One last thing about that edition of You and Yours

Before it disappears off the BBC site - it's due to go Tuesday March 4th...

It started off with with a piece setting up the discussion by Roy Greenslade, who's a well known journalist/academic. He's written an excellent history of the press, post-WW2, called 'Press Gang' - there are copies in the library. He also blogs for The Guardian and writes a lot for their Media Section. Generally he's a well respected media/press commentator.

Anyway, Greenslade's opening package tried to summarise the way the press has changed in the last fifty years or so. He talked about the move away from the age of the press baron, when owners treated papers as tools for propaganda, as a chance to push their own political agenda. He covered the rise of the tabloid and the increasing dominance of entertainment. He also talked about the increased competition the press faces from TV, radio and the net and about the commercial pressures many journalists face.

So far, so similar to the arguments Nick Davies makes in 'Flat Earth News'. But Greenslade's a journalist, so he knew he had to deliver some kind of angle on the book.

So he went with the idea that, though journalists like to pretend things have got worse and were much better in the old days, there never was a journalistic golden age. Journalism's always been a 'rackety old trade'. The implication was that Davies' book falls into this sort of 'Golden Age' thinking.

However, it doesn't really. As Davies points out on the show in response, he's not saying things have got much worse, he's just saying they've changed. Things were bad in a certain way in the past (when proprietors could stop certain stories running). Things are bad in a different way now, when over-stretched journalists have no time and increasingly rely on material from PRs and the Press Association, which they never check or add to in any significant way.

What Greenslade was doing was coming up with a line. Journalists often do this - it's a key skill. Faced with a complex mess of facts, they conjure up an angle on it all, a line that people can take away from the piece. Greenslade's 'Golden Age' line was in fact used by The Guardian's columnist Simon Jenkins when he dismissed 'Flat Earth News', along with other recent criticisms of journalism, claiming that the press was just fine.

Coming up with lines, developing angles, is one of the things journalists have to learn to do. I wonder if you can draw links with this professional skill/practice and the more general theoretical analysis of framing - the way that the news media frame discussions in certain ways.

Developing an angle is a conscious way of framing a discussion. In a way, it's about spinning a story a particular way. Framing is a larger, often more unconscious process - it's about fitting stories into certain narrative frames, that determine the way people read and respond to the news...

Rod's going to talk some more about framing this week, I think.

I've been thinking about that edition of Your and Yours devoted to the Nick Davies book, Flat Earth News. As I said before, it's a good intro to Davies' crticisms of the current news media and is worth a listen.

But if you wanted to take a more analytical view, it's worth stepping back and thinking how the issue is framed by the show as a whole. You and Yours is Radio 4's consumer phone in show. Standard territory for them might be complaints about banks or estate agents or schools. They often interview experts to set up the issue then take calls from the public, who call to air specific grievances.

So the show has a consumerist/individualist approach. It moves towards personalising issues. The idea's there in the title. So the show as whole moves from the expert view (in this case, Davies and various ex-hacks/academics (Roy Greenslade, Peter Preson, Eve Pollard) to contributions from callers, who often personalise the issue in question. So in this episode you get contributions from people who say things like:

• The press covered something involving me and got it all wrong
• I turned up an interesting story (involving me) and the press refused to cover it
• I work for the press and I don't do the things Davies says

So the discussion gets kind of randomised and personalised. It kind of stops having a political dimension and stars becoming a kind of consumerist 'are you being properly served' discussion...

Is that the best way to cover this issue? How does this kind of framing affect the way you see the book (I guess it makes you perhaps want to buy the book and maybe stop buying newspapers - but could it encourage a more political response?).

Interestingly enough, the presenter begins the show by noting that Davies is highly critical of the influence of PRs on the news agenda and that it's therefore kind of ironic that his book is being heavily promoted by various PRs. And, of course, that promotion is the reason You and Yours are covering 'Flat Earth News' in the first place.

PCC investigates journalists' use of social networking sites

One side issue relating to the Bridgend story - yesterday, on the Radio 4 teatime news magazine show PM, I heard a report saying that the Press Complaints Commission is investigating the way journalists use social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo. You'll be able to hear the report via the BBC's Listen Again til next Tuesday - it starts around 47 minutes in to the show and is about five minutes long.

The hook for the package, it seems, was the way journalists reporting the suicides in Bridgend have used social networking sites. They've trawled pages on Bebo and the others, reading messages and helping themselves to photos which are then run in the newspapers. Relatives and friends of the deceased have said they find this upsetting.

We've talked a little bit about this subject in general in the Online Journalism 3 class I do on Mondays. Increasingly, journalists see Facebook and the rest as useful tools - they go there looking for material and (often) have no qualms about using photos, arguing that people chose to make their pages 'publicly available'. But is this really ok? The PCC is looking into it and trying to develop some guidelines.

