The good old days. Photo by Robert VAN DER HILST/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
I got into journalism twice. First, the old way. When I was doing my A-levels, I arranged work experience stints at three local papers – one for each of the market towns in striking distance of my village, the smallest with an editorial staff of about half a dozen and the largest run by a team of maybe twice that. I tagged along to the magistrates court. I went to a planning meeting. I wrote up press releases from agricultural shows as nibs, and had them turned back to me covered in red ink by an irritable subeditor who did not really want to be babysitting. I, a clever girl who was used to impressing my teachers rather than taking correction, read the comments with my face burning and knuckled down to the amends.
Other minders were happier to have me on their heels. There was the young woman reporter who said nice things about my office-inappropriate floaty skirts (look, it was the nineties), and who told me about her dreams of getting onto a London tabloid as she chain-smoked by the car between council meetings. And there was the sardonic middle-aged guy who delighted in my enthusiasm for talking to newly arrived clerics and taking on extra work — yes, of course I would supply that week’s restaurant review which had somehow been overlooked! I realise now, he had perhaps hoped for more from his career than a middling job on the second-biggest paper in England’s smallest county, but he was kind enough to encourage my chirruping about Orwell and Parker rather than crush it out like one of the fags he, too, endlessly smoked (look, it was the nineties).
Local papers were places that could take you places, if you were good, if you were ambitious. I borrowed a book on shorthand from the library and studied it in my free time. I read, and I read, and I read. I wanted this so badly – I wanted the cynicism, the self-deprecation, the hack’s pride in being a hack, underpinned by a fierce private seriousness about what their papers meant to their readers.
We were our readers’ eyes in the courtroom and the town hall, and we celebrated their large sheep and we marked the birth of their babies and the passing of their dead, and we got their names right, because there was a good chance you might meet them in the pub and get an in-person right of reply if you didn’t. I thought I would do my English degree, then a graduate traineeship in London, and maybe one day I’d come home again and work on (I meant run) one of these papers. Even this was gentrified compared to the paths taken by the people I’d shadowed: a degree was not a prerequisite for a job in a newsroom. Look, it was the nineties.
***
Ten years later, I got into journalism for the second time. I hadn’t done the graduate traineeship – I’d had two babies instead while I was at university, and parked my inky dreams, because how could I be a mum of two and live in London pulling late-nighters? Instead I secured funding for a masters and then a doctorate, thinking that academia might be a more welcoming environment for a woman with family commitments, and you can imagine how that turned out. Lol. I never learned shorthand, but I never stopped reading either and I never stopped being in love with journalism: one of the first pieces I got commissioned was about Michael Frayn’s hack farce Towards the End of the Morning, and whether the newspaper novel would survive in a post-print world.
Because in the decade that had passed, the internet had happened. This had been devastating for the press, and most devastating for the local press, which now exists in only a skeleton version. Between 2005 and 2015, nearly two hundred titles shut down — partly because their circulations fell (a constantly screen-stimulated reader doesn’t need to pick up a paper to fill their time, and it’s notable that one of the few to straggle on is the Evening Standard, which went free-sheet and focused on reaching reception-starved underground commuters), but mostly because the classified market died.
Have an announcement? Put it on Facebook. Flogging a sofa? Gumtree. Looking for a date? OKC. That time I spent on the court benches watching drunks plead guilty to shoplifting was subsidised by the real business of the papers, which consisted of those tiny columns of text between the readers’ letters and the sport: ono, gsoh, dearly missed, wltm, bnib. All on the internet now. If you are up against a judge on a charge, or victim of a crime that is tried in a magistrates’ court, or if a planning decision affects your life, or if local government does anything — by and large, that goes unwitnessed, because these days everyone sells their old crosstrainer on eBay.
This, as much as baroque theories about Cambridge Analytica, is the real threat to democracy constituted by the internet. The decline of local press is also bad for justice, and bad for all sorts of reasons, but most importantly, because I’m hugely solipsistic, it’s bad for journalists.
My second route into journalism began like this: I emailed The Guardian’s Comment is Free desk with a pitch about how angry a political adviser’s anti-abortion comments had made me, and within 24 hours, it had been commissioned and published online. This was thrilling: I wrote for The Guardian now! Eventually, I developed a routine for picking up this kind of work. Every morning started with the Today programme, scanning Twitter, reading the headlines, especially reading the headlines in the Mail, in search of something that I could be mad enough about to write 600-800 hundred fiery words on it.
Being mad was important because the economics of this kind of content required fast output (since timeliness is critical) and high engagement (since this is how editors, and writers, measure success). I write quickly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so people are more likely to share and react. Not everything I wrote when this was my main form of journalism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dishonesty that made me feel ashamed: I was deliberately riling myself so I could rile other people in turn, and the arguments I offered had a kind of incuriosity, a clamshell quality, where the main thing to recommend them was how impervious I could make them to critique.
That critique came from two places, and neither of them were my editors. There were the comments, which I was encouraged to participate in (this meant extra unpaid hours of being called a dipshit by the odd, self-celebrating clique that every site will attract in the name of building a “community”), and Twitter, which it seemed (still seems) impossible not to be a part of if I wanted to stake a place in public life. And there’s a buzz to it as well. Being in the thick of the fight, delivering put-downs to all-comers, soaking up commiserations and applause from onlookers, feels good. God knows, when the rates are so low, you need some kind of sop to pull you through.
