Nice piece by Tom Clark in today's Guardian on media attitudes to poverty.
Whenever newspapers are charged with peddling a pernicious line, they
plead that they are merely reflecting their readers. But does middle
Britain really see Vicky Pollard as representing the poor?
You can read the rest here. As Clark points out - many top journalists are simply unfamiliar with poverty. Your average Fleet Street salary is nudging £40K and for seniors, and commentators especially, having only three foreign holidays a year and two nannies is considered slumming it. But it is the news values which rate celebrity fluff and avoid 'complicated' stories which are truely to blame.
Alison Gow over at the Liverpool Daily Post has written a nice post on the different approaches to sourcing, writing and publishing news story for old school print and new school web 2.0 journos. Meanwhile this post breaks rule 88 on Paul Bradshaw's list of 1000 things he's learnt about blogging.
Summer is officially over when well-paid columnists return from their hols, tanned and invigorated, having read widely and considered deeply and bend to the task of illuminating our lives with new thoughts. Unless you're Henry Porter. It is somehow very right that after a crap summer, Henry Porter should return to The Observer today and offload the same pompous crud that he was shovelling before he went away. Yes, it's the "we're all doomed to live in a world like The Matrix because nobody will listen to my warnings about the surveillance society" theme. Again. It looks like he popped back in the office, checked his Google alert box for "surveillance gone mad" stories, cut and pasted pars from a couple of political features he read over the summer and there you go. I'm waiting for a magazine called Flipside to run a feature I've done on children and surveillance and the way we catalogue young people in all sorts of different ways. Meanwhile the IT project for one of these systems has just gone pearshaped. (Janet Murray has a good piece on it). Porter - if you're going to write about this stuff endlessly give us a new tune and some facts. (BTW: his mugshot on the Observer website looks like he should be holding a card with a row of numbers on it. Very scary.
Update: donpaskini points out one glaring contradiction in Porter's column. Sadie's Tavern has taken a stiletto to Porter previously. Anyone else want to join the gang?
I'm going to be doing some lecturing at the University of the West of England this year to first year students on the BA Journalism course. Below is a list of books, of which the students are expected to read at least one in the first term and review. (There are other, practical, books on the syllabus as well) Personally I found former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's autobiography A Good Life very instructive (if not the most sympathetic to union members) and is often overlooked. When I started out the three books which really inspired me were Michael Herr's Dispatches, Edward Behr's Anyone Here Been Raped And Speak English? and Pilger's Heroes (just seeing the cover again is so evocative). Foreign reporting (and all those Vietnam movies) seemed to similary inspire a lot of my peers. I guess books such as Ravi Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City perform the same function today. Something's got to be motivating aspiring journalists because I'm not sure you can write a ripping yarn about blogging (made some coffee, scanned the feeds, rang someone, fed the cat, wrote a post). What inspires me now are those books which dig out the stories closer to home - getting down and dirty not swanning round Westrminster. Dark Heart by Nick Davies, which is on the list below, is a prime example. A journalist friend (where are you now David Northmore?) once gave me a copy of The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe and Edward Johnson. It was once groundbreaking and I still like it - but it seems to have fallen out of favour. (Meanwhile thanks to Roy Greenslade for the tip about a new website for local and regional journalists. I'll be adding that to my resource list for the students).
Kate Adie
The Kindness of Strangers,
Corsets to Camouflage: Women
and War
Nobody's Child
Into
Danger: Risking your life for your work
George Alagiah
A Passage to
Africa
A Home from Home: From immigrant boy
to English man
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Some of my best friends are…
Lynn Barber
Mostly Men
Demon Barber
Nick
Davies
Dark Heart
Murder on
Ward Four
White Lies
Flat Earth
News
Thomas Harding
The Video Activist Handbook
Emily O'Reilly
Veronica Guerin: The Life and
Death of a Crime Reporter.
John Pilger
The New Rulers of the World
Tell Me No Lies: Investigative
journalism and its triumphs
Freedom Next Time
Tim Gopsill and Greg Neale
Journalists: 100 years of the NUJ
Chris Horrrie & Adam
Nathan
L?ve TV: Telly Brats & Topless
Darts
Feargal Keane
Season
of Blood: A Rwandan Journey
David Loyn
Frontline:
The British mavericks who changed the face of war reporting
Interesting column from Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian's readers' editor, on journalists and legal protection. Journalists love to set themselves apart from the masses - and being able to claim some high-falutin' public interest defence for nosing around in peoples' rubbish bins is seen as one of the perks of the job. But Butterworth quotes Clay Shirky that, with the rise of citizen journalism, how can this protection be extended to, well, everybody. As he says:
"If anyone can be a publisher, then anyone can be a journalist. And if anyone can be a journalist, then journalistic privilege
suddenly becomes a loophole too large to be borne by society."
As ever, the law lags behind technology. Do you need to qualify for legal protection, and if so how? Does my NUJ membership (and consequently signing up for its code of conduct) give me rights over well-meaning but non-union bloggers? Are gatekeepers becoming redundant? Perhaps the rights of journalists will become the rights for anyone who takes a mature role in civil society. If you can prove your actions are well-intended and carried out in as professional a manner as possible you deserve some legal protection. You are simply exercising your rights as a citizen to scrutinise society.
The News of the World's 'Fake Sheik' investigative reporter has written a book. He's interviewed by the BBC here. Along with the decline of the Sunday Times Insight team and Donal Macintyre's ego trips, Mahmood's dubious antics sum up much that is wrong with mainstream investigative journalism. Safe targets, headlines first, ethics last. Nick Davies is very good on this.
Marvellous - someone else is irritated by Henry Porter's egotistical ramblings in The Observer. I've posted on Porter before and yes I do go on, but he's awful. A highlight was the column he excreted last month where he extrapolated from his daughter's pleasant graduation that young people are generally, like, OK. However, the headline from this piece shows the sheer bumptiousness of the man. We need decent liberal writers in our few liberal newspapers - but Porter is in the irway. Sadie: let's start a consign-Porter-to-the-memory-hole club.
The story of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and his affair has dominated media coverage in the US. Bloggers are picking the story apart with relish. And why not: it's a great story, even if the media over here seem a little less bothered by it (OK, Edwards isn't running for anything now and he's American and the Olympics have started so fair enough). I was intrigued by a snippet in a Guardian report that the National Enquirer, which broke the story, had been running to for ages. Since October year! They eventually set up Edwards after he outright denied it (aka lied). It wasn't until he confessed to ABC that it became a mainstream story. American journalists are even more sniffy about their tabloid compadres than we are - but 10 months to miss a story on a plate is pretty good going. Am I posting this because I think we get it right over here? No. The Kennedy alcoholic story proves no-one is immune from missing what's right infront of them.
Interesting study from the Centre for Public Integrity in the US about poisonings from household chemicals. It questions whether manufacturers are doing enough to make their products safe. You would think this report would have a bearing over here. Even with our FOI laws and some sterling efforts one wonders if we could a get access to similar data in this country.
politics, journalism and some points in between from Phil Chamberlain, a Wiltshire-based freelance journalist, UWE journalism lecturer and media trainer