Destination Digital

"[The article] is not dead.   I did not kill it."   The words of new media prophesier Jeff Jarvis in a Media Guardian article investigating the future, ironically enough, of the printed article.   This defensive stance has become a trademark of Jarvis' musings about mainstream media.

Following a now familiar tack, journalism lecturer Jarvis pokes a digital stick at traditional media outlets.   He suggests that their structures are inherently outmoded and on the brink of collapse and foretells of a brave new world diametrically opposed to the linear one which they have inhabited for far too long.   When he gets the occasional brickbat in response, his usual schtick is to feign shock (hurt, even), before conceding how unsettling it must be for those being forced out of their old media comfort blankets - but reasserting that it is a fate which inevitably befall them whether they embrace it or not.   Is that salt I sense being gleefully rubbed into an open wound?   Probably.

In his analysis of the article as the base unit of print journalism, Jarvis questions whether this is sustainable or even desirable in the near future.   In adopting a "digital first" way of thinking, he argues, articles should be viewed as luxuries or mere by-products of a new media process.   The partially constructed immediacy of the internet should take precedence.   The article - and, by extension, its broadcast equivalent, the package - would no longer be the gold standard.

For a man so keen to promote the bottom-up wonders of the web, Jarvis is curiously quick to dictate how journalism should look in the future.   In his view of a world with fewer articles, he returns to a theme which runs through much of his new-media analysis - abundance.   More is, well, more, apparently.

"Digital is freeing...infinite," opines Jarvis.   For those with infinite time to explore these infinite possibilities, that may be true.   For the rest of the real world, the wholesale dismantling of traditional journalistic structures would leave chaos in its wake.   The benefits that might flow from a greater stream of information would surely be wiped out by the difficulty in navigating a meaningful path through the unmoderated verbiage.

Then comes the vague notion of the role journalists themselves will play in this new world order.   And here, Jarvis wheels out his disturbingly amorphous vision of news organisations as "less of a producer, more an open platform for the public to share what it knows."   In other words, professional journalists - with the contacts, access and training that affords them - are to be relegated almost to bystander status and are supposed to revel in the sight of others doing the job for them.   Of course, some might do it better - but many will not.

Whatever Jarvis might want to see jettisoned and whatever I would like see to preserved do not really count for much in the end.   "Digital first" might already be coming down the track, though there is no guarantee that it will reach its final destination.

It's "digital only" which is a more worrying prospect.

Trusting Twitter

Amongst the many things spoken and written in the on-going furore about privacy injunctions, there have been some unlikely glimmers of hope for the future of the 'traditional' media outlets which are bound by them.   

The fact that Twitter makes a mockery of such reporting restrictions should be an open goal for the new media evangelists who take any opportunity to imply that the microblogging site is rendering print and broadcast media equally obsolete.   Yet there has been a twist to that particular narrative.

The oft overlooked issue of credibility in relation to 'news' emerging from social networking sites is finally being acknowledged, bringing some much needed balance to this related debate.   Max Mosley, Max Clifford and Director of the Press Complaints Commission, Stephen Able, might seem strange bedfellows in any context - but they have all noted the greater weight attached to publication in traditional media.   And little wonder.    

The perceived freedom to publish and (maybe not) be damned raises questions about the provenance of any information revealed.   After all, some tweets incorrectly identified certain individuals as having taken out injunctions.   So what's the marker of credibility in the Twittersphere?   Traction?   It surely follows that the most trusted sources on Twitter are those individuals who are already affiliated to established newsgathering outlets - and are willing to put their name to a story and stand by it.

Mosley and Clifford (speaking to BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio Merseyside, respectively) both admitted as much, dismissing Twitter almost as an irrelevance when it comes to allegations from anonymous individuals.    The PCC's Stephen Abel goes even further, stating "You may ignore a story on Twitter.   It only really matters when it is published on a trusted site."

Interestingly, it seems many people not only ignored, but were completely bypassed, by much of the Twitter-gossip of recent months.   In a recent edition of BBC2's Frank Skinner's Opinionated, recorded in mid-April, several weeks after the injunction speculation had begun to swirl, Chris Addison asked the audience if they were aware of the actor and footballer at the centre of the storm.   Not a single person in the audience knew the (possible) identities of those involved.   Admittedly, Skinner's target audience isn't as young as it was during his 1990s pomp, but it's fair to say they come from a media-savvy generation.   Yet they had neither sought nor happened across the information that was available to them via Twitter.

Of course, issues of credibility matter slightly less when it comes to the superficial froth of celebrity gossip (not wishing to diminish the impact it could have on the wrongly accused).   However, when it comes to hard news, credibility counts.   And that's where the role of the journalist as assessor and arbiter comes into its own - no matter how deeply unfashionable that may be in the digital age.

