks, or in all too many cases even murder, because of their work. No live and free journalists means no journalism.

10) Andrew Neil closed the debate with a bold definition of journalism -- "to publish things that powerful people don't want to hear." But he gave this significant compliment to the bloggers: that their barbs, comments and sometimes corrections help to keep the journalists honest.

Please send any comments on this blog to william@cfom.org.uk

Reporting barriers in East and West -- subtle, obvious, sometimes fatal. How media freedom shapes politics everywhere

by William Horsley, International Director, CFOM

Spending ten days in East Asia prompts me to these thoughts about the variety of methods that governments and other powerful forces employ to stop journalists from reporting things they are determined to suppress. It's the same the whole world over.

The irony is that reliable information about violence, harassment and legal or practical barriers to reporting is plentiful and well-known. Yet inquiring journalism remains dangerous or difficult, in varying degrees, almost everywhere, in the east and west alike. CFOM was set up a year ago at the University of Sheffield with the aim of contributing to better understanding of the destructive effect of these abuses, and to work with others, including governments wherever possible, to remedy them -- through better laws, restraints on misuses of state power, proper administration of justice, and support for independent journalism.

Souheast Asia: Last December's massacre of 31 media workers, among the 57 people killed in Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines, is the most brutal method of suppression of all. The International News Safety Institute calls it the highest death toll of journalists in any single incident in recorded history.

Gunmen adbucted and apparently killed everyone in a large party of people travelling through Maguindanao, including a woman filing her husband's nomination to run for provincial governor of the area in forthcoming elections. The carnage pushed up the total number of targeted killings of journalists in 2009 to 132 in 35 countries, making last year one of the worst on record, INSI said.

Why then has the international community not agreed and implemented ways of investigating such atrocities quickly and thoroughly, and bringing the perpetrators to justice? Why especially in view of the UN Security Council's Resolution 1738, passed unanimously in 2006? That text calls on all states to protect media professionals in armed conflicts and to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international law. It is not formally binding, but it is a political commitment by which every country has agreed to be measured. A matter of justice and honour. A pledge honoured, too often, in the breach but not in the observance.

By all accounts the investigations into the Philippines massacre were neither as prompt, well-resourced or well coordinated as they should have been to be effective. An experienced British professional, Chris Cobb-Smith, who took part in one of several parallel invesigations on the ground after the massacre, told an audience at the Frontline Club in London in January that the lack of clarity or of any coordinating authority resulted in confusion, and severely limited the usefulness of the efforts of national and international bodies.

The Philippines has one of the bloodiest records of any country in the world for the murder of media workers in recent times.

South Asia: As I write, the evidence is piling up by the day of intolerable pressures and alleged abuses of authority against journalists in Sri Lanka. The Committee to Protect Journalists says journalists there have been subjected to government intimidation, arrests, censorship, and harassment in the aftermath of the recent presidential election.

"We are receiving reports of government retribution against journalists who sided with the opposition in the election", the CPJ says in a statement. It cites reports of government retribution against journalists who sided with the opposition in the election.

The Commonwealth heads of government's annual summit meeting, held in Trinidad and Tobago last November, was an opportunity for an open and constructive debate on some of the chronic abuses of human rights, good governance and freedom of expression that mar the societies of many Commonwealth states. Instead, the closing statement trod a safe and un-self-critical path. It focused on climate change, terrorism and Zimbabwe.

Europe: And the hard truth is that Europe can no longer claim to be a haven from large-scale or violent assaults on journalists and on the media as watchdogs on those who wield state power.

On 27 January the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed a Recommendation http://assembly.coe.int/Mainf.asp?link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta10/EREC1897.htm

which it sent to the governments of the 47 member states, condemning the murder of at least 20 journalists in the European region since 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in an apparent contract killing in Moscow.

The elected parliamentary representatives from across Europe called on governments, in effect, to stop evading their responsibilities, and to end the climate of impunity for those responsible for killing or attacking journalists -- not only in Russia where at least thirteen journalists have died in what are suspected to be targeted attacks, but wherever evidence points to weak or inadequate criminal and judicial investigations.

The PACE also asked the Council of Europe's new Secretary-General, Thorbjorn Jagland, to set up a continuous monitoring system, to mark the cards of all member states with regard to serious violations of media freedom of all kinds, and step up pressure on them to live up to their pledges. The monitoring is to cover more than 20 specific aspects of media freedom and media-government interaction --including suspected cases of judicial impunity, the need to abolish criminal libel, and national reviews of national anti-terrorism laws to challenge measures that contradict Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

China: Here in East Asia the repurcussions of Google's dispute with the Chinese authorities, over their attempt to entrench their own state-imposed limits on the population's access to Internet information, has assumed the dimensions of a major clash of civilisations in much international media coverage. I for one don't doubt that the path that China takes in the coming years with regard to freedom of information and public debate will be crucial to the issue of whether or not its wider political development goes towards accountability and openness, or the reverse.

Japan: Meanwhile the Japanese have sprung a surprise. A new government, which last year won a landslide election victory and so ended the half-century of unbroken rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has promised a shakeup of entrenched political power structures (especially the pervasive power of the unelected civil servants, heirs to the Tokugawa tradition of mandarin rule with an iron hand).

As part of the shake-up, it has announced it is also pulling down (at least part of) the pervasive Japanese system of exclusive reporters' clubs ("kisha clubs") which have delivered something close to a monopoly on real-time government-related news to the privileged, mainly national, media ever since the end of World War Two. Smaller fry, freelances and foreigners have thereby often been denied access not only to press conferences but also to key sources of information.

