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Science journalism boost
Science journalism and science journalism training has got a lot of attention recently with a government-sponsored report proposing a raft of measures. By science the Science and the Media Expert group means the physical sciences as well as engineering and technology.
The vast majority of the general public get its news about science from the mass media. The objective of the recommendations of the Group is to improve the understanding of science among journalists, on the one hand, and the understanding of the media by scientists.
National Coordinator for Science Journalism Training
Some heavyweights are involved. The BBC, Reuters and the British Science Association among others. The Group calls for the creation of a National Coordinator for Science Journalism Training to be run by the Royal Statistical Society. And there is a push to train science press officers as well as journalists.
Many of the recommendations are of the type that I would say “about time too”.
These include:
• Media courses for scientists. I’ve been involved in this with, among others, some serious brains at Hewlett-Packard’s Bristol Lab. The scientists get it and even enjoy it, when some of them can get over their prejudice about the media.
• Lobby broadcasters for more and better science programming.
• Start an annual summer school for science investigative reporting. Investigative reporting is an excellent way to create exclusives and make the agenda.
• Secure more access for journalists to peer-reviewed journals where they report their “findings”.
Too narrow?
As so many journalists come from an arts background this is all to be welcomed. There is a danger that, if seriously undertaken at undergraduate level, the journalists of tomorrow will be in a niche. The more vocationally oriented undergraduate journalism courses become, the less chance that graduate may have of getting a job. There are only so many science journalism jobs. And the more Universities will become vocational trainers rather than education and research institutes.
At the University of East London, where I also teach, the new Sports Journalism BA is up and running.
The old way of becoming a journalist from Oxbridge was to do the PPE and therefore have a wide understanding of politics, philosophy and economics. Then onto the Times to write leaders! Broad training or subject-oriented? You can vote on this issue at the bottom right side panel Polls on the contentetc home page.
Blatant plug
One of the best ways of achieving the aims of the Group would be to increase the number of MA courses with a specialist twist in journalism. I help run a Magazines MA at UEL. This MA attracts people who have often been in journalism for some years and want a broader perspective. They want to answer the question “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
People like Steve Connor, science editor of The Independent and with whom I have the privilege to work in the past, would not benefit from this. They know the broader scene already. But there are hundreds if not thousands of others who could.
E-learning
This type of education need not be full time nor done in the traditional way. It could be online e-learning. The BBC College of Journalism will develop its online science training content for all BBC journalists. It has launched its online training to the public for free. So far it is focused on new media issues and is not of particularly rich content.
Another blatant plug
And there is always the growing range of interactive Contentetc e-learning courses.
By Andrew Calcutt
University of East London
Editor of Rising East and Proof Reading
Recession and Romance go together like Horse and Carriage, right? In terms of commercial entertainment, the Great Depression of the 1930s amounted to Picture Palaces inhabited by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the 1980s there was the fantasy couple of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. All right, they really were the leaders of their respective nations, but you get my drift: typically, recession prompts fantasies of love and marriage.
Flip this equation round the other way, and you might expect avowedly unromantic magazines to find themselves unhitched (divorced, even) from the market during times of recession. Like the times we are now living through. However, according to a newly published audit by Paul Darigan, my student and colleague at the University of East London, real life (non-romantic) magazines for women such as Love It!, That’s Life! and Pick Me Up, are holding up well. Meanwhile other more glamorous titles are going to the wall, and whole sectors feel like they are up against it.
Unreality
How come many of today’s women readers are sticking to reality rather than indulging in the sort of fantasy which their grandmothers relied on to exorcise the spectre of recession? It can’t be because the readers of today’s real life titles are relatively unaffected by the current economic downturn. They are drawn from the lower socio-economic groups which are taken to be bearing the brunt of it. Could it be that their whole experience (up to and including the recent experience of recession), has taken on an air of unreality? If so, perhaps Pick Me Up, That’s Life! and similar titles are offering their readers a reality check that is well worth the cover price of 68p.
(Such a lovely figure! Just counting out the exact money provides a gratifying reminder of what a sensible shopper you are.)