Just before any like-minded flag-wavers for the "hierarchy of news" get too carried away, though, the Liverpool Wavertree MP, Luciana Berger, tried to rain our parade.   Speaking to ITV Granada's regional political programme, Party People, she commented that she's aware of many people "who now get their news solely from Twitter."   Now that's a thought that should really send a chill down the spine of journalists - more so than any superinjunction.

Here's to the hierarchy of news

Where does news come from?   You might think that, six months into a Broadcast Journalism Masters, I'd be able to answer that poser in a heartbeat.  Not a bit of it.

I had naively imagined before embarking on the course that we were all going to be let in on some kind of industry secret about how journalists get a good story - or any story.   It transpires that the secret to finding a story as a trainee journalist is that rare combination of luck and judgement.   Luck that you happen across something of vague interest in the first place and judgement that you are able to discern just how vague the interest is permitted to be before it no longer constitutes a story.

Until, that is, you find yourself in the fortunate position of working for a news organisation with real status.   Then, it seems, stories have a habit of coming to you.   How else to explain the fact that the country's national and local press, not to mention broadcast media, are full of stories which elude the mortal trainee?   Because some of us just aren't very good?   Well, probably - but I think there is a more fundamental reason. 

News finds its way to the organisations with the greatest ability to disseminate it.   If you had information on anything from a church fayre to a big political scandal, where are you going to take it?   Some obscure blogger (asks the obscure blogger)?    No - the chances are you would go straight to one of the 'traditional' media outlets that are increasingly portrayed as some kind of stain on the modern media landscape.

That's not to say established media outlets have it easy when it comes to generating stories.   Much of their material will be down to old fashioned legwork and contacts.   Yet here again, they excel, because of the access their status affords them.   Real journalists from real news organisations succeed where trainees operating in an artificial environment never could.

All of which reinforces my innate scepticism about the fashionable concept that 'we're all journalists now'.   Even as a trainee, I don't consider myself a bona fide journalist - no authority has been conferred on my words.   The lack of status and access means that I could never aspire to emulate anything a traditional media outlet could produce.   

Some commentators seem to be confusing citizen journalism (the ability to state your opinion in a blog or get lucky with some mobile phone footage) with the craft of newsgathering and production.   The internet and those who populate it have undoubtedly opened up a new journalistic frontier.   The speed, breadth and depth of available information assists journalists enormously - but it should never replace them.   Elites are deeply unpopular in an age when the internet is seen as a great leveller.   Yet without a journalistic elite to gather, filter and judge the raw material, the competing, partial, biased voices of the internet could mislead us into thinking we know a lot about everything, when, in fact, we know very little about anything at all.  

The hierarchy of news remains intact - for now.   If the dark day ever comes when the presses stop rolling and the television news goes blank, then we had better hope the organisations behind them survive in some other form.   If they don't, then it won't just be trainees like me who will be missing out on stories - we all will.     

What's all this about, then?

Now, why would you be reading this?   No offence meant - it was a genuine question.   Apart from people who know me and might make the effort to visit a blog like this once in a while (probably to spare my feelings more than anything), why would anybody else be interested?

If I were in the public consciousness, that would be different.   If I were a politician, journalist or broadcaster (rather than an aspiring one), there would undoubtedly be a whole swathe of people tracking my every blogged utterance - but I'm not.    And that's why I have a slight problem with the 'blogosphere'.   It all seems just a little bit conceited.   Cue the digital obsessives who'll be wailing how, to use the well-worn phrase of the year, I "just don't get it."

So having spectacularly failed to answer the first question, here comes another.   Given all that, why am I adding my voice to the ever increasing background hum of comment, opinions and unnecessary bile?   Well, hopefully, I'll manage to avoid the bile element of the proceedings for a start.   The overriding reason, though, is pure self-interest.  

Trainee broadcast journalists up and down the country are having the multi-platform message drummed into them - some of us take a little more drumming than others.     Maybe it's because, on the one hand, I'm being taught how to make finely honed and crafted radio and television packages and, on the other, being told that any old hastily arranged pictures or tatty bit of audio will do so long as it can be thrown into a mash-up (eh?) and flashed around the world in a nanosecond.   It kind of makes you fear for the future of your chosen medium and causes you to resent the brave, new, converged, multi-platform world a little more than you probably should. 

Anyway, having flirted with Twitter (and felt dirty and cheap for the pleasure), I think my contribution to the digital world can best be made here - as a little analogue outpost, gently nudging readers in the direction of those 'traditional' media which our digital cousins talk about with such rancour and vitriol.    Now that probably isn't the spirit in which I've been advised to engage with digital, but at least I've got a blog - what more do you want?