Inaugural lecture

Is “news” over?

Professor George Brock, Head of Journalism, City University London

March 17, 2010

If you pause to look at the state of news media in the developed world, you may

well be reminded of the story, alas apocryphal, of the conjuror and his parrot

who sailed on the Titanic.

The ship sailed with a large complement of bands, orchestras and entertainers.

Down at the foot of the bill was a conjuror whose gimmick or unique selling point

was a parrot who sat on his shoulder and gave a running commentary on where

the conjuror was hiding a ball or a handkerchief. “It’s up his sleeve,” the parrot

might squawk, or “Watch his other hand!” And so on.

The ship hit the iceberg and sank. The conjuror and the parrot found themselves

in a lifeboat. The bird was out of sorts and said nothing for four whole days.

When the parrot did finally speak, he asked the conjuror a question: “OK, so

what have you done with the ship?” When we look at news, in the same way as

that parrot, we’re failing to grasp what’s happening around us. And the failure of

journalists to see the whole picture is the worst of all.

What I want to do this evening is to use my own experience in the news business

to try to paint in the rest of that picture. I want to talk about the trajectory of

change in my working lifetime, as well as trust and alienation. In doing that I

hope to achieve my basic aim, which is to rescue the ideals of journalism. For

they are in need of help.

Debate about news is almost exclusively doom-laden. There is gloom economic:

print advertising income falling in newspapers, online publishing failing to find a

business model, the financing of local television news uncertain. There is

pessimism journalistic: original reporting, it is said, has been replaced by

“churnalism”, amounting to the rapid rewriting of press releases by underpaid

serfs, wholly owned by unscrupulous and manipulative tycoons. Steve Coogan, in

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one of those question-and-answer features which magazines love, was asked

recently: “If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you

choose?” And he replied: “Genuine journalistic inquiry.” Other voices don’t just

ask: is news over? They ask if journalism exists or adds any value at all.

To meet that question head on, we have to start by asking once again what

journalism actually is. Perfectly easy to recognise, you might say: a person

equipped with anything from a spiral-bound notebook to a handycam reporting

events to the rest of us. But anyone can now do that if they choose. Can anyone

relaying news to anyone call themselves a journalist? Journalism has now

become a word wandering around in search of a definition.

In the past decade and a half, the ability of very small computers to swop,

replicate and link vast quantities of data at high speed and at almost no cost

have changed more than news. These technologies push slow transformative

shifts in human communication, the public sphere, privacy, politics, the division

between work and play and the distribution of power. Distilling the effects on

news, we can separate out three irreversible shifts:

First, in the quantity of information available. When journalism began,

reliable information was scarce; despite the inaccuracy of much that you

can find nowadays, news is in glut. Perhaps the most dramatic effects of

this explosion of information are still to be felt in regions like Africa and

South Asia where the internet’s riches arrive on a mobile phone, equipping

the poor with information which they haven’t had before. Across the world

the internet adoption rate is now eight times faster on mobile phones than

it is on PCs. Here is one small example from villages in Uttar Pradesh, the

beneficiaries of an experiment being conducted by the International

Media Institute of India. The villages may or may not have access to radio

or television, but if they do, little of that news is local enough to matter.

But everyone has a mobile phone. A couple of people in each village,

chosen as reporters, gather the stories. They may be thefts, fires, holes in

the road, floods, births, deaths, prayer meetings. They record the stories

in the local dialect and send them to an editor, who can filter and perhaps

add in region-wide information on crop prices, weather forecasts or even

advice on sanitation or childcare. A company in Hyderabad then sends the

“news” back as a voice call. Thanks to speakers on phones, the twice-daily

bulletins have become a social event.

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Second big change: the instant alteration of information. Cable and

satellite gave us rolling 24-hour news. The internet allows that to be

updated, nuanced, corrected continuously from many different directions.

Those who enjoy this say that news has become a “process” or a

“conversation”. Those who do not enjoy this say that news is losing at

least some of its authority, clarity and coherence.

