LCC Journalism

On Tuesday I spoke at an event on the future of Journalism at a London creative agency called Protein. With me on the panel were Julian March of ITV (shortly to head to New York as seniorVP of NBC), Luke Lewis, editor of Buzzfeed and Martin Belam of Trinity Mirror.

In the wide-ranging discussion Martin mentioned some research by Quartz News, an American business site, which suggests that online journalists are wasting their time publishing articles between 500 and 800 words in length. These are too long to be shareable and too short to be in depth, so they don’t get read on line, runs the argument.

This chimed with some of my own thinking on where value  increasing lies in journalism. How can you stand out from the crowd and provide something that the public values. One answer is to be first with stories: this means being accurate at speed and publishing widely. Key here are sources, contacts, news sense, verification, the ability to reach large audiences on social networks. Being reliably ahead of the competition seems like a good place for a journalist to be.

Being first probably means being succinct: summing up the story in a couple of sentences and getting it out there.

Alternatively a journalist can go deep into a story and provide background and context: this probably means spending time over a story and writing at length. Key skills here are knowledge, research, the ability to explain. People will pay money for this – look at the Economist.

If you’re aiming to be first, you’re probably going to be short and succinct. If you’re aiming to provide context, you’re likely to be writing at length, so that you can set out your facts, background and argument.

But the typical news piece falls somewhere in the middle. These are the 500-800-worders that Quartz is taking aim at: neither super fast nor especially in depth, it’s often hard to see what they offer. They exist at that length largely because of the conventions of newspaper design. However, a properly written news story contains all of its key information in the first couple of pars: the further down the story you go, the less valuable is the information.

This story from the Telegraph is pretty typical. The new information – the revised death toll – is contained in the first sentence. Everything else that follows is either a restatement of that or repetition of old news from earlier in the week. A writer presumably spent an hour or two pulling all this together. And, because it was cobbled together from copy provided by news agencies, pretty much the identical story can be read in dozens of other sites. Where’s the value in that?

It’s an oversimplification to say that there is no point in producing 500-800 word stories (this piece comes in at just over 500, for example….). Of course, some are hugely valuable and interesting. But it’s worth noting that the fundamental form of the news story has remained unchanged for decades and asking whether it is really the best way of delivering information in the digital age.

Journalists don’t always get along with the people they write about: to some extent it’s our job not to do so.  We’re paid to be objective, to report what the public wants and needs to know and that can involve the telling of uncomfortable truths.

So there are often disagreements between journalists and their subjects, sometimes rows. I have even known reporters and press officers to come to blows over disobliging coverage. Generally, though, journalists are allowed to carry on doing their jobs without hindrance, all sides accepting, I suppose, that the public has the right to be informed. Organisations have the right to ban journalists they dislike from press conferences or to refuse to speak to them but, on the whole, they don’t.

One exception has been the football world where clubs have from time to time imposed bans on journalists whose reporting they take exception to. According to this report from the BBC, the practice is becoming more common.

Clubs know they need publicity but believe they can deal directly with fans, via club websites and social media. Doing it this way allows them to control the conversation and keep the bad news under wraps.

They’re not alone in thinking this way. As Kieran Alger, editor of T3 magazine, pointed out in last week’s guest lecture at the LCC, brands such as ASOS and Red Bull run highly professional magazines and websites, running the kind of journalistic content you would expect to find in newsstand titles – devoid, of course, of any criticism of Red Bull, ASOS or their products.

This is creating a new type of job – the brand journalist who uses journalistic skills and techniques in a PR environment. It is said that there are already more brand journalists working in the UK than there are journalists on consumer magazines.

It’s also creating dilemmas for traditional newspapers and magazines and the journalists who work on them. Many, perhaps most, magazines and newspapers produce sponsored content of various sorts, paid for by companies. We’ve all seen the special supplements and website sections marked ‘special promotion’ or the like.

But what do papers do when told, explicitly or otherwise, that they’ll be banned if their reporting of a local football club doesn’t find favour? Stand and fight or bend to the wind?

And what is the public’s attitude to all this? Do they value the critical, objective eye of an independent journalist? Or are they happy to receive information that is pre-vetted by their favourite football club? And how would we all feel if politics, business and the environment were covered in the same way, with independent reporting effectively cut out of the process?