I’m suggesting that real life magazine consumers are purchasing the equivalent of that moment in Enid Blyton stories when the heroine pinches herself to make sure she is not dreaming.
An extra dose
Aren’t their lives real enough? It’s not as if these readers are living in a bubble, like the boys in the City with their botox babes and silicon bonuses. Perhaps they already are down and dirty in the nitty gritty, yet 323,171 people are prepared to pay the publishers (IPC Media) of Pick Me Up for an extra dose of it. Do they take prurient, almost ghoulish pleasure from reading a series of ghastly melodramas which have occurred, thankfully, to someone else? Possibly, but Darigan’s dissection of this title suggests that readers come to it more in search of affinity than smug complacency.
Mirrors
The fact is we all need our reality to be valued by others. We need it to be interpreted, evaluated and thus validated by them, otherwise we can’t be sure it’s really there. Besides mirrors, modern human beings require a whole range of reflective surfaces. Also, when old ones get smashed or covered over, there is a market for new kinds of looking glass, and money to be made from polishing them up.
In years gone by, the mothers and grandmothers of Pick Me Up readers would have seen themselves reflected in the fabric of working class communities, from the pub to the launderette to the Labour Party. Now Labour (ha!) is the sole property of middle class apparatchiks (seemingly to the deliberate exclusion of the white working class). Meanwhile far fewer pubs remain open and few people remain in the ones that are. For all its labour-saving benefits, consumer technology has also strengthened the trends towards domestic isolation. A wall of silence has arisen between individuated working class women and their equally atomised contemporaries. In this context, magazines like Pick Me Up do something to wire them back together again.
Strong wiring?
It’s debatable how strong the wiring really is. Maybe it lasts for only as long as it takes to read the magazine. In which case it is a gross exaggeration to refer to this kind of association as ‘community’, as various publishers are now inclined to do. But this is of no concern to the regular readers of real life magazines. For 68p, I doubt they expect a lifelong sense of belonging. At this price, it’s enough to be offered a fleeting sense of connection. Especially since so many other erstwhile sources are now unable to supply it, even fleetingly.
Of course, the ‘reality’ of reality magazines is about as genuine as a wedding reception. Readers’ life stories are subbed into shape like a pregnant bride squeezed into her wedding dress. In constructing the magazine to match readers’ requirements, there is a high degree of artificiality, a large amount of personal manipulation, and a ring of truth that is often as unpalatable as the ‘transgressions’ revealed in a best man’s speech.
Face value?
It would be easy to assume that readers from lower socio-economic groups don’t appreciate the tension between reality and artificiality in their favourite titles. Do they take at face value the lurid copy, unduly garish stories, and the cheap and somehow cheerless colour schemes? Again, I doubt it. Like the art crowd that went for ‘hyper-reality’ in the 1980s; and the trendy young people who adopted ‘the grunge aesthetic’ in the early 1990s, I reckon they are having a play at being real (they just took their time getting round to it).
Regardless of how much irony their working class readers are picking up (if so, it is another bad habit acquired from the middle classes), the continued commercial success of these titles suggests that they have identified a viable market where social solidarity used to be.
By Andrew Calcutt
University of East London
Editor of Rising East and Proof Reading
Recession and Romance go together like Horse and Carriage, right? In terms of commercial entertainment, the Great Depression of the 1930s amounted to Picture Palaces inhabited by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the 1980s there was the fantasy couple of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. All right, they really were the leaders of their respective nations, but you get my drift: typically, recession prompts fantasies of love and marriage.
Flip this equation round the other way, and you might expect avowedly unromantic magazines to find themselves unhitched (divorced, even) from the market during times of recession. Like the times we are now living through. However, according to a newly published audit by Paul Darigan, my student and colleague at the University of East London, real life (non-romantic) magazines for women such as Love It!, That’s Life! and Pick Me Up, are holding up well. Meanwhile other more glamorous titles are going to the wall, and whole sectors feel like they are up against it.