The third change is the most profound. I would call it the decentralisation

of news. The production and consumption of news has been decoupled

from advertising and its previous sources of income. First and foremost

that causes an economic crisis. The readers and watchers of mass media

news have never paid the full cost in subscription or cover price. In print,

advertising is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the income

needed to keep a quality newspaper going. Many newspapers, and

particularly local and regional ones, get a big slice of their income from

classified ads, usually for jobs, houses and cars. Those small ads have

transferred to the web. Not “will” transfer, but “have”; past tense. The

analyst Claire Enders estimates that between 2007 and 2013, the value of

print advertising coming to UK newspapers will fall by almost half. A

similarly respected American consultancy has just predicted that for the

first time in 2010 in the US, more advertising dollars will be spent online

than in print. One report this week reckoned that in Britain a hundred

newspaper titles stopped publishing in 2009.

What I’ve called decentralisation does not stop there. The ability for

anyone to produce something called “news”, circulate it, discuss it and

edit it brings an oligopoly to a brutal end. Until recently, journalists could

define what they did as a craft or as a mission, but they could rest secure

in the knowledge that it wasn’t easy for anyone to claim to be a journalist

unless they owned or operated the capital-intensive equipment to publish

or broadcast. That barrier to entry has gone. Over the last 15 years, a lot

of authority – not to mention social status and sense of identity among

journalists – evaporated.

The last decentralising effect is that the large communities of shared

knowledge formed by newspapers don’t survive or grow in this new

information environment. We have to go back to de Tocqueville, reporting

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what he saw in the early American republic, to see what a remarkable

social reshaper the newspaper once was. He found that

“In democratic countries…it frequently happens that a great

number of men who wish to or want to combine cannot accomplish

it because…they cannot see and do not know where to find one

another. A newspaper takes up the notion or the feeling that had

occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then

immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering

minds…at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them

together, and the newspaper is necessary to keep them united.”

This is journalism which requires psychological insight on a level which I fear

many editors may not achieve. And of course now online audiences and

communities form, congeal, dissolve and disperse at a speed unimaginable to de

Tocqueville.

This description of the alterations wrought by the web, email and mobile wireless

technology cannot cover all that will happen. The only confident prediction I

make is that the unexpected will occur. But the changes that we have registered

ask us: do we know what journalism is? Does it have a distinctive purpose? Or

does the idea just dissolve in a sea of media?

Digital technology allows mainstream news outlets to enrich what they do with a

stream of pictures or words from non-journalists. In the wake of the 7/7

bombings in London, many of the first images that reached us were taken on

camera phones by eyewitnesses. Few of the images which reach us now of

demonstrations in Iran, Burma or Tibet are taken by professional journalists.

When The Guardian seeks to fill gaps in the story of the man who died at the G20

demonstration last year or the Trafigura case, its reporters tweet for help – and

get it, drawing on a pool of expertise that may always have been there but is

now more instantly accessible than ever before.

Commenting on what he calls the “mutualisation” of journalism, the editor of The

Guardian, Alan Rusbridger said:

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“Is any of this journalism? Does it matter? You could waste many doctoral

theses arguing the point but it seems futile to deny that something

interesting is going on here.”

No doctoral time will be wasted here at City and there’s no dispute that

something interesting is going on. But I respectfully disagree about whether it

matters. Journalism is the systematic effort to establish the truth of what matters

to society. It follows that expertise and experience, for example, should count for

something. There is a fascinating debate starting over what Clay Shirky

christened “algorithmic authority”. Shirky argues that for centuries, intellectual

authority rested with the individual experts and that this is now having to give

way to collective, evolving judgements made Wikipedia-style by groups of

knowledgeable, interested people. Applied to news, this is journalism as fluid

process, always provisional, always being improved – and always open to

contribution. In short, the distinction between qualified professionals on the

inside of the machine and amateurs outside collapses.

This is a competition for trust between two different forms of collective

intelligence. This argument is not being openly and clearly mapped by those who

run news media. Perhaps understandably, no editor wanting to encourage the

highest level of participation online wants to underline that the suggestions,

tweets, tips and facts flowing in from this rich new sources are being filtered in a

traditional way.

