Working for the reader: telling what the news means

Let’s start with a classic definition of news: a fact or event not made public before. Facts or events. And the public is the reader, listener or viewer.

The attempt to implement this classic definition is under pressure from:

• Smaller teams of journalists who do not have the time to get to the new facts or events;
• The multiplicity of media which means that somebody else may have the story and so it is not new; and
• The increased organisation of the PR machines which see journalism as just another step in the marketing plan.

Our readers, listeners and viewers have shorter attention spans then they used to. We encourage this by using shorter sentences. And the media we use encourages this by demanding that the world is carved into smaller parts and delivered faster.

Interpret: don’t just describe

Readers, viewers and listeners are, therefore, less and less likely to want to work out what the news means to them. In short, they want it interpreted, not just delivered.

If we are to retain their attention we need to use our professional skills to interpret for them. We need increasingly to tell them what the impact is or will be on them. Put yourself in the readers’ shoes and start from there.

Good

These thoughts were reinforced last week by the BA cabin crew strike ballot. Here’s the Sun’s intro to the story:

“British Airways cabin crew yesterday voted massively in favour of strikes which may drag on into the SUMMER.”

Nicely done: there’s the interpretation and the threat to summer flights.

Better

But look at this from the Daily Mail:

“British Airways passengers could face a series of strikes starting as soon as next week after cabin crew yesterday voted overwhelmingly for industrial action.”

Yes, longer because it’s the Mail. But also better than the Sun because we are more likely to be a BA passenger than a member of the cabin crew and because the threat is closer.

The Daily Telegraph had something between the two. Perhaps because many of the senior editors of the Telegraph now come from the Mail.

Energy

In the same editions the Sun said about energy prices:

“The energy watchdog is demanding that struggling customers’ bills should be slashed after a fall in the wholesale price of power.”

OK, but a bit distant from you and me. The Daily Mail ran much the same story as its lead and here’s the intro:

“Energy suppliers are making more than £100 out of every customer refusing to cut bills during the record freeze.”

It’s that “£100” that makes it work. The Mail has interpreted the news and made it specific to every customer, doing a simple piece of maths to drive the story home to each reader.

In short, interpreted what the story means for each reader.

These differences in intros are subtle. But they show how far the publication has gone to make the news important to each reader. In both cases the Mail has not left it to the reader to work out the impact on them: it has shown what the impact it.

Change definition of news

So, perhaps we can change the classic definition to: a fact or event interpreted for the reader not made public before.

We can use this approach in any news writing: in magazines, newspapers, online, on radio and TV. We news writers need to ask ourselves: what do we want the readers/listeners/viewers to do or think as a result of reading this. And then start there.

There are dangers. We may be including “should” or “could” too many times in story intros. “Passengers could face...”. Only if we can honestly write “will” and be assured of our predication should be use it. But if we want to keep our readers/listeners/viewers we need to work for them and interpret the news.

Grammar e-learning course

It is with trepidation that I offer the world an e-learning course on grammar. I have a grammar textbook given to me by the subs at Computing when I left of over 1,700 pages. They obviously thought I would need help as a freelance, bless them.

Why trepidation?
English grammar is a slippery subject. There are so many irregularities in the English language. It’s a fine combination of German, French, Latin and bits of other languages.

I used to write software in the Basic, Cobol, Fortran, APL and Assembler programming languages. Give me them any time. Clear and unambiguous structures of language put through an unforgiving machine which will do exactly what you tell it.

English evolves
As a natural language English evolves. And it evolves without the assistance of the equivalent of the Académie française to formalise it. When you’ve had a national academy formalising the language since 1635 you’re bound to have the structure modern French has. And when that structure is given priority in French education over a child’s self expression, you’re bound to have a surer grasp of grammar in France than in the UK.

Take “fewer” and “less”. I try to “keep the line” that “fewer “ is for figures, things you can count and “less” for mass. But you will often see it the other was round in supermarkets: “Less than five items”.

Its and it’s
And then there’s our friend the apostrophe. I’ve got a bottle of French’s Classic Yellow mustard in the fridge. On the back it says: “An American family favourite since it’s introduction at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904!” Yes, it’s great with burgers and hotdogs, but it’s depressing to see such a blunder.

I’ve driven my colleagues at ContentETC, Lucy and Margaret, nearly to distraction as I put the e-learning grammar course together. They polished and tested it. And found my mistakes.

One of the problems I had was what to include. I’ve focused on what I think are the top 20 mistakes and how to fix them. But is it sheer pedantry to include “fewer” and “less” today?

I have included “who” and whom”. Perhaps because I think the only time the fictional Inspector Morse on TV got any nookey was with a woman who impressed him with their correct use. Or should it be “usage”? Surely “use” today?

What’s not there
And should I have included “affect” and “effect”? I did not. Should I insist that “impact” is not a verb? I did not. But they could be in “Another top 20 grammar mistakes and how to fix them” course.

Another problem was how far to drill own. I may be fascinated by the mechanics of language, but will others be?

The idea is not to rant at the world like an old pedant. The idea is to help people who are writing and may not have a formal understanding of grammar to express themselves better. And for them not to make howlers which will, for those who do know their grammar, devalue their work.

Here’s what I have included:
• Words and sentences: nouns, verbs etc;
• Punctuation: apostrophe, comma and dash, semicolon, hyphen, exclamation mark;
• Confused words: less and fewer; past and last; past and passed; I and me; into/onto and in to and on to; who, whom, that and which, frequent and regular;
• Making the sentence work: subject and verb working; dangling and wandering modifiers; wrong tenses; and gerunds;
• And a final five: parallel structure; faulty coordination; compounds; shifts in subjects; and what not to worry about.

Working at it
Those who know me may be surprised that with my erratic semi-dyslexic spelling I am the creator of a grammar course. I’m a bit surprised as well. But who better to do it than one who has had to work at it? After all, I lost lots of money for my publishers with libel actions, so I had to get my head around that.

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.