Battle for quality as churnalists fight back
JOURNALISTS cannot do their job properly anymore, NUJ President Michelle Stanistreet said in a debate on the state of the profession in London in March. And it’s not their fault, she added.
Standards are suffering because of the squeeze on jobs and resources and the consequent pressure to produce too much material too fast.
She was speaking at a debate on Flat Earth News, the book by NUJ member and Guardian freelance Nick Davies that has rocked the journalism establishment by exposing the way that UK national papers in particular produce their news.
He used the phrase “churnalism not journalism” to describe the constant and rapid recycling of unchecked information.
Michelle Stanistreet, a feature writer on the Sunday Express, said: “The inevitable result of the squeeze is that standards are suffering. Increasing numbers of journalists are feeling like churnalists. Time and again I have heard journalists on the ground saying this.
“They are unable to do their job as they would like to do it, checking out facts and getting out and about and talking to people. It is soul-destroying for people who became journalists because of their talent and enthusiasm.
“It is not journalists that create churnalism, it is the bosses running the companies.”
Nick Davies told the meeting, organised by the Press Gazette: “We can’t wrest media outlets away from these corporations and they are not about to loosen up and give us back our resources.
“We have got to fight back to make our own news judgements, that’s what journalism is about. Every time we win a battle it matters.”
The editor of the Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford, said: “We have to compete online. We need to become better journalists so we can do the churning and then find the time to do the better journalism as well.”
Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC defence correspondent now working for the London Evening Standard, said: “It is amazing how many stories based purely on government sources get into the papers, because journalists know they won’t be denied and there won’t be trouble.”
He said that the former Observer political editor Kamal Ahmad, who is blasted in the book for peddling the Downing Street line during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, “didn’t tell the lies about Iraq because he was overworked but because he was lazy and he wanted great stories from the government.
“At national level journalism should work well because reporters have more time to do their jobs properly.”
Andrew Gilligan spoke of the series of exposés he had been doing of the people around London Mayor Ken Livingstone, which has led to one senior aide resigning.
“The other papers have not made any effort themselves to find out the truth,” he said. “They have just reported that the Evening Standard says this and Ken Livingstone says that, but no-one has wanted to take the time to get into the story. It is not difficult, the information is in the public domain, but if it had been left to churnalism the story would never have happened.”
But he challenged the assertion in Flat Earth News that reporters were overworked because of a huge expansion in the amount of editorial space to be filled. “The growth in space has not been in news but features and lifestyle stuff, most of which is supplied by freelances.”
And reporters’ work had made much easier by the internet. “The web has transformed the work of journalists; getting information is so quick. I would have had to have spent half a day going to Companies House for information on a company that I can now get in ten minutes”.