But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is

exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in

the old days to be known as “editing”. If it’s done right, it should be for the

benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.

Editing isn’t uncontroversial: the risks of selection and judgement are required,

as well as a practised reflex for accuracy. Editors have to ask old questions. How

do we know this is true? How reliable is the record of this source? Can we check

this down some other route? What is the level of risk if we run this on one source

only? The nature of research may have changed but the responsibilities of the

researcher have not. News may not be over but it doesn’t reach you in the same

way and the way it is assembled is also altering. But it is equally true and

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important that buried inside these changes, something essential needs

preserving. In the words of the great Harry Evans, at the very end of his latest

book:

“The question is not whether internet journalism will be dominant, but

whether it will maintain the quality of the best print journalism.”

The most visible and obvious factors which have brought journalism to an

inflection point are technical and financial. But there’s also a half-acknowledged

crisis of consumer confidence. If journalism is to be valued – and perhaps even to

be paid for – that worth has to be clear to those who are not journalists. Thoreau

said that it takes two people to tell the truth: one to say it, another to hear it.

Journalists have to start by accepting that they don’t automatically hold the

powerful place in the new information system that they held in the old. William

Perrin, a local blogger in King’s Cross who was once a Cabinet Office civil

servant, says that journalism “as a belief system” is over. Chris Anderson, a

professional exaggerator and author of the books The Long Tail and Free, says

that there’s no longer any such thing as news.

They’re nearly right. Many journalists speak as if and seem to believe that their

assistance to democracy is so vital and self-evident that it is up to society to

provide a route out of their current problems. At least some people watching the

news media’s travails are, rather, waiting for its practitioners to rethink their way

of thinking and working. There are already people – William Perrin is one of them

– who are rethinking ways of supplying people with the information they need

without caring whether anyone calls it journalism or not.

Journalists should start by narrowing down the elements which make the core of

what they do. There are four of them:

First, verification: the elimination of doubt about what has happened,

especially as to events which are disputed. When news media began,

information of any kind was scarce, reliable information even more so.

Today, the reliable information is still scarce; but it is liable to be hidden in

a torrent of data.

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Second, sense-making. Some facts are easier to establish than others but

there are very few that are “pure” in the sense that they can divorced

from context or values. There never was a golden age when newspapers

“of record” just stuck to the facts. There was a past age when dull, formal,

deferential reporting got nobody very excited. That is not the same as

good journalism, whose tasks include making sense of what it transmits.

That involves the exercise of judgement, which involves risk. Sense-

making may go under the labels of reporting, analysis, comment or

opinion.

Third, witness. Irrespective of the hugely amplified power of digital

recording, there remain situations best captured, with whatever

technology is available, by an experienced eyewitness. New technology

has eliminated the need for the vast quantities of blanket, routine

reporting that was needed in the past.

Fourth and last: investigation. Irrespective of greater transparency, there

remain hidden stories. They require skill, experience, patience and

resources to tell. It’s a specialist skill.

These four overlapping functions should be the pillars of trust. They will be at the

heart of what we teach here at City. This isn’t supposed to be a list of what

journalists do. I’m concerned here to frame the essential moral, democratic

foundation for what journalism lays a claim to do. None of these four things can

be done by an algorithm. There are plenty of other things that news media will

do. They might include…distilling and selection, argument, simplification, taste-

making or arts criticism, gossip, rumour, covering public and political institutions,

what the media scholar Michael Schudson calls “social empathy” (his term for

the expansion of reporting to cover real lives), crosswords, mobilising campaigns

– and simply poking fun at the ridiculous. Disclosure can now be done by anyone,

experienced or inexperienced, with a bundle of motives or none. Significant

disclosures can be made by red-top papers, bloggers in their pyjamas, by

political activists from Fox News to John Pilger.

But all of these functions can be done, and are being done, by thousands of

others who neither count themselves as news organisations or journalists. The

coverage of public and political institutions is not in my core list. I am assuming

that routine coverage of hearings, parliaments , some local and national

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government data will happen, if gradually, with greater transparency made

possible by new technology. That doesn’t mean to say that these institutions

may not deserve eye-witness reporting, verification, analysis or investigation

from time to time. They certainly will.

