Interviewing and ethics

“In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), [Janet] Malcolm described the inevitable betrayal involved in the journalist-subject encounter; the subject will regress like a patient in psychoanalysis, childishly trusting their questioner, only to discover that the journalist is not a compassionate listener but a professional with an agenda and a story to construct.

Thus, according to the book’s oft-quoted opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

(Taken from The Journalist and the Biographer – Sydney Morning Herald)

Frost Nixon

This snippet of the Nixon interviews with David Frost in 1977 (sorry – it can’t be embedded – you have to click on that link) encapsulates the point perfectly. It shows Frost poised, concentrating. Head down a touch, eyes up. Meanwhile Nixon’s body language is defeatist: shoulders thrown back, head bobbing about, hands outstretched before him.

It’s a fascinating snapshot of the journalist at work.

Interviewing as an art

Interviewing is a learned art as much as a natural-born skill. I thought I’d add some examples below of encounters – some famous, some not – that have stuck in my mind.

All of these interviews throw up different challenges. Some have more successful outcomes than others.

1. David Dimbleby runs into a grumpy Gore Vidal on the night of Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.

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2. Devina McCall in caught wretchedly in a clash of style – between pop tv and rock music in this interview with James Dean Bradfield.

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3. Al Capp takes on John Lennon at his Bed-In in Montreal

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4. Jeremy Paxman interviews George Galloway on election night 2005 – and goes straight for the throat

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5. Trouble between interviewees – a famous incident between Gore Vidal and William Buckley in 1968

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6. And back to Lennon again. This is an old favourite and great work of art: a 14 year-old Beatle fan meets Lennon at around the same time as the Al Capp incident

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image credit: taijofj on Flickr

Much maligned: media studies.

One week and one day before 11 September 2001, Michael Hann, who is now Film and Music Editor at the Guardian, wrote a feature: Media studies? Do yourself a favour – forget it.

The best part of a decade on, it’s interesting to have a look back at this. On job prospects, he said:

This autumn, students around the country will enrol for undergraduate journalism degrees, probably imagining that their three years of study will place them in the forefront of those students seeking jobs in the media when they graduate…

…many will face disappointment. Undergraduate journalism degrees are a new creation in this country. Even a decade ago, it was accepted that studying journalism as a student meant one of two things: either the pre-entry courses run by the bodies that oversee journalists’ training, or one of the postgraduate courses run by a number of institutions, headed by the Oxbridge of journalism: the one-year courses at City and Cardiff universities.

It’s hard not to claim cause and effect, when, in the last few weeks alone, there’s been a blog post by Lara O’Reilly on the scarcity of opportunities for recent grads and another on Journalism.co.uk which runs to similar lines by Joseph Stashko.

So maybe Hann was right? Or maybe not. Listen to this:

In their desire to gets bums on seats and fees in accounts, too many colleges and universities are running courses that do not provide students, even after three years, with the skills they need to get a job. Worse, because they need the money the students generate, they fail to identify students who are simply not good enough to work in journalism and warn them of their shortcomings. Why would anyone do a journalism degree if they thought they would not get a job at the end of it? They would not. But don’t tell them that: we might lose the cash.

Every editor who takes work experience students has had the same experience: a student in the final year of a journalism degree who will never get a job. I have seen students who, literally, could not string a sentence together. Not one of their tutors had ever sat down with them and explained the bitter facts of life: you can’t write, can’t sub, can’t interview, won’t ring round – you’re unemployable in journalism.

People like that have always wanted to be journalists and they have always been disappointed. The difference now is that they waste three years of their lives and thousands of pounds before they find out. And course tutors collude in it.

This point is more difficult to square – and a decade on Hann will probably have to concede that this was an unfair caricature. Those starting off in journalism today might not be any more or less talented than those a decade ago, but they are certainly much better prepared.

Student media. (c.2001)

Around the same time that Hann was writing his piece, I was about to start my degree at Durham. It was a small, odd place in comparison to the county that I had just left. All crooked houses, towering cathedrals, stone bridges and cobbled streets. After a bit I started writing for Palatinate, the student newspaper – which at the time was about all the early journalism training that we were expected to get.

@rebeccats might well back me up on this, but I confess that we weren’t especially good. None of us had had any proper training in how to give a news story shape; half of the features were indulgent and wore on like a church sermon and the whole thing – a broadsheet paper with accompanying arts supplement – was cobbled together on a doddery Mac by a group of aspiring writers who had all of the design nous of a gibbon.

If you look at student media a decade on, the landscape has changed entirely. Students like Joseph Stashko (who is a journalism student at UCLan) are running hyperlocal sites such as Blog Preston in their spare time. Josh Halliday – who did his BA at Sunderland – has blogged his way to a trainee job with the Guardian, and up at Birmingham City University, Paul Bradshaw has set up a course which is so far in front of the rest of the industry that a good chunk of the media travels up their JeeCamp Unconference each year to see what might be happening next.

While this all might be reflective of a rather jumbled up industry, it is far more democratic than how it used to be. A decade after Hann’s article and journalism grads are unquestionably better qualified and prepared to enter the industry than they were before. Good students are now fully NCTJ trained and in addition they know about design, they know about coding, they know about data and they have the tools – both hardware and software – to get the job done quickly and sometimes brilliantly.

During our degrees we didn’t have any of this training. We just learnt in public by occasionally making a hash of things, knowing that we’d have to go off and do a postgraduate course at some point in the future. With Halliday’s appointment – the kind of position that you’d have expected to go to a breezy-bequiffed English Lit or History grad back in the early 2000s – it’s clear that nowadays the industry is taking journalism undergraduate degrees seriously.