The proposed reforms of the government's information and media policy may or may not turn out to be real. But in my view -- and I reported from Japan for many years myself -- the influence of the kisha club system on the evolution of Japan's unique (and in many ways baffling) political culture has been enormous. So much so that I venture to say that the privileged mainstream Japanese media, beneficiaries of the kisha club system and working closely with the political establishment for all these years, can be said to have played a real part in the maintenance of the one-party, LDP-dominated, system for so long.

The proposition is worth further examination. For now I just quote a highly independent Journalist, Tetsuo Jimbo, the founder of one of Japan's first online news broadcasting companies. He told the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan recently: "The kisha club system has spoiled the Japanese media, as it means they don't go out and do investigaive journalism."

In each of the cases I've touched on in this eclectic east-west tour, the degree of vigour and independence of those who investigate, report and analyse public affairs -- journalists, editors, scholars, think-tankers and the rest -- is closely linked to the the freedom and independence of the politicians and policy-makers -- in other words, the governments themselves.

Britain: It's time to wrap up this blogspot. But not without a mention of the lively debate about news media as a central element in civil society in the UK. I look forward to the final report of the Carnegie Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, which is due out in March 2010.

As a taster, one of the commissioners, Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman, spoke cogently at a big-tent media event, the Oxford Media Convention, on 22 January. Her theme: the vital link between independent and inquiring local reporting ... and the future of democracy.

I wrote about Joyce's insights, and those of other Convention speakers, on the website of the BBC's College of Journalism. (I's accessible only to those using a .uk domain I fear

http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2010/01/hearing-the-sos-for-watchdog-j.shtml

How great headlines mislead

How great headlines mislead - William Horsley's CFOM blog, January 11 2010

This nice example comes from Prof Robert Watson, one of the UK's top authorities on climate change and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On December 29 last year, following the shambles of the Copenhagen mega-summit, the Wall Street Journal carried an article which Watson co-wrote with another authority on (and firm believer in) climate change, Mohamed El-Ashry.

The point of the piece was to support the "orthodox" scientists' position that carbon dioxide is the main culprit causing long-term and inexorable climate change, but also to get across a second important message -- that in the short term we should be focusing more on cutting the "other greenhouse gas": methane.

Watson and El-Ashry explained that cutting emissions of methane can make an immediate impact to "buffer" or slow down climate change. And compared to taking action on CO2, cutting methane "requires only modest investment".

The article was printed on the Journal's op ed page all right. But Prof Watson was dismayed to see the sub-heading above the piece. It said "Forget about carbon. If we want to buffer global warming, cutting methane is the key". Forget about carbon? No way was that what the authors meant.

Watson was talking to a meeting of the Association of European Journalists in London on January 4, the first working day of the year for many of us.

The 25 journalists there were quite typical of the general public in Britain -- only half-persuaded about the scientific orthodoxy that climate change is due mostly to rising levels of CO2 and is mostly man-made, but well aware of the gaps in our own understanding of the science.

Robert Watson is a brilliantly clear and expert speaker, the most articulate scientist many of us have ever heard talking about policy issues.

He frankly acknowledges that scientists "are not winning the battle for public opinion" about the real threat of climate change.

But he was (I thought, as a non-specialist) pretty convincing on the central arguments -- those deeply annoying points about the need for carbon capture, emissions trading and climate change being man-made.

He also seems to be onto something important when he says that methane is responsible for 75% as much warming as carbon dioxode, and while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years (so reversing global temperature increases by cutting carbon emissions is bound to take many decades, at least), methane "lasts only a decade but packs a powerful punch while it's there".

For the journalists Prof Watson had a special message: "The role of the media [in informing the public about climate change and other seminal scientific issues] is unbelievably central".

Which I translate as meaning "get your facts straight and dump your misleading headlines!".

He was too polite to put it so directly. But he does accuse the media of distorting the way the facts are presented to the public at large.

The media, by their nature, love controversy. So the climate change debate, Watson says, is often presented as a roughly balanced contest between two opposing sides. Whereas in fact, he says "95% of scientists now believe in climate change".

But, he complains, newspapers like to run stories that say things like "2,500 scientists say one thing -- but one scientist at MIT (or wherever) disagrees!". Indeed they do run stories, and headlines,like that.

A couple of days after Watson's appearance at the AEJ I spotted the issue of apparently overhyped media coverage being examined somewhere else -- in Vanity Fair's January edition.

VF nowadays regularly does more investigative and original journalism than most of the conventional news magazines.

Their science feature on the Large Hadron Collider was the first piece I have seen anywhere (OK, I don't subscribe to any specialist science publication) that explained in graphic detail the metal-crunching accident that occurred some 100 metres underground in September 2008, when the collider broke down just before the proton beams were due to be shot round the whole circuit to start the experiment in multiple proton stream collisions.

In the article Kurt Anderson took aim at the way much of the media made headlines out of the scientists' talk about the possibility of the L.H.C producing weird and wonderful things like extra dimensions and black holes.

The kind of black holes that scientists are excited about perhaps finding at CERN are "harmless ones, microscopic and incredibly short-lived", Anderson says. Yet alarmists who hyped the danger of the L.H.C destroying the earth had a much bigger platform thanks to the internet and cable news channels, and mainstream media, he writes, "consistently took the apocalypse possibility seriously."

OK, but those headlines -- "forget carbon" and "maybe our scientists are about to destgroy our planet" probably ensured that a heck of a lot more peope read about those complex "scientific" topics -- didn't they?

So is Professor Watson right about the media muddying vital messages about science? And does it matter?

Well, perhaps it's a coincidence, but the BBC Trust has just ordered a review of science coverage on the BBC -- reportedly the world's largest news organisation -- after complaints from the British public that it doesn't give enough weight to climate change sceptics.