Why does tightening the boundaries round the definition of journalism matter?

Because of what has happened over the past half century.

A 20th century graph of all newspaper sales in Britain shows a peak in the 1920s

and a downwards slope since then. That decline may have been accelerated by

the arrival of both radio and television, but since neither newcomer forced more

than a handful of newspapers out of business, print publishers were gratefully

surprised to be still in the game at all. Once the panic over survival had subsided

by around 1970, far less attention was paid to the slow but profound change

which then took place in newspapers. With broadcasting giving people their first

inkling of news, print was gradually nudged into territory where papers had the

natural advantage over broadcast: descriptive writing, investigations, context,

analysis and opinion. Much of this was excellent and appreciated, but the shift

marked the weakening of the hold which newspapers had on their hitherto

captive market.

Broadcasting channels multiplied. And the audience naturally fragmented. The

amounts of time and money spent on news media grew in the 1980s and 1990s;

newspapers grew ever larger on the back of a long advertising boom. But the big

audiences shrank, split between more and more choices. Twenty years ago the

main evening news bulletins on the BBC and ITV commanded nightly news

audiences of 8-10m viewers each. Both are down to half that number.

Competition for attention became more expensive and difficult. Investment in

reporting which took a long time to research and write shrank. And it wasn’t just

the producers of news who were short of resources. The consumers of news saw

themselves as having less and less time to read and watch. In 1997, the number

of people saying that they “never have enough time to get anything done” hit an

all-time high of two-thirds of the sample. By no coincidence at all, that was just

after London’s first free morning newspaper, Metro, became available in the

capital’s commuter trains and subways, offering travellers a quick read only as

long as their journey at no cost in effort or money.

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These gradual changes started the long process of the hollowing or thinning of

news. Competition for attention became tough both between proliferating outlets

on the same platform and between radio, television and print. Justin Lewis of

Cardiff University has shown that many journalists are today turning out up to

three times more material as they would have been expected to produce 20 or

30 years ago. The long term effect on the consumers of news was twofold but

not surprising. People began to lose both interest and faith in what they read,

heard and watched.

Now it’s possible to exaggerate the loss of trust. Exaggerate, that is, by

suggesting that journalists have ever been much trusted. There wasn’t much

trust in the past. But the trust levels for those who enjoy higher ratings – BBC

and broadcast journalists for example – are slipping in Britain. Journalists have

been long accustomed to write these ratings off as inevitable or irrelevant. But in

the era when people have the choice to opt out of established media, the public

impact of fiascos and disgraces - the handling of MMR, the worst excesses of the

reporting of the search for Madeleine McCann and the widespread use of phone-

tapping - is far greater. The same development can be seen in America, where

trust levels in news media began declining in the mid-1970s. To capture the

change, think of the difference between the movie All The President’s Men in the

mid-70s and the fifth season of The Wire just a few years ago. I probably don’t

have to describe Watergate, and if you haven’t seen the last series of The Wire, I

won’t spoil the plot. Suffice to say that the later drama does not show journalists

in anything like such a glamorous or flattering light as the earlier film.

The other effect, the loss of interest, is less easy to measure but more important.

It is picked out most strikingly in the Ofcom report New News, Future News in

2007. It disclosed a gap between news and daily experience: more than half the

people surveyed for Ofcom’s report did not think that news as presented to them

was relevant to their lives. This alienation and indifference was explored in an

excellent Reuters Institute study whose authors found that journalists were seen

as

“…”insiders”, looking out from the citadels of power rather than outsiders

looking in, journalists were seen as being compromised by their proximity

to social power…. our focus groups did not consider journalists to be

dishonest…. Distrust took a more oblique form. The participants seemed

to be questioning the institutional integrity of news.”

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And again:

“When distrust in news was expressed…it was because people felt that

their expectations of the news were not shared by news producers; that

they were being told stories that were not adequately explained; that their

lives were being reported in ways that were not adequately researched; or

that new communicative spaces were opening up in which useful, reliable

or amusing information could be accessed without having to subscribe to

the authority of the mainstream media.”

