Volume 20, Number 2, 2009 |
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ContentsEditorial - Jade Goody’s legacy 3Not finally... Subjective views on matters journalistic 5 Charles Collier-Wright, Christian Christensen, Oliver Marre Suzanne Franks and Jean Seaton - Is saving the world journalism’s job? 13 Torin Douglas - Inside stories: on the media beat 21 Janine di Giovanni - Why now I walk away from danger 27 Eddie Adams - Icons of photography 37 Steve Hewlett - For TV news, the news isn’t all bad 41 The press Stephen Fay - Death of the posh Sundays 47 Matthew Engel - Local papers: an obituary 55 Charles Curry - Crisis? What crisis? 59 Paul Morley - The song is ended 67 BOOK REVIEWSAnthony Delano on Paul Preston 75Susanna Forrest on H G Cocks 77 Geoffrey Goodman on Granville Williams 79 Ann Leslie on Justine Hardy 81 Jane Reed on Liz Hodgkinson 83 Michael Leapman on Gay Talese 85 Quotes of the Quarter – 36 Ten years ago The way we were 54 Letter 87 News – Hugh Cudlipp Award 74 Anniversary celebrations – IBC 
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Editorial - Jade Goody’s legacyJade Goody is merely the most recent in a line of popular figures magnified by media attention to exaggerated proportions (and Susan Boyle of Britain’s Got Talent fame looks to be the next). But publications that rely on the fashion for celebrity could well find themselves deprived of circulation-stimulating material as lawyers and agents, for different reasons, attempt to curtail critical press coverage. The popular press is halfway there already and the complete collapse of celebrity journalism into showbiz and sport-controlled puppetry cannot be far off. Those media outlets that can’t see the train coming may survive just long enough to reflect that throwing themselves in front of it might have been a better option than clambering aboard.
Suzanne Franks and Jean Seaton - Is saving the world journalism’s job?The BBC was right not to screen the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) appeal for Gaza, argue the authors. But they say the decision divided BBC newsrooms. News purists argued for the untainted objectivity of witnesses as the most important contribution against those journalists who wanted the BBC to show that it cared and do its bit in the midst of a bitter political and humanitarian crisis. After detailing the history of the relationship between the BBC and the DEC, they contend that the BBC’s director-general, Mark Thompson, made his decision based on his “overriding concern to protect impartiality.”
Torin Douglas - Inside stories: on the media beatThe BBC’s media correspondent explains the challenges he faces in covering stories that involve his own employer, and its competitors. He writes: “While most media groups love to dish the dirt on their rivals, they are far more sensitive when their own dirty linen is washed in public.” He explains: “You have to be of the BBC, but outside it – trusted by its executives and their press advisers, but also by government ministers and the BBC’s regulators, competitors and critics.” He explains how he got the job, the cynicism of many other journalists. These have largely been silenced, not least since, during a media scrum, he “thrust a microphone at John Birt, then the BBC director-general, who was in trouble over his tax-deductible suits and other expenses” and shouted: “Are you going to resign, Mr Birt?” That won him credibility among his peers.
Janine di Giovanni - Why now I walk away from dangerAfter 15 years of reporting from war zones, the former correspondent for The Times explains why she has given up the job. Motherhood played the key part in her decision, along with the realisation that whatever lessons reporters might learn some to help them stay alive “no amount of judgment and caution can save you from bad luck.” Even so, she still misses those assignments. She writes: “When the conflict in Lebanon began, I was in America teaching my son to swim. Which was more important? Logically, I knew the answer but yearning is not logical. Reporting war had been most of my life for many years and suddenly to be pulled from it was like a junkie having their stash of drugs stolen.”
Steve Hewlett – For TV news, the news isn’t all badNationally, TV news has quite possibly never been stronger or more readily available, argues the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show. He points out that the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky are performing well. “There’s more news about and it is of higher quality and from more reliable sources than ever before,” he writes. That’s a very different picture from regional and local news output, where “there’s something approaching a crisis. However, he believes that there are “potential solutions”, notably through digital technology because it offers the prospect of broadcasting genuinely local TV news and information.
Stephen Fay – Death of the posh SundaysThe former Sunday Times writer, and deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday, laments the decline of serious Sunday titles. They were a phenomenon, he writes, “feeding off a growing taste for persistent campaigning, leisurely reporting and growing consumerism. What they wrote on Sunday set the agenda for the following week’s news.” No longer. While newspaper economics and internet technology have been “unkind to the posh Sundays” their greatest loss has been their loss oft authority. Where, he asks, is the relevance, the bite and the sense of discovery?
Matthew Engel – Local papers: an obituaryAn analysis of the many reasons why regional and local papers have steadily lost sales and kudos over the last 30 years. Engel, who memorably wrote in 1993, about the tabloidish sensationalist agenda of too many titles, now considers the problems of corporate chain ownership, falling revenue and a failed internet strategy. He concludes: “Britain’s local newspaper groups compounded their problems by their ill-judged expansion of the past few years and decades of editorial neglect before that… This is a tragedy not merely for our industry. It is a tragedy for our democracy.”
Charles Curry – Crisis? What crisis?The proprietor and editor of the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times in Hampshire may be 88, but he still works a full week. Here, he tells his personal journalistic story while praising the virtues of independence from large conglomerates. It’s an uplifting tale.
Paul Morley – The song is endedThe former New Musical Express staffer recalls that being a rock writer in the 1970s meant belonging to an exclusive club. There were just three or four weekly music magazines and barely any serious coverage in Fleet Street newspapers. Then it suddenly began to flourish, due to its freshness and questioning of sacred cows. But Morley is concerned that the net has changed everything. Great, original writing about rock music is now “gets lost amid all the blandly frantic tranquillising noise of everyone clamouring to review their purchases, list their favourites, present their findings, describe their night out, rate new releases, authorize their memories and display their knowledge.”
BJR Blog: Oliver Marre - Hot gossip goes coldAt the end of March, I wrote my final column under the Pendennis byline in The Observer and was not replaced. An extraordinary list of names, from Anthony Sampson to Barbara Cartland, had worn the Pendennis hat before me. At more or less the same time, The Independent’s Pandora writer, Henry Deedes, faced compulsory redundancy; the Daily Mail’s deputy diary editor, John McEntee, departed; Celia Walden was moved from The Daily Telegraph’s Spy column and The Sunday Telegraph’s hardworking Mandrake team asked to fill the space by putting some of their scoops into the daily pages...
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