As somebody on the first year of a course that will hopefully lead me into the world of journalism, what am I heading towards? To be honest, the future seems bleak. As far as I can tell, none of the broadsheets seem to have retained any appetite for real investigative journalism. While this is almost certainly down to the cost of it (time is money and we're in an environment of falling sales and thus falling advertising revenue) you'd hope the proprietors would realise that a paper that doesn't offer anything meaningful to read is no longer fit for purpose.
Watching from the outside it almost seems as if investigative journalism is seen as 'bad form', and there's been a gentleman's agreement not to do any.
Nick Davies suggests in his 'Flat Earth News' that a large number of articles published today are rewrites or even verbatim reprints of items from the Press Association wire, printed without any serious checking or research taking place before being pushed out for the next edition. Especially in the financial services and technical world, I often see the same 'article' reprinted verbatim on multiple sites, which is clearly just a press release being regurgitated. As somebody hoping to enter the industry, it's a worry. I don't want to earn a living copying and pasting other people's press releases.
TV news is also of quite a poor quality in the UK at present.. Channel 4 news is, in my opinion, the best of the current crop, while the BBC and Sky compete in their attempts to repeat the fewest possible number of articles the largest number of times across our screens, in headlines sized for the hard of thinking.
The BBC is (I suspect) actually a large part of why it's so difficult to make money from news in the UK. As much as I love the BBC, how can any private enterprise compete against an organisation that is essentially funded by a tax on owning a TV set, and that is able to maintain such a strong news team and web presence?
So, should I look for a job at the BBC? If Flat Earth News is correct, only if I want a job that is effectively typing. Nick Davies alleges that on 9th December 2005, Rod Liddle wrote a memo to the online news team suggesting that breaking news should be up on the website within five minutes. That five minutes was supposed to be enough time to write a one-liner for the website ticker, send an email to the news desk to alert them to the story, write a four paragraph 'stub' article to put on the website and perform any necessary checking. (p69 Davies, 2008)
How much checking do you think you could do in those five minutes? Unless the story was extremely straightforward , I couldn't vouch for a story's accuracy under those circumstances. Given that part of the BBC's recent settlement under George Osborne's spending review is that they have to limit their local news reporting (sorry for linking to the Mirror) I'm not convinced that things will be getting any easier there either.
All this could potentially leave me a bit gloomy about future job prospects, but I'm not despairing just yet. I've got two and a bit more years at university during which the situation will continue to change, and if nobody else has worked it out by the time I finish, then I'll have to find a financial backer and do something about it myself....
Happy New Year!
References:
Davies, Nick (2008) Flat Earth News, London: Vintage Books