Those new communicative spaces opened up for users of news who felt taken for

granted. And they have been making full use of the opportunity.

As these changes work their way through, what do we see? What we actually

have at the moment is a mixed news economy: part industrial old mass media

(printworks, terrestrial broadcasting and so on) and part a networked digital

information economy. Consumer loyalties are divided: affection for a favourite

newspaper or the appointment with the evening news doesn’t decline just

because the business model is going to run out of steam. But very gradually, the

habit of using old media is wearing off; and the young are not picking it up.

Above all, what we have here – and journalists find this the hardest of all to

accept – is a fall in the perceived value of what mainstream news organisations

produce. It’s a double whammy: mainstream news itself isn’t, in a connected

age, as useful or interesting as it was. And the bundle that is the news

programme or newspaper no longer makes the sense it did. If you can get only

the item you want, why pay the cost of the whole package?

Imagine a common enough event in any large city. It is a Friday evening and a

young woman on her way home after a night out is attacked and robbed. The

attack is not fatal, but serious enough to put her in hospital overnight and to

involve the police. By the next morning, her social network will have been

alerted. She might have triggered this by tweeting, posting on Facebook or

another social networking site or simply by sending emails or texts from a phone.

Before 24 hours have gone by, anything up to several hundred people will have

read and discussed the details. What does the local paper do? A routine police

check which might put a few paragraphs on the website on the Saturday and in

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Monday evening’s edition. It wasn’t a murder after all. In print, more potential

readers but less engagement.

Conventional news’s disadvantage is not really lack of speed, although it will be

slower. It is also that the formal, one-size-fits-all “news” arrives in less satisfying

form. For this is both a public event (police, hospital and a possible court case)

and a private one belonging to a network. The private version of the news will be

swifter, richer and more detailed and authentic, carried by voices who know

eachother. As young consumers of news say nowadays: “If the news is important

enough it will find me.”

None of these developments are being witnessed or described here with much

pleasure by me. I spent many years in newspapers. Historically speaking it is

true that news media are regularly turned upside down by technological

innovation, by competition and market forces. But the fragmentation of channels

and instant interactivity is a huge adjustment. There are risks and loss to society

as a whole. Elected and unelected powers will be left less closely watched. For

the first time in one or two centuries, major cities may soon have no community

conversation in print. For there is no law of economics which guarantees that

when one business model fails, a replacement one is immediately available.

Before asking what we might hope to do about this, let me highlight one issue

which gets neglected as we move away from an era dominated by print and

broadcast.

If, as seems likely, most news consumption is on electronic and wireless devices

and not in print, any story can be told audio-visually. The only barriers to

portable TV news are ones of technology and cost and they will be crossed fairly

soon. Most news websites now carry video and we are well on the way to

wireless networks which will carry video easily and at bearable cost to iPads,

smartphones or any of the new lightweight touchscreens which will multiply in

the next few years.

Words can carry more complex meanings than sound and picture can sometimes

manage. That’s not to take anything away from the irreplaceable immediacy and

power of witness which television and radio have. And we should be grateful that

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ever-cheaper and ever-lighter devices make capturing the history of the present

easier than it ever was. But we have to find a way to make sure that words

survive in the equation. Each technology tends to affect the way news is

reported on that particular technology. No such rigid conventions have grown up

yet for online and some of the most successful ways of telling stories seem to

weave words, video and sound together in new combinations, in a new grammar

if you will. I only plead that words – so beautiful and so useful – don’t get

squeezed out of the equation.

There’s no avoiding any longer the issue of how we make this pay. Big

established news organisations with large fixed costs are looking for ways of

getting you to pay for what you learn. In a lot of cases this probably won’t work.

Not so much because the younger audience is used to online news and

information for free – that is an issue – but because the business logic is the

wrong way round. Most great news providers of today began small: they found a

demand and supplied it. The business model often came later. When radio

became popular in the United States in the 1920s, no one who started it had any

idea how to make it pay. Proctor & Gamble, then as now makers of detergents,

offered to pay money to stations if the company could be identified as the

sponsors of a show. They went for drama. Thus was born the first “soap opera”.

