http://www.theguardian.com/
The first Oxford Dictionary of Journalism is published this month.* Its author, Tony Harcup, who teaches journalism at Sheffield university, spent more than two years defining around 1,400 relevant terms, ranging from above-the-fold to zines. In this guest posting he reflects on what the process taught him about the past, present and future of journalism
Journalism is a gloriously messy business. It is a mass of contradictions and has been ever since it started, however we define it and whenever we date it from.
Over the centuries, journalism has been produced for purposes ranging from investigation to propaganda and from the love of telling a good story to the quest for profit. Sometimes it has been all those things at once.
What the best journalists have in common is that they tell us things that we didn't even know we didn't know. That's a worthwhile activity even when nobody seems to be listening. As when the unpaid "citizen journalists" (as nobody called them) of the Rochdale Alternative Paper conducted an investigation into the child-abusing behaviour of politician Cyril "Mr Rochdale" Smith back in 1979.
Their thorough reporting job was ignored by all except Private Eye, and it has taken more than three decades (and the death of Smith) for the Daily Mail to launch into full battle mode on the story.
Better late than never, but let's not forget the role of the long-defunct RAP in fulfilling that vital journalistic function of being a thorn in the side of the powers-that-be.
There is a long history of such reporting and we can look back as far as the English civil war to see nascent forms of journalism being produced not just for the sake of a story but also to afflict the comfortable.
That period of turmoil saw the appearance of an extraordinary array of newsbooks, pamphlets and other printed matter combining elements of reportage with commentary and analysis, all written with a view to supporting or criticising one side or another in the conflict.
Although very much a product of its time, such a mix would not be wholly alien to readers of some of our public prints or online output nearly four centuries on.
It is worth noting that the Leveller pamphleteer John Lilburne fell foul not just of the king's star chamber but also of the "commonwealth" that replaced Charles I because Lilburne was a thorn in all their sides.
Also, in an early example of a poacher turning gamekeeper, John Milton ended up working as Cromwell's censor despite being responsible for one of the most powerful attacks on censorship ever written (Areopagitica).
Press freedoms won by their successors have helped create vigilant watchdog media and rapaciously commercial media alike.
In truth, journalism has never been a monolithic entity any more than journalists have formed a tightly defined or rigidly controlled profession. Journalism is not a profession in any sense that would be understood by lawyers or medical doctors. A good thing too, when we recall that it took non-professional journalists to expose Cyril Smith in his lifetime.
If journalism's past is messy, its future is likely to be even more so. Yet the difficulty of predicting what comes next is matched only by the certainty with which some trend-spotters insist they know for sure.
I have lost count of the number of times I have read about the death of investigative journalism. But investigations in recent years by the likes of Andrew Norfolk at The Times and Paul Lewis at The Guardian are surely worthy of being considered alongside the work of investigative heroes of yesteryear.
Although phone-hacking showed journalism in a bad light, we should not forget that the light that revealed the scandal was shone not by the authorities but by Nick Davies, a journalist.
Such dogged and labour-intensive reporting may be the exception today, but so were the Thalidomide and Watergate probes in the 1970s. Anyone who doubts the continued existence of investigative journalism in the UK simply needs to look up the range of entries to the Paul Foot Award every year (see here).
Such work is often produced at length and in great depth, contradicting another common assertion about 21st century journalism – that, in a process sometimes described as the 'buzzfeedification' of news, it is becoming all about celebs, snippets, gossip, and lists of entertaining things.
Much journalism is going that way, of course, but not all of it, and even BuzzFeed itself now has a section devoted to long-form reads (see here).
Newspapers and magazines are doomed too, we are told, and they probably are in printed form. But nobody really knows quite when the presses will be switched off for the last time, and until then reality is likely to continue to be more complicated than is predicted.
While many titles reinvent themselves as digital brands, for example, one of the magazine sector's continuing success stories is the splendidly old-fashioned Private Eye, the online offering of which amounts to little more than an exhortation to buy the dead-tree version.
Questions about the future without clear answers
And remember the reaction when the cannibalised daily newspaper i was launched on to the news-stands in 2010? Few predicted it would still be going now or that it would regularly outsell both its parent Independent and The Guardian combined.
There is certainly no shortage of questions. Will the future of journalism be entirely digital and multimedia or will there still be room for print either in premium paid-for or free distribution form? Will the paywall, the metered payment or the open journalism model prevail online?
Will local alternatives fill spaces vacated by retreating corporate chains? And will people who have used social media since they were young children ever have any inclination to bother with what we might recognise as serious journalism?
But when it comes to answers, your guess is as good as mine. Anyone anticipating easy answers is probably asking the wrong questions because the future of journalism is likely to be many things at once: simultaneously vacuous, cerebral, profitable, loss-making, prurient, in the public interest, bite-sized, long-form, knee-jerk, revelatory, depressing, uplifting, funny, grubby, mobile, surprising and contradictory.
So I'll stick to making just two fairly safe predictions:
1. Journalists will always hark back to a mythical golden age that seems to coincide with when they were young, and which has now gone for ever.
2. Anything with the temerity to be called a dictionary of journalism will always provoke journalists to scour it for omissions, errors or slights to prove that the author knows nothing about anything.
Some things will never change.
