My initiation in the mid-1980s was anything but propitious: “Boy: your piece is full of shit,” an editor at the Reuters news agency bellowed at me in the middle of the busy newsroom. The rough and tumble is one of the endearing, and enduring, qualities of news journalism, even if so much else about it (not least the management skills) has changed. As Alan Rusbridger points out in his captivating guide, the trade has weathered its many storms. It’s still there, just; and it is vital for society that it survives and even thrives again.
The former Guardian editor is one of the gatekeepers of the industry. When in that post and in subsequent speeches and books he has pondered its future in the face of fake news and the financial collapse of its business model. His latest offering, an A to Z guide, does all this too, while also injecting humour. As he notes early on, “boredom is the editorial kiss of death”. Story selection is crucial for a successful editor with an eye on circulation, or nowadays clicks. In local papers or TV-land, that has meant: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The more dramatic – gruesome even – the story, the better. Or as US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson is supposed to have said: “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then they print the chaff.”
Public life in reality, Rusbridger suggests, is usually more mundane: “The business of quiet, good, efficient government lacks drama or intrigue.” The job of the newspaper sometimes is “to tell its readers to eat their peas”. He devotes several passages to the issues and individuals that he feels have corroded the credibility of journalism. His rogues’ gallery includes the late Christopher Booker and other climate crisis deniers, as well as the American Iraq war cheerleader Judith Miller. One protagonist mentioned at length, but who strangely doesn’t get a section of his own, is Boris Johnson, who set a new standard for inventing stories while in Brussels for the Daily Telegraph.
Journalism has always had protagonists who do whatever it takes to advocate for their cause. Think Lord Haw Haw in the second world war. In some ways, these people are less problematic because they are visible and prominent. More dangerous are the less heralded who allow themselves to be bought. When I worked in the Westminster lobby, I knew which of my colleagues was the unofficial spokesperson for which cabinet minister. No money was exchanged, but stories were proffered in return for pliancy. As one spin doctor put it to me: “Shut up, take it down if you want more in the future.”
In my first week as editor of the New Statesman in 2005, Rusbridger offered me some priceless advice: don’t let yourself get drawn in to the political battles. That wasn’t so easy given that the Brownites were on the prowl; they were desperate to unseat Tony Blair, and they saw “their” magazine as an important tool. I was bombarded by low-grade puff pieces by serving ministers and their aides. They didn’t let up, even after Brown took office. Each time I would tell them ever so politely to take a running jump.
As this book points out, financial journalists perhaps come under even more pressure than political ones. Much of it is channelled through the newspaper’s proprietor, almost always a big beast in the business jungle. In the old days there were profits to be made. Why do people bother nowadays to buy newspapers? It is a device for these titans, men (almost always) of dubious repute (sometimes), to buy a seat at society’s top table and to try to influence the debate. Social media and other tech changes have disrupted that line. Now the key players, garnering more than 80% of digital advertising, are Facebook and Google, doing more to mould public life than any proprietor could have dreamed of.
News and How to Use It is a compelling tour d’horizon of the trade. I would have liked to see more examples beyond the Anglo-American vista. In India, advertorial copy – a pernicious melding of advertising and editorial – has been established practice for years. In Germany, interviewees are given a right to comment on an article about them before it is published. In France, privacy laws often lead to deference to authority.
Rusbridger talks with passion about social media, citizen journalism and new business models. There is no shortage of cheap and cheerful websites that cater to commentators’ vanities. But who is going to fund the journalism that really matters – the investigations, the search for facts that those with power would rather we did not have? Do we want Silicon Valley to be its philanthropists?
This book is not a paean to the old days, far from it, even if the author – like many of us boomers – struggles to comprehend phenomena such as the role of Instagram influencers. Rusbridger points out many failings of past journalism, not least the lack of diversity. This matters not just because it narrowed the path to the top, but because it skewed which stories would be covered. He quotes a former local reporter as saying that, had his paper still existed, “there is no way Grenfell could have happened”. Local residents saw their beat reporters as the glue that kept the community together. They would have known who to turn to about their concerns over shoddy construction.
Mercifully, in spite of its precarious future, there is no shortage of young people in the UK and abroad wanting to go into journalism, displaying at least as much tenacity and resilience as any previous generation. Their methods may have to some extent changed: data is now at the heart of so much reporting.
Rusbridger wonders whether the pandemic has led the public to seek a return to mediated journalism, to professionals who can help navigate what is news and what’s not. “As with much else in Brexit-sundered Britain, it is not immediately clear whether the unavoidably shared national experience of the Covid-19 crisis … will restore a sense of mutual respect and forbearance between government and the political press, and between the media and anxious voters desperate for reliable guidance through the catastrophe.”
I might have preferred a more emphatic statement. But perhaps his caution is merited. Donald Trump may be on his way out, but the lying and the falsehoods so beloved of the rich and powerful are as prevalent as ever.