I don’t have a magic fix answer to the burning question of how we pay for

sustainable journalism. I’m in good company: neither does anyone else.

Journalists need to be quite sure and clear about what they’re offering. We’re

past the era when we could assume that journalism’s usefulness was self-

evident. Experiment has now to match value to demand. The media most likely

to succeed in creating new income streams are those which throw most

spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. If you’ve ever thrown spaghetti at a wall,

you’ll know that very little of it does actually stay there. It isn’t just messy; the

failure rate is very high. It’s expensive and it’s risky.

If you’re looking for a job in a news organisation or – less likely these days –

buying shares in one, look for the one with the most unsentimental ability to run

through the largest possible number of tests and the agility to discard all the

ones that don’t work. The first attempts to replicate the old print business model

in a digital context haven’t worked. Selling advertising at a good price depends

on scarcity of supply to keep that price up. In print, radio and television, the

number of channels was limited and the advertising inventory thus rationed. On

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the internet, the supply is almost infinite and digital technology renders mass,

one-size-fits-all advertising gradually obsolete and being replaced by more

targeted ads tailored to groups and individuals. That suggests to me that the old

model isn’t going to work in the new digital context. But if people keep

experimenting, we’ll know.

By far the most interesting examples are taking place below the radar of most

metropolitan journalists. It is in these small online news laboratories – even if

they don’t call themselves that – that the rescue of what matters is most likely to

succeed. It would require another lecture to describe and analyse the variety of

what is occurring in dozens of local news sites like Pits ‘n Potts (coal mines and

potteries: it’s in Staffordshire), Litchfield, Leeds, … and inside London in places

like King’s Cross or Greenwich.

For an example of what has worked really well in a country whose local media

were once in worse shape than here, let me take you eastward to the Czech

Republic. There a large insurance company has invested in a chain of small

coffee shops. They have also set up small newspapers and websites, but they are

– so far and commercially - less important than the coffee shops, which provide

income while the journalism finds its feet. The coffee shops are also the local

newsrooms. The journalism is local, parochial and stays close to its market. That

“hyperlocal” reporting is balanced by a headquarters newsroom in Prague, which

serves the whole network, staffed by a handful of editors with some experience.

They lend a hand when asked with design or reporting and can tie together story

patterns (the provision of GP services right across the country, say) which

emerge from the localities. The formula works: dozens more coffee shop

newsrooms are being rolled out now. They plan more outlets and newsrooms for

their country than McDonalds.

The discussions over paywalls and charging online have to be seen in this

context. Risks will be taken: the market will learn. If charging for online content

works, the rules of the game will change. It seems unlikely that putting a paywall

round an entire paper, as the Editor of The Times has said that he plans to do,

can work. But we’ll see; and it looks as if we’ll see in as soon as May. Others

argue that links are the currency that counts: “do what you do best and link to

the rest”. The odds are that a wholly new formula may work better than either.

The more experiments, the more discoveries, the more journalism sustained.

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There may be no single, magic-bullet formula for success. There may be several

or many.

Philanthropy is bound to play a role for the foreseeable future, at the very least

in bridging the old and new eras. Not merely in providing a platform for some

journalism but in assisting empirical experiment. Take investigative journalism,

along with war reporting perhaps the hardest and most expensive reporting to

keep going. Here at City we already run a specialised one-year MA in

investigative journalism. We host the Centre for Investigative Journalism which

acts as an influential network for teaching and discussion. Next month will see

the launch of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, also based here,

established by a generous donation from David and Elaine Potter. This team will

not only research and publish investigative stories but research and reflect on

which business models work. The inspiration here is similar philanthropically-

funded initiatives in the United States.

Can or should public funds – in addition to those already raised for the BBC - be

used to ensure that power, local power particularly, will be held to account? We

can confidently expect that this question will be asked as regional papers start to

fail in greater numbers. Public subsidy cannot be the right answer: if journalism

has public value, it is as an independent source of knowledge and known to be

that. Independence is not a sufficient condition for useful quality but it is a

necessary one. If public funding for news media must find its way onto the

political agenda, let’s at least observe two principles:

That if the state wants to help, that help should be transparent and

indirect. The model is the modest help for the pilot schemes for

independently-financed news coalitions in local television news.

