I Feel The Need For Speed

Michael Hedges February 13, 2012 Follow on Twitter

Newsrooms are delightful studies of chaos. It’s a high-pressure world where the timid are quickly discarded. Add online demands to the mix and the mind boggles. Once journalism was about who, where, what, when and why. Now it’s the power of Twitter.

When the BBC and Sky News suggested that reporters might share leads with editors at least a few seconds before going to the Tweetdeck, the Twitterati went all unhinged. Sky News reporters were admonished hold breaking news items for editors first and not to “retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter,” said an email to news staff (February 7), widely disseminated through the media sphere. The BBC followed (February 8): “our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible… and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.”

The social media swarm took it all quite personally, in a social sort of way. “As with so many other similar social-media policies,” wrote Matthew Ingram on Gigaon (February 7), “this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.” Twitter, he wrote previously, is now a newswire.

The rules are “based on a flawed understanding of today’s media ecosystem,” wrote University of British Columbia digital journalism professor Alfred Hermida on his blog reportr.net (February 8). “It assumes that journalists still have a monopoly on breaking the news.”

These Twitter rules effectively bring a certain process to bear and a bit of focus. Retweeting random thoughts of the maddening crowd “could be wrong,” said the Sky News email, quoted by the Guardian. Sky News reporters were also told to “stick to their own beat.”

Another critical insider suggested a dark reason behind the Twitter bans, beyond the “Victorian” traditional media misunderstanding new media. “The social media revolution is changing power structures in newsrooms,” wrote the BBC’s thoughtful technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones (February 8), “allowing young journalists who understand this new world — and a few older ones — to build reputations independent of their own organizations.”

“Some would like to turn the clock back to a simpler time, when all power resided in the newsdesk, only star reporters got a byline, and sharing information with outsiders before the presses rolled or the bulletin began was a sacking offence,” he concluded. “But it is almost certainly too late for that.”

Oh, the times they’ve been a’changing. Two decades ago - another time and another place – the news editor’s epiphany was the stylistic challenge of “showing process.” The technology had barely arrived but there was a sense – backed up by audience response – that flying bits of information (“This just in…”) were, at once, magnets for hard-core news junkies and effective promotion for the main event; newscast, program, edition, whatever. Reporters, pads or recorders in hand, couldn’t be bothered. Social media platforms arrived this century and process is now everything, all news dissembled into bits and bytes, 1s and 0s.

But news organizations are congenitally chaotic and competitive. Reporters, editors and, perhaps, owners and board directors are adrenalin addicted, breaking news and resulting audience the drug. UK media watchers and interested outsiders have been treated in the last few months to an in-depth view of the sausage factory by virtue of the News Of The World phone hacking scandal.

After big name celebrities whinged to the Leveson inquiry about abuse by publicity, big name UK editors and owners, celebrities in the own right, revealed just how tough it is to catch the buzz. The Leveson Inquiry is mandated to get to the bottom of “the culture, practices and ethics of the press.” Dozens have already been given an opportunity to share, the first round concluding last week.

Daily Express, Daily Star and Channel Five owner Richard Desmond enlightened the Leveson Inquiry (January 13) explaining his libel settlement percentage (“38 bad ones”) was quite acceptable. When asked about media ethics at his newspapers the jocular Mr. Desmond responded: ”Ethical? I don't quite know what the word means, perhaps you will explain what the word means … We don't talk about ethics or morals because it is a very fine line and everybody's ethics are different.” Eyes rolled.

UK tabloid Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, to whom Mr. Desmond referred on the record as “the fat butcher”, enlarged his spat (February 6) with actor Hugh Grant about privacy, said online media reporters should be denied press accreditation, Twitter being the scourge of the earth, and suggested a shift in legal liability from publishers (and editors) to jurnos. Of the Leveson Inquiry, “the British public are receiving a very bleak picture,” he observed, “of an industry that employs thousands of people.”

While Lord Justice Leveson pursues the sausage factory’s ethics the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) is looking into the law. Two investigations – Operation Weeting for phone-hacking and Operation Elveden for bribery – have yielded about two dozen arrests. The most recent (February 11) yielded five employees of News International’s Sun tabloid plus a police officer, a Ministry of Defense employee and a member of the armed services.

News Corporation, owner of News International, where all this excitement seem to have started, closed tabloid News Of The World last year and jettisoned several executives. The Sun is the UK biggest selling newspaper and News International’s new CEO Tom Mockridge told staff (February 11) that just because Rupert Murdoch was jetting to London for a visit they shouldn’t worry about their jobs.

Mr. Murdoch joined the Twitterati a few weeks ago. That seems to have been a passing fancy. But we knew that.

See also in ftm Knowledge

Press/Media Freedom - Challenges and Concerns

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Social Media Matures (...maybe...)

Hundreds of millions use social media. It has spawned revolutions, excited investors and confounded traditional media. With all that attention a business model remains unclear or it's simply so different many can't see it. What is clear is that there's no turning back. 42 pages, PDF (June 2011)

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