*Oxford Dictionary of Journalism by Tony Harcup (OUP, £12.99). Personal note: I wrote a cover line for the book after reading it in manuscript form. More information: Oxford University Press
source:http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/may/07/journalism-education-universityofsheffield
Journalism is a gloriously messy business. It is a mass of contradictions and has been ever since it started, however we define it and whenever we date it from.
Over the centuries, journalism has been produced for purposes ranging from investigation to propaganda and from the love of telling a good story to the quest for profit. Sometimes it has been all those things at once.
What the best journalists have in common is that they tell us things that we didn't even know we didn't know. That's a worthwhile activity even when nobody seems to be listening. As when the unpaid "citizen journalists" (as nobody called them) of the Rochdale Alternative Paper conducted an investigation into the child-abusing behaviour of politician Cyril "Mr Rochdale" Smith back in 1979.
Their thorough reporting job was ignored by all except Private Eye, and it has taken more than three decades (and the death of Smith) for the Daily Mail to launch into full battle mode on the story.
Better late than never, but let's not forget the role of the long-defunct RAP in fulfilling that vital journalistic function of being a thorn in the side of the powers-that-be.
There is a long history of such reporting and we can look back as far as the English civil war to see nascent forms of journalism being produced not just for the sake of a story but also to afflict the comfortable.
That period of turmoil saw the appearance of an extraordinary array of newsbooks, pamphlets and other printed matter combining elements of reportage with commentary and analysis, all written with a view to supporting or criticising one side or another in the conflict.
Although very much a product of its time, such a mix would not be wholly alien to readers of some of our public prints or online output nearly four centuries on.
It is worth noting that the Leveller pamphleteer John Lilburne fell foul not just of the king's star chamber but also of the "commonwealth" that replaced Charles I because Lilburne was a thorn in all their sides.
Also, in an early example of a poacher turning gamekeeper, John Milton ended up working as Cromwell's censor despite being responsible for one of the most powerful attacks on censorship ever written (Areopagitica).
Press freedoms won by their successors have helped create vigilant watchdog media and rapaciously commercial media alike.
In truth, journalism has never been a monolithic entity any more than journalists have formed a tightly defined or rigidly controlled profession. Journalism is not a profession in any sense that would be understood by lawyers or medical doctors. A good thing too, when we recall that it took non-professional journalists to expose Cyril Smith in his lifetime.
If journalism's past is messy, its future is likely to be even more so. Yet the difficulty of predicting what comes next is matched only by the certainty with which some trend-spotters insist they know for sure.
I have lost count of the number of times I have read about the death of investigative journalism. But investigations in recent years by the likes of Andrew Norfolk at The Times and Paul Lewis at The Guardian are surely worthy of being considered alongside the work of investigative heroes of yesteryear.
Although phone-hacking showed journalism in a bad light, we should not forget that the light that revealed the scandal was shone not by the authorities but by Nick Davies, a journalist.
Such dogged and labour-intensive reporting may be the exception today, but so were the Thalidomide and Watergate probes in the 1970s. Anyone who doubts the continued existence of investigative journalism in the UK simply needs to look up the range of entries to the Paul Foot Award every year (see here).
Such work is often produced at length and in great depth, contradicting another common assertion about 21st century journalism – that, in a process sometimes described as the 'buzzfeedification' of news, it is becoming all about celebs, snippets, gossip, and lists of entertaining things.
Much journalism is going that way, of course, but not all of it, and even BuzzFeed itself now has a section devoted to long-form reads (see here).
Newspapers and magazines are doomed too, we are told, and they probably are in printed form. But nobody really knows quite when the presses will be switched off for the last time, and until then reality is likely to continue to be more complicated than is predicted.
While many titles reinvent themselves as digital brands, for example, one of the magazine sector's continuing success stories is the splendidly old-fashioned Private Eye, the online offering of which amounts to little more than an exhortation to buy the dead-tree version.
Questions about the future without clear answers
And remember the reaction when the cannibalised daily newspaper i was launched on to the news-stands in 2010? Few predicted it would still be going now or that it would regularly outsell both its parent Independent and The Guardian combined.
There is certainly no shortage of questions. Will the future of journalism be entirely digital and multimedia or will there still be room for print either in premium paid-for or free distribution form? Will the paywall, the metered payment or the open journalism model prevail online?
Will local alternatives fill spaces vacated by retreating corporate chains? And will people who have used social media since they were young children ever have any inclination to bother with what we might recognise as serious journalism?
But when it comes to answers, your guess is as good as mine. Anyone anticipating easy answers is probably asking the wrong questions because the future of journalism is likely to be many things at once: simultaneously vacuous, cerebral, profitable, loss-making, prurient, in the public interest, bite-sized, long-form, knee-jerk, revelatory, depressing, uplifting, funny, grubby, mobile, surprising and contradictory.
So I'll stick to making just two fairly safe predictions:
1. Journalists will always hark back to a mythical golden age that seems to coincide with when they were young, and which has now gone for ever.
2. Anything with the temerity to be called a dictionary of journalism will always provoke journalists to scour it for omissions, errors or slights to prove that the author knows nothing about anything.
Some things will never change.
*Oxford Dictionary of Journalism by Tony Harcup (OUP, £12.99). Personal note: I wrote a cover line for the book after reading it in manuscript form. More information: Oxford University Press
source:http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/may/07/journalism-education-universityofsheffield
No comments:
Post a Comment