Second, that what should be supported is experiments in any media and

not devoted to the propping up of business models that are failing. Help

should be “platform-agnostic”, available to whatever scheme or medium

looks likely to work.

Before finishing, I want to return to those functions which define journalism. In

everyday journalism there is a practice so regular, so little questioned that it can

almost be called a default mode. Not bias or inaccuracy. They both happen but

so do many efforts to prevent them occurring. To witnessing and sense-making,

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many journalists add a third element: telling us whether something is morally

acceptable or not. Usually it isn’t.

This is what Martin Bell calls reporting that “cares as well as knows”. Martin Bell

may be sparing in his caring but others aren’t so careful. Indignation is now a

routine commodity in news. Reporting without the judgement and selection

involved in sense-making does little worthwhile. But the style and posture into

which much reporting has slipped goes much further – a mission creep on a

grand scale.

We need to go back to Paul Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors in 2008 to

read the manifesto for moral outrage. The Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail and

Mail on Sunday was complaining about the decisions of Mr Justice Eady in the

case which the News of the World lost against Max Moseley, who, the paper

claimed, had been taking part in “sick Nazi orgies.”

(I quote) “Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in

defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social

behaviour,” Dacre argued. “If readers don’t agree with the defence of such

values, they would not buy those papers in such numbers.” He then gave the

game away. “If mass-circulation newspapers , which also devote considerable

space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write

about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the

obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.”

This is self-deluding arrogance. Revealing genuine scandal is right and Mr Dacre

has done that. But his claim went much further: that journalists are moral

arbiters. This assumption has a catastrophic distorting effect on the mission of

journalism and a corroding effect on public trust. There are many people in any

society entitled to defend moral standards. Some of them may even be better

qualified than journalists to speak on the subject. Many developments, probably

starting with Watergate, have contributed to this inflation of journalism’s work

but whatever the causes, the result has been an epidemic of attitude

masquerading as analysis, emotion trumping reasoning from the facts. No one

wants or will read journalism stripped of any passion. But synthetic outrage

repels readers.

Editors might profitably concentrate on the moral behaviour of their own

journalists for the simple reason that they should fear other agencies doing so.

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Over the past 20 years there has been an enormous quantity of judge-generated

law in the UK which affects the news media from the development of the

Reynolds principles in defamation to the cumulative creation of what is new

privacy legislation. These judgements amount to attempts to define what good

journalism might be in law. This has been argued out, piece by piece, by judges

because the news media stayed out of the debate. They did so because,

influenced by the editors and proprietors of the red-top papers, they feared a

new privacy law. They relied on a self-regulatory body, the Press Complaints

Commission, which lacks credibility because it is dominated by the media itself.

And a new privacy law could not possibly be worse than the haphazard jigsaw we

have now.

But in general, rules won’t help journalists to connect better with their audiences

in the changed context I’ve tried to describe. And nothing at all can make

journalism lovable, uncontroversial or risk-free. Good journalism lives close to the

edge of the rules. Journalism discloses things that no one else gets into the

public domain because risks get taken: the Daily Telegraph buys a CD-ROM,

running the risk of censure for its methods, but thus ensures that Parliament

can’t edit the truth. It’s not even easy to put a professional frontier round

journalists. It’s a porous business: people are recruited to it and discovered to be

talented, both things happening in random accidents as much as by careful

choice. Not even training will guarantee quality: although naturally here at City

we believe that it can do a great deal of good and we are hard at work trying to

adapt our curriculum to the needs of the future.

We’re entering a new communications age and no one can accurately predict

what exactly those needs will be. We can only equip ourselves better to navigate

change. You can only do that with a clear idea of the value you want to add. And

the value is that systematic attempt to get at the truth of what matters. Making

the argument for journalism all over again needs a little more self-critical

appraisal than we have been used to doing. For the worth of journalism is real

and its case will need to be made often in the next few years.

end

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