Keep the faith
Investigative reporter Nick Davies has become one of the best-known faces in journalism, not for his stories but for a book published a year ago that lifted the lid on our trade. TIM GOPSILL has been following his progress
HE’S LIKE an evangelist, touring the land delivering his message to gatherings of the faithful. He has spoken in academic seminars, industry conferences, college lecture halls and in union meetings in upstairs rooms above pubs. You almost expect him to arrive on a donkey.
Nick Davies’s preaching style may not be fire and brimstone — he is engaging and entertaining — but his message is one of doom. “We are in a world of information chaos,” he warns. “The mass media organisations are dying, the business model that has sustained them is falling apart and there is nothing to replace it.”
For journalists this means that “we won’t be in a position to provide the reliable information the public wants”. Salvation, he says, may be at hand — but it’s up to us to achieve it.
It’s just over a year since his book Flat Earth News rocked the media world with its exposés of rotten practices at the heart of British journalism. It became a surprise big seller: according to industry sources, Flat Earth News sold more than 20,000 in hardback, and the paperback edition that came out in January sold more than 12,000 in a month.
Flat Earth accused national papers variously of concocting stories by dubious means, of running stories they know to be untrue (the “Flat Earth” stories) and of generally following the rules of what he called “churnalism” — the practice of continually regurgitating unchecked stories that may or may not be true.
Clearly it touched a nerve. It was fiercely attacked by some newspaper notables, who looked as though they had things to hide — which did sales no harm — but more importantly it attracted waves of support from working hacks.
He found, he said, “a huge camp of journalists, print and broadcast, national and local, from this country and numerous countries around the world, getting in touch, generally saying ‘Thank God you said that’.” The speaking invitations began to pour in. During the year, he says, he has done at least a hundred, “including Marxists in London and Dublin, Buddhists by candle light in Brighton, numerous NUJ branches, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, armfuls of literary festivals and a posh gentleman’s club in Mayfair”.
It’s a heartening rejoinder to the web mystics who predict that life will be lived online that so many people want to hear the message from Nick Davies in the flesh, as it were.
But over the year the message has changed. In two recent events organised by the NUJ he made not a single reference to “churnalism” or “flat earth news”. Now he talks about the crisis in the industry and how it might be solved.
The media owners are responsible for the crisis in the industry and they are incapable of providing the solution, he told the NUJ’s Jobs Summit, which attracted more than 150 members in London in January.
“The big lie you find all over the world from media corporations is that they can cut staffing and resources without damaging the quality of the news they produce. They say the internet is the problem and the credit crunch has made it worse, but they have already ransacked the newsrooms for profit.
“The problem began with the big corporations colonising the newsrooms and plundering them for profit,” he told a joint meeting organised by London NUJ branches in February. “They said ‘let’s cut our costs’ — so they sacked journalists — and ‘let’s increase our income’, so they produced more features and supplements to get more advertising.
“The crucial link is between the financial pressure on the newsroom and the pressure on the journalists to provide falsehood, distortion and propaganda. People outside the industry think it’s because journalists are ordered to do it by the proprietors but it’s worse than that: the commercial pressure is eating away at our ability to do our job properly.
“The problem is clearly financial, but the solution is political. We have to show the public that they need us. We need to improve the status of journalists. We are not trusted, because we are misperceived. The best-known people in journalism are people like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, who because of their misbehaviour have brought us into disrepute.”
One solution, he said, could be state funding of local media. “We have to be much more open about solutions. We need to get public funding into the media — not into the pockets of companies like Johnston Press or Newsquest, but into the hands of journalists. We have to start thinking about mini-media, small groups of journalists gathering together to cover a particular area.
“The conventional methods of publishing won’t work and the punters won’t pay for online news, and there won’t be much from advertising, so we have to find new sources of money — public money, sponsorship, NGOs and so on. We have to save the quality of news.”
Between the meetings, in his job at the Guardian, Nick Davies, an NUJ member since 1976, has been working on the paper’s Tax Gap feature, an exemplary investigative series on tax scams run by big companies. Nick Davies is a journalist who likes to practise what he preaches.