(Have a look at Paul Bradshaw’s list of recent successful grads at the bottom of this post to see more examples of top jobs going to graduating journalism students).

One Blair, one Bush, one photo

One incident from my time on Palatinate sticks in my mind particularly. It was in about 2003, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when President George W. Bush arrived to visit Tony Blair at his Sedgefield home. Bush ate a pub lunch while surrounded by a scrum of security and then disappeared off the sky in his helicopter.

The most we managed on the event was a grainy photograph at 150 paces and a short news piece. I wonder how that story would have been reported now with trained bloggers and teams of student journalists: Twitter, AudioBoo, Posterous and all the rest of it. It’s would be a good measure of how student reporting has moved on.

But where are the jobs? There has been a 24% increase in applicants for journalism courses over the last year and the industry is being squeezed. You can’t help get the feeling that trying to get all the journalism graduates into relevant jobs is like trying to jam an elephant into a thimble.  So on that count, I think Hann’s first point stands – and that journalism educators and universities should make this fact as plain as possible to student applicants. After all, no torture is equal to that of encouragement of hope.

I still think, though, that the good grads (have a look at Lara O’Reilly if you want an example of one) will still do well and find their way. They’re already better prepared than a load of us lot were back in the summer of 2004 and what the best ones need now more than anything is a little luck.

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Paul Bradshaw has recently begun a series on successful journalism students who have gone on to great jobs in the media. To see all nine of those profiled so far, have a look at the New Online Journalists.

(Image: Prebends Bridge in Durham, by BigBadsWorld on Flickr)

Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.

As ever, comments welcome.

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Sources Used:

“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]

“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]

“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]

“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]

Given at City University London on 16.11.09.

As the You Tube videos don’t seem to work, I’ll add this excellent one below:

An overcooked moral panic?

Yes. 150 people have died from swine flu. But, amongst the panic, I thought that it would be a good idea to note that at least three other things that are happening in the world at the moment. It would be nice if just one newspaper, or one television station devoted a similar amount of coverage to how…

The Sri Lankan government continues to kill Tamil civilians

A New York-sized ice shelf collapses off Antarctica

Obama taps HIV specialist to head AIDS fight

(Feel free to add to this list – it’s quite a quick one…)

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Image credit: be_khe

image credit: inju

Media Problems: 1833 – 2009

Here are some extracts from an article that appeared in a publication named the Westminster Review in 1833; a year before the twenty-one year old Charles Dickens became a political journalist for the Morning Chronicle, and when Queen Victoria wasn’t a queen at all, but a princess of the awkward age of fourteen.

The terms ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ had only recently been coined, but some of the problems that the author notes are still lingering today – 176 years on.

Information Overload:

1833: ‘Newspapers are everywhere a necessary of life; multitudes of men cannot breakfast without them; after breakfast other multitudes of men resort to the club and the reading room for their perusal, with an appetite with which the hard working man seeks his dinner. Numbers of persons, both of fortune and supposed education, converse solely by and from the newspapers; and the fact of a barren journal even assumes to individuals so situated, the shape of a serious misfortune. It has even been said that suicides have been committed from a constant repetition of the announcement that nothing new had occurred – in other words that newspapers of the day were barren.’

Today:

2008: Daily Mail: Information Overload

Who Blogs Too Much? Unqualified Offerings

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Not staying on topic:

1833: ‘The Morning Paper of London aims at everything, and this may be the reason why it does nothing well. No transaction takes place which it does not perceive itself competent to report; and for reporters it is lamentable to think that it relies much on the itinerants above spoken of – persons who, if they had no inducements to be false, have no faculty enabling them to be true. The absurd style, the bad English, and the curious phraseology of that abundant crop of small and long paragraphs to be found in the morning papers, and which so often have been so often the subject of ridicule, are altogether attributable to that class of news-purveyors on whom a morning paper principally depends for its supply of facts as they are facetiously termed. The penny a line men are generally persons who are by no means qualified to report common proceedings – persons who have not had the education of decent butlers; but such is the constitution of the morning newspaper, that in these hands are the names and the characters of a large portion of their countrymen daily and hourly placed. It is they who supply the whole of that portion of the paper that comes under the head of domestic news. It is through the habit of relying on such accredited agents as these that the London newspapers are liable to be hoaxed, as they so frequently are, by pretend information…’

Today:

When good blogs go bad – Problogger

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False pretence at authority:

1833: ‘The whole of this mess is placed under the superintendence of an editor – the same person who is expected to write the dicta that are to guide the opinions of the British world for at least a day. He is to be responsible not merely his own opinion on events – event on which a secretary of state, with all the facts before him, would often find it difficult instantly to write an article for the nation… – and all this in the dead of night, when the small hours are increasing fast, in a heated factory redolent of oil and printer’s ink…’

Today:

‘Newspapers have a tradition and authority that the online world cannot yet match’ (Simon Kelner). (An article from 2006, The Future of Newspapers – The Independent)

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Burn out:

1833: ‘It is not to be denied that many of the daily papers contain articles of ability, – that some of their editors are writers of acknowledged talent; but can one man do everything? Has he the power of writing with effect daily and for ever? Is he never to read? Is no time to be given to society, to recreation, to the laying in a fresh stock of experience, to encouraging and cultivating new impressions or removing the old? So tasked is the editor of a morning journal, that he must necessarily soon be driven to the lees of his brain, and be content to foist his intellectual dregs upon the gaping world in lieu of the wisdom they have the right to expect from the pen of a public instructor…’

Today:

Blogging Burnout Prevention Tips: The Blog Herald

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The full essay can be found in this Google Book, on page 450