First Commandment of News Reporting
Day 7: Thou shalt fill the space
We have too much news. There is rolling news, and news websites and newspapers and evening bulletins and social media presences and ...
When we valued news more, reporters would be paid properly to produce it. Local papers would have a few young reporters who would sit in on the local magistrates' court and council meetings. National newspapers would employ seasoned journalists who would ferret around for stories. Broadcast television news was the pinacle: I remember when there were “Newsnight Special Reports” where a journalist and crew might go off for a week or two to produce an extended report on an under-reported story. Newspapers have always competed for readers, with a good “scoop” bringing them great value.
For most reporters today their primary duty is to fill the space, to produce voluminous copy as cheaply as possible. This gives rise to a number of phenomena:
- The placed story: – The story that came from a PR department and can be used as copy with minimal further effort
- The wire service story: – The story from Reuters or PA that can be pulled and used
- The contrived row: – The story that keeps giving, so a reporter can get copy every day with minimal investment of time
The first type, the placed story, is particularly insidious. Here an unholy alliance develops between PR departments, targeted on their weekly column inches, and reporters with an impossible quota to fill. These are the articles that start with “a new study says that...” which can be translated as “a study that hasn't been peer reviewed yet can be cherry picked to give this juicy titbit”. Two days later social media is buzzing with “Did you know that X makes you live longer” and some university PR department are smiling while the researchers are weeping at how their work has been trivialised.
Just now there are two contrived rows running: one about Covid testing and one about PPE. Both are important, and both have been trivialised in order to provide easy copy.
The Covid tests aren't very good, with people hospitalised whose tests come back negative, and positive results from people who've recovered. The informative way to do testing would be to have a cohort of people who are tested every few days to give a sampled measure of infection rate in the general population: the repeated testing would give a four dimensional view of the progression, and a good view of how many people have at some time been asymptomatically infected. But instead we get angry stories of “why haven't I been tested” and “here's a target number we can set and then catch you out for missing it”.
There have been a lot of errors made in every country during this pandemic. The Nightingale hospitals would seem, happily, to not be needed. The surge in the use of PPE has been worldwide and resulted in supply chains failing to keep up – if there were more in Britain then some other country would have less.
We've commended Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, who has spoken calmly and openly with “Team NZ” every day. But then she's not had Laura Kuenssberg treating the briefing process like a parlour game – “will the minister in front of today's microphone fall into the dastardly trap I've set?”.
“Stay safe, stay kind”. If we were kinder to our elected leaders then they would be able to serve us better. But then our reporters might not have enough copy to fill the space.