In the meantime, there's a certain irony in the way journalists who have suggested that social networking sites might have played some role in the suicides rely on them at the same time for material and take that material without asking for permission or thinking about the effects their publication of it might have.

Bridgend, journalists and social networking

One of the things I want to look at on this blog is the way the news media, in particular the press, has covered the recent spate of suicides in Bridgend. Parents, relatives and people living in the area have recently said that they think media coverage of this has, in some way, glamourised suicide. Some have said they think the coverage may be responsible for the continuing suicides.

It's a sad story, overall. It raises lots of interesting points about journalistic ethics and about the effects that the media (and journalism) have on people's behaviour. I'd like to look at it over the next few weeks.

It's interesting that, when the story began to reach the national media, the press in particular began to point the finger at new media - in particular social networking sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook. For example, the Daily Mail ran with a big front page splash about 'The Internet Suicide Cult' back in January (they were responding to some remarks by a coroner investigating the deaths). The newspapers have a history of this - suggesting that new media technologies - from the net to video games - can affect behaviour (especially the behaviour of the young) in all sorts of interestingly problematic ways.

However, what's becoming apparent as people look at the Bridgend case is that it's the old media - basic newspaper reporting in fact, which may be part of the problem. The Media Guardian's columnist Peter Wilby looked at this on Monday (you'll need to register to read it). After having a pop at the Mail, he looked at academic research on this subject.

"Oxford University's centre for suicide research looked at 90 studies across the world. More than half had found evidence that suicides covered inthe media - whether in newspapers, films or TV news and drama - were followed by an increase in the number of cases. None had identified a fall."

Wilby talks about possible reasons for this. I'll post some more on this soon. But it's an interesting way into the whole debate about 'media effects'. A lot of research has been done over the years into trying to decide what effects media coverage (and journalism) have on the people who consume it. A lot of it is inconclusive - it's often hard to point to definite occasions where the media seems to have a clear, direct causal effect on the way someone behaves or thinks. But on the other hand, we all feel like it plays some sort of role... So we'll look at this over the next few weeks.

Journalists criticising journalism

To kick things off, it might be interesting to look at the fuss surrounding 'Flat Earth News', the new book by the well known investigative journalist, Nick Davies. Over the years, he's done lots of really interesting work for The Guardian, covering things like crime, drugs and education.

This time round, his subject is the current state of journalism. In his new book, he talks about the way newspapers in particular are being undermined by commercial pressures - mainly the desires of big media companies to cut costs and maximise profites.

In particular, he focuses on the way journalists increasingly rely on wire agencies and prs for stories. They rework press releases, often without checking facts, often because they're under pressure to fill more and more space and have less and less time to do it properly. Davies' term for this is 'churnalism'.

The problem with this is that increasingly it's PRs and press agents, not journalists, who are setting the news agenda, who are doing the original reporting and writing. And of course PRs usally have a particular agenda, a particular line to push...

I'm simplifying a little. We can go into more detail over the coming weeks. But I think 'Flat Earth News' sounds like a really interesting example of journalistic criticisms of journalism.

Lots of journalists, once they get too old/tired to put with late nights and deadlines, sit back and start to worry about what they've been doing for the last twenty/thirty years of their lives. And they sometimes get round to writing books that explore those worries. It's interesting to set this kind of thing against the kind of critique made by academics and theorists.

For example, Davies is concerned about the effects of commerce, the way big businesses, governments and the PRs they use increasingly set the public agenda and how all this undermines journalism's 'fourth estate role'. In some respects, there are links to the arguments made by Chomsky and Herman about the propoganda model, an attempt to account for systemic bias in the news media.

You should be looking at Chomsky in one of the next two sessions with Rod. Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the Propaganda model, if Rod hasn't got to it yet, though a better bet would be to get 'Manufacturing Consent', the book in which Chomsky and Herman develop the idea, out of the library (there are lots of copies in there).

If you want a quick introduction to 'Flat Earth News', there's a basic summary and an extract on the promotional web site. Alternatively, try this introduction to the argument which Davies wrote for The Guardian.

Alternatively, have a listen to today's episode of the Radio 4 phone-in/consumer show, You and Yours. It's devoted to Davies' book and features him and various other ageing Fleet Street notables arguing over the book. I'll post more on this tomorrow.

Testing, testing

Weclome to the unit blog. I never quite know what to write first when I start a blog. And in general, I think first posts on blogs are always a bit random. Someone once said they're like the moment before a gig when someone steps up to the microphones, taps it and drones 'Testing, testing, one, two, one, two.'

Anyway, as the blurb in the sidebar says, the idea here is to link to stories that relate to some of the ideas and theories you'll look at during the course of the unit. Think of it as an online version of the research logs you're doing.

We also want to link to some useful resources online and put up some advice about researching your essays and dissertations. It's also a space where you can ask questions relating to the unit or comment on the stories we link to or add stories of your own.

That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how it develops.