As might have been expected, reactions to the condemnations of media
practices contained in Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, which provides a plank
for an article on investigative journalism by David Leigh in this issue, have
tended to be focused on the moral and methodological failings of national
newspapers and broadcasters. Another aspect might, however, have even
more serious repercussions, because it chiefly concerns the people who will
help to determine the future of the industry, the coming generations of
journalists.

One of Davies’s informants is a trainee reporter on a regional daily
tabloid, and he (or she – there are no clues to gender, so for simplicity we’ll
assume a male) provides a diary of one 45-hour working week. During it the
reporter produced 48 stories of varying lengths and importance on the basis
of only 26 conversations with informants, only four of whom he had met face
to face. Indeed, he spent only three hours away from his desk, telephone and
computer terminal, and most of his time was occupied answering demands
from the news desk to fill specific holes in the typical 24 pages of local news
scheduled in each day’s paper. His account suggests that much of this
material is trivial and formulaic, to use no stronger terms. For example, his
editor apparently wants a daily page of happy stories to cheer up the readers,
and it is hardly surprising that in the week monitored the only way the
trainee found of solving that problem was to re-write three appropriately
optimistic tales from another paper. During his time off he can look forward
to spending whatever is left over from an annual salary of £15,500 after tax
and basic necessities.

Of course, there’s nothing new in long hours for junior reporters, coupled
with poor pay and exploitation. Davies’s trainee informant might even think
himself lucky that his week did not include, as used to be the case, a couple of
evening meetings of local charities or councils and a weekend football match.
Tied to his desk as he was during what presumably was a typical week, he at
least was spared trudging through rain and worse to and from news diary
commitments when unable to catch a bus, the fares for which would only
reluctantly be reimbursed by the management (rendering reporters
immobile, of course, removes any such obligation).

But, with all its indignities and inadequacies, that past world was
recognisable as journalism. Davies’s trainee has no chance of checking any of
the stories he has pounded into his terminal, largely without interviewing a
single source, let alone making a human contact that might one day provide
another story. Much of journalism is best learned on the street, but, as
Davies points out: “It is a common experience among young journalists that
they leave university with a degree in journalism, bursting with enthusiasm,
only to end up chained to a keyboard on a production line in a news factory,
churning out trivia and cliché to fill space in the paper.” Davies’s word for this
is “churnalism”: a system in which reporters are under pressure to accept any
source of information, often from a PR handout, and re-cycle it to feed the
next edition or the next broadcast bulletin. And, Davies says, the infection
has spread to national level as downsizing escalates.

Whether or not the growth of uncritical newsgathering in local and
provincial markets is the result of a deliberate managerial policy, it is
certainly one aspect of the general depletion of manpower brought about by
a desire to save costs and increase profits. Davies’s trainee is at one end of the
spectrum. Somewhere near the middle are the sub-editors whose task used to
include a close examination of stories to make sure they were (a) new and (b)
made sense. These days they have also to function as typesetters and fulfil the
function of those almost-forgotten antiques, the correctors of the press –
quaintly named, but frequently capable of catching a major error.

What does the future hold if newspapers and broadcasters do not
encourage young journalists by allowing them to exercise their skills using
their minds to ask questions and assess the answers sceptically, intelligently
and knowledgeably? Poorly trained and with little news judgement, the
executives of tomorrow will produce anodyne newspapers and bulletins
because that is all they know. And as the paying public wake up to the
realisation that the traditional media are turning into mere processors of
pseudo-news, they will surely abandon them, happy to find the truth by
weighing up for themselves the mixture of fact, opinion and craziness that
compete with each other in the free-for-all of cyberspace. If Davies’s trainee
is a harbinger of the end of news journalism as we know it, the coroner’s
verdict can be nothing other than suicide.