Unreality
How come many of today’s women readers are sticking to reality rather than indulging in the sort of fantasy which their grandmothers relied on to exorcise the spectre of recession? It can’t be because the readers of today’s real life titles are relatively unaffected by the current economic downturn. They are drawn from the lower socio-economic groups which are taken to be bearing the brunt of it. Could it be that their whole experience (up to and including the recent experience of recession), has taken on an air of unreality? If so, perhaps Pick Me Up, That’s Life! and similar titles are offering their readers a reality check that is well worth the cover price of 68p.
(Such a lovely figure! Just counting out the exact money provides a gratifying reminder of what a sensible shopper you are.)
I’m suggesting that real life magazine consumers are purchasing the equivalent of that moment in Enid Blyton stories when the heroine pinches herself to make sure she is not dreaming.
An extra dose
Aren’t their lives real enough? It’s not as if these readers are living in a bubble, like the boys in the City with their botox babes and silicon bonuses. Perhaps they already are down and dirty in the nitty gritty, yet 323,171 people are prepared to pay the publishers (IPC Media) of Pick Me Up for an extra dose of it. Do they take prurient, almost ghoulish pleasure from reading a series of ghastly melodramas which have occurred, thankfully, to someone else? Possibly, but Darigan’s dissection of this title suggests that readers come to it more in search of affinity than smug complacency.
Mirrors
The fact is we all need our reality to be valued by others. We need it to be interpreted, evaluated and thus validated by them, otherwise we can’t be sure it’s really there. Besides mirrors, modern human beings require a whole range of reflective surfaces. Also, when old ones get smashed or covered over, there is a market for new kinds of looking glass, and money to be made from polishing them up.
In years gone by, the mothers and grandmothers of Pick Me Up readers would have seen themselves reflected in the fabric of working class communities, from the pub to the launderette to the Labour Party. Now Labour (ha!) is the sole property of middle class apparatchiks (seemingly to the deliberate exclusion of the white working class). Meanwhile far fewer pubs remain open and few people remain in the ones that are. For all its labour-saving benefits, consumer technology has also strengthened the trends towards domestic isolation. A wall of silence has arisen between individuated working class women and their equally atomised contemporaries. In this context, magazines like Pick Me Up do something to wire them back together again.
Strong wiring?
It’s debatable how strong the wiring really is. Maybe it lasts for only as long as it takes to read the magazine. In which case it is a gross exaggeration to refer to this kind of association as ‘community’, as various publishers are now inclined to do. But this is of no concern to the regular readers of real life magazines. For 68p, I doubt they expect a lifelong sense of belonging. At this price, it’s enough to be offered a fleeting sense of connection. Especially since so many other erstwhile sources are now unable to supply it, even fleetingly.
Of course, the ‘reality’ of reality magazines is about as genuine as a wedding reception. Readers’ life stories are subbed into shape like a pregnant bride squeezed into her wedding dress. In constructing the magazine to match readers’ requirements, there is a high degree of artificiality, a large amount of personal manipulation, and a ring of truth that is often as unpalatable as the ‘transgressions’ revealed in a best man’s speech.
Face value?
It would be easy to assume that readers from lower socio-economic groups don’t appreciate the tension between reality and artificiality in their favourite titles. Do they take at face value the lurid copy, unduly garish stories, and the cheap and somehow cheerless colour schemes? Again, I doubt it. Like the art crowd that went for ‘hyper-reality’ in the 1980s; and the trendy young people who adopted ‘the grunge aesthetic’ in the early 1990s, I reckon they are having a play at being real (they just took their time getting round to it).
Regardless of how much irony their working class readers are picking up (if so, it is another bad habit acquired from the middle classes), the continued commercial success of these titles suggests that they have identified a viable market where social solidarity used to be.
Exclusive, original and quality content to the rescue
By Richard Sharpe
I’m optimistic about the future of journalism.
Why, you ask, when there’s so much to be pessimistic about:
• Publishers are in a perfect storm of recession and a challenge of digital media;
• Contract/customer publishing is challenging the independence of journalism as magazines especially become an arm of branding;
• User generated content is challenging the privileged position journalists used to hold; and
• Journalists are losing their jobs at a seemingly ever increasing rate as publications fold.
Still I’m optimistic. And the clue is in the word “content”. Many journalists hate the word. “We’re not content generators,” they say, “we’re journalists.” But content is the key to a revival of the role of journalists.
