Director’s Blog

The veteran American media executive Alan Mutter has come up with a formula to value your hourly labour as a professional journalist in the face of repeated requests to give it up for free as part of the Online ‘Exchange Economy’. He comes up (eventually) with a formula that you should charge four times the local minimum wage. But could the reality be much worse?

Poor old days

A former UK national newspaper editor recently pointed out to me the historical fact that journalists only became part of the upper middle class salariat in the late 1960s. Since then national journalists, at least, have enjoyed better money than teachers for example. Many columnists and anyone above news editor level expected to have private schooling and second homes. The more leafy avenues of the nicer parts of Chiswick and Ealing hummed to the sound of BBC bosses discussing tutors and cleaners as well as deadlines and stories.

The first emergence of these aspirational semi-professionals is portrayed accurately and cruelly in Michael Frayn’s seminal novel of Fleet Street in that period, Towards The End Of The Morning. The hero and villain of the book are shown springing intellectually and culturally from a better class of breeding and education. They both have  a sense of the wider significance of their trade in a dawning mass media age that had not been enjoyed by journalists before.

But it could be that we are about to go back to the more working class levels of pay and status enjoyed by the artisans who populated pre-War newsrooms featured in novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

Jeff Jarvis correctly points out that journalists will only get paid what the public want to pay them, not what they think they are worth. This is the problem with Downie and Schudson’s plea for greater subsidy for  journalism.

So perhaps the last 30 years was exceptional, a golden age of  affluence for the news-worker warmed by the glow of the advertising boom. Some great stuff was made in those decades but I am not sure that we really invested enough in the product and our relationship with the audience.

Now here comes the reckoning. As it happens I personally still think that there is enormous economic value in the industry and that after some redistribution people will make a more fulfilling as well as profitable living. But as many as 50% jobs could be churned through and possibly lost. Meanwhile, many others will show the kind of creativity and enterprise that wasn’t even possible with the old hard metal, presses and broadcast paraphenalia and create something anew.

For a global elite who care about the big international issues such as climate change, economic regulation or conflict and security, modern media is a wondrous but worrying thing. Thanks to great multi-national brands like the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera or the New York Times we have fantastic trans-national news resources. While the Guardian only has 300,000 sales in the UK, it has 30 million readers online across the world. And yet at the same time the level of foreign correspondents, international coverage and the commitment to understanding global stories is declining in the hard-pressed mainstream media.

This was the problem that Columbia President Lee Bollinger sought to solve in a Polis lecture that used his new book about media freedom of expression as a springboard to discuss the kind of journalism we need for a globalised world. [The podcast will be up soon, as will a full report on the actual lecture] ‘Your news is our news now’ he said. And the implication is that therefore we also share a need to find a solution to what threatens it.  His answer was surprising and in a Chatham House Rules dinner afterwards was challenged by a former Fleet Street editor, a senior Conservative MP, and assorted UK academics, lawyers and an economist. Read the rest of this entry »

No Regrets

Tony Blair’s resolute, unchanging, self-affirming appearance at the impotent Chilcot Inquiry reminded us of the Politician’s Virility Dilemma. If they change their minds or admit fault then they are seen as weak. If they stick to their guns they are seen as strong but wrong. We in the media and the public can enjoy 20-20 hindsight while those who make history are doomed to live in it.

As Paul Staines so crisply put it, the Chilcot Inquiry will change nothing and nobody will change their minds. Indeed, “for the political classes [the Blair hearing at Chilcott] is the Super-Bowl of political self-justification.”

Of course, many journalists and voters have changed their minds about the invasion of Iraq. Or at least, there has been a remarkable re-framing of the story. It is often ignored that at the time just about everyone thought it likely that Saddam had WMD - that wasn’t really the issue. The argument was over what to do about it. And the real damage was done not by the invasion but the aftermath. I don’t remember anyone talking about that at the time, though now everyone claims they knew we were unprepared for the Post-Saddam situation. Read the rest of this entry »

A view of the world

Travelling around New York City at the weekend with my two teenage boys was a reminder of just how globalised our culture has become with shops, music and even art looking distinctly familiar to my young Londoners.

An all-day seminar today on world media seemed to suggest that global journalism has some trans-national trends, too. But as ever, look closer and the cracks appear. Read the rest of this entry »

Haiti pic from @firesideint

Across the world editors in TV studios and newspaper offices are looking for something else to lead on apart from Haiti. I know, I’ve been there. It’s the biggest story in the world, but it’s been around for a few days and it is starting to fit into the pattern of all disaster stories. If we want the viewers/reader/listener to pay attention we’re going to have to headline something without the words ‘Haiti’ ‘Aid’ or ‘Death’.

So the big US TV networks will be the first to leave, while everyone else will scale down their presence and perhaps rely on the agencies. The story will slip down the running order or the page. This is how news works and it’s not wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Blimey, Polis has become influential on a global scale. On the day that we have an event warning about naive assumptions about the Internet and Democracy, Google ends its collaboration with censorship in China!

Alright, so there was no causal link between our digital democracy talk by Evgency Morozov and today’s news, but it was certainly topical. You can read Morozov’s general argument here, and he has responded directly to the Google move here: Read the rest of this entry »

We have all got to stop believing in the Monkey Myth of the Internet and Democracy, according to Evgeny Morozov, speaking at  Polis. By this he means that the current wishful thinking is that the Internet works like the monkey and the typewriter. Leave it alone to bash away and probability theory says that eventually it will write out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Evgeny was talking primarily about how digital optimists think that somehow, naturally, inevitably, the Internet will bring democracy to authoritarian regimes like China, Iran and Russia. But his argument can also apply to hopes for E-Democracy in liberal states, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Come to the LSE

NEW EVENT

Will the market and innovation decide the future of the internet, or will the future be led by law and policy?

The Internet is rapidly evolving and has mutated in the space of a decade from a static information source to a dynamic organism. In the future its shape will be dramatically different, as the online space moves even further to the centre of almost every aspect of our lives.

One of the key issues facing all online providers is the extent to which the rights of users should be protected and enhanced. Can users themselves be empowered to take greater control of their information? Recent controversies over new policies and practices also show that policy agendas and market pressures may collide on issues around privacy,  security, and end-user autonomy.

That is the subject of a special Polis discussion with the leading internet and telecommunications companies will identify the key policy and technological challenges for the coming years. Innovation in this space is dramatic. The companies taking part in this fireside chat are the buzz of the marketplace, and are constantly developing new devices and new platforms that substantially influence the online world. Read the rest of this entry »

Snow Queen?

The failed challenge by Hoon/Hewitt to Gordon Brown’s leadership is perhaps the first serious political coup that has ever been played out within a normal day’s news cycle. Thanks to texting, 24 hour news and the blogs this story was begun and ended between one conventional newspaper deadline and the next. This morning we wake up to headlines about something that was over by yesterday’s Newsnight. Truly, a political media snow squall rather than a big freeze.

The timeline actually stretches back to blogger Guido Fawkes giving a strong hint that something was afoot on Tuesday night. But the following lunchtime, while the BBC’s Political Editor was rubbishing that rumour, the actual story broke as the plotters emailed and texted fellow MPs. Read the rest of this entry »

The starting gun has fired in the UK election race and already the spectators are being bombarded with a series of disputes about detail and process.

I am on record as saying that the last US election was the best covered ever, in the sense that anyone who wanted to say or know something could find facts and a platform online somewhere.

But the downside of an information age election is that you get lots of information. Read the rest of this entry »