Content starts the circle
Because it’s content that starts the circle of content begetting community begetting cash which is the mantra of online publishing. No quality content and no community. No community and no cash.
Publishers exploiting the online media have more often than not gone for volume. They have struggled to integrate the management of digital technologies into their organisations, often creating confusion and complex organisations. They have wanted high numbers of visitors to sell those eyeballs on.
More of the same
This has led to not a greater variety of content online but just a lot more of the same. That is the conclusion of a long research project at Goldsmiths College the results of which are now out in the book ‘Comment is free, facts are sacred: Journalistic ethics in a changing mediascape’. It is edited by Graham Miekle and Guy Redden and published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Good journalism can, however, triumph. We have a shining example in the Daily Telegraph’s MPs expenses expose. They paid for the source material: but it is not cheque-book journalism. They had to research the stories, pace the coverage and keep the campaign going in a masterly fashion to have such an impact.
ContentETC
Content can be king. That is why ETC’s new e-learning website is called ContentETC.
But it can’t be any old content nor the content everybody else has.
Three words describe the content which can revive the spirits of journalists: exclusive, original and quality.
• Exclusive: breaking stories nobody else has, as the Telegraph shows, wins readers and attention. Topping and tailing press releases just makes journalists another step in marketing campaigns.
• Original: write in an original way using more advanced writing techniques and readers will be more willing to read the whole story and be entertained at the same time.
• Quality: this means fit for purpose. Putting yourself in the shoes of the reader and telling them the impact this event has on them is another key. Just watch how the Daily Mail does it and you’ll get the point.
Start an investigative campaign
I recently consulted for a leading specialist weekly using this mantra. Their news was mostly long, flat and mostly focused on the process. “XWZ has announced...” We brainstormed methods of generating more news without adding to their burdens. They seemed convinced that the ideas generated would save them time. Then I suggested using that time to launch a series of investigative campaigns. These would generate their exclusive news. They left the session with their tails high.
Focusing on exclusive, original and quality content can re-energize journalists, transform publications and attract readers. Try it and see if I’m not right.
Victory for Singh and one in the eye for Eady
Mr Justice Eady has got it wrong again in a libel action, says the Court of Appeal. His ruling that Simon Singh’s article in the guardian meant that the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) knowingly promoted bogus treatments has been overturned.
Singh has written extensively about the bogus claims of some chiros that their treatments can cure a range of children’s ailments. He wrote that the BCA was willingly promoting these bogus claims. The BCA is suing for libel. Eady ruled that the words meant that the BCA knew they were bogus and Singh would have to prove it.
This week the Appeal Court said Eady was wrong.
Where’s the jury?
What, anyway, was he doing sitting without a jury and deciding a matter of fact rather than law? The role of the jury is being eroded too much in libel.
This slap down follows a string of reversed decisions he made in the Desmond v Bower case.
The Court of Appeal is becoming an unlikely champion of free speech.
But just having to appeal ups the ante for the defence because of the costs.
BBC libel fees almost £1 m since start of 2008
News that the BBC has paid out almost £1 million in costs and damages for libel from current affairs programmes in 2 years has shocked the Sunday Express. Not me.
The BBC received 71 complaints about libel since January 2008 and spent £121,000 on lawyers to defend itself, says the Sunday Express.
Consider just one fact about the output of the BBC: over 78,000 radio hours in its past financial year over 10 radio networks. And it has 8 tv networks also pumping out hours of viewing.
Current affairs is a central part of the BBC. The BBC spends £4.5 billion on operating expenditure, putting out those radio and TV hours, putting up the websites and all the support needed to do that.
For which it has to pay out, under our libel laws, just £1 million in nearly 2 years. Well worth it for a public broadcaster.
Unless you think a public broadcaster should not libel anybody. That’s not at all possible for a current affairs remit.
And unless you think a public broadcaster should not compete with the private sector. That, I suspect, is the root of this Sunday Express story.
But well done to the Sunday Express for using the Freedom of Information Act to get this information. All public bodies should be open to public scrutiny using this legislation.
Pity that private operations which as Richard Desmond’s empire are not so open.