The same forces that squeezed local journalism mostly to death had been at work on the national level. There’s an assumption that if you write for the national press, you must be well-off: journalism is, after all, a profession. But publications with falling print circulations and shrinking ad spend can hardly afford to keep up with inflation. A byline is not going to convince your bank manager to issue a loan.
Even so, the perception that journalists are beacons of middle-class privilege persists. People have always thought badly of hacks (I remember a secondary teacher who, when I told her I wanted to be a journalist, looked appalled and said: “But you’ll have to do some awful things”), but today journalism occupies a strange niche of being low reward and low prestige, yet still high resentment. There’s an assumption that writers have reserves of wealth and power which means the public is entitled to a piece of them.
There’s a tiny element of merit to this, which is that as opportunities to get into journalism have declined, it’s become more dominated by those with personal resources (aka well-off parents). Journalists, it should be said, hardly discourage the assumption that we are important and secure – because most of us would like it to be true. We went to university for this, we work long hours, we believe in the Insight team or David Carr or Joan Didion or whatever.
“Being a journalist” has a kind of legacy value, even though being a journalist is not in most cases what it once was: I sometimes teach creative writing students, and it’s astonishing how many young people will tell you that they’d like to be a journalist while not being able to name a single journalist that they themselves admire or publication they read regularly.
***
Compare the girl of 1998, and the young woman of 2008. The girl works in a newsroom. She learns her trade, going place to place, talking to people, figuring out what’s a story and what isn’t, with feedback from editors. If she annoys someone, they might write a letter or phone the desk (or even, if they have the clout, threaten to pull their advertising) but that’s about as bad as it gets. The young woman of 2008 is on her own. She stays in one spot with her laptop.
She’s more qualified, but she’s also more narrowly skilled. And she’s vulnerable. Her editors could stop taking her pitches at any moment if they don’t get enough reaction, or (worse) if they get too much reaction of the wrong sort, which won’t arrive as a scattering of green-ink letters, but in the form of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets attacking her, and attacking the people who employ her. It’s easier to let her go and hire someone less contentious to file that copy than it is to defend her — although they’re unlikely to need to cut her, because she’s already been socialised via internet into pursuing the fragile approval bestowed by loosely-bonded online groups.
I was very lucky to be the girl before I was that young woman. The majority of people who now enter journalism will only have the latter experience, and even if they wind up on staff, this will be what forms them. They are weak actors reliant on weak institutions. This weakness is what you have understand before you can make sense of the strange cowardice that afflicts the media.
It is, on the face of it, baffling that certain positions which are niche in the public at large can attain the status of unassailable truth within the media. Most people, by and large, don’t adhere to privilege theory, for example. Which isn’t to say privilege theory shouldn’t feature in any journalism — but nor should it be the only framework through which rights are discussed, and nor should any dissension from privilege theory be treated as prima facie evidence of bigotry.
Such ideas take hold because they work as markers of belonging: your commitment to them shows your commitment to the institution. And they are enforced for two reasons: because to let them slide would be to make yourself vulnerable to the same attacks, and because excluding other people from the field increases your access to the shrinking resources available.
In other words, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that journalism as a profession has grown less catholic (small C) as it’s become more besieged; nor that the more elite it has become due to entry routes like the local press shutting down, the more obsessed its practitioners as a whole have grown with signalling their lack of elitism to each other (in ironically jargon-y language). The market cost of ignoring opinions the public would gladly pay to read does not outweigh the personal cost of disaligning from the in-group values.
The only profession that I think is probably worse for this is the one I almost went into instead: academia has even lousier pay and even lousier security for work that is supposedly valuable, and even less tolerance of what I suppose I’m going to have to call intellectual diversity, despite that being one of the ugliest phrases in existence. It matters, deeply, that the organisations to which we entrust the discovery and dissemination of information and ideas have grown hostile to free speech and free thought. It matters that they have grown closer to being intellectual monocultures: if the national press was populated by more people who’d had their career grounding doing vox pops in the regions, I wonder whether the 2016 referendum result would have felt like quite such an ambush.
But telling journalism to be better — acts like signing the open letter recently published in Harper’s Magazine, or complaining about unpaid internships — is not going to make a lick of difference when the institutions themselves have been gutted. (Depressingly, many critics of “woke culture” on the Right would happily destroy, not reinforce, the institutions they have some justice in critiquing. If you think the BBC is too reflexively liberal, that’s an argument for making it securely independent, not for starving it of funds — unless of course you’ve always wanted to starve it of funds.) You cannot change a culture unless you change the incentives that act on it. And I don’t have a plan for doing that.
I could hector you to buy a paper, but you won’t. I could command you to give up Gumtree, but why should you? It’s just better than local paper classifieds. Democracy was a free rider on a slightly inconvenient way of life, and it’s much harder to give up convenience than it is democracy. I think paywalls help, and private funding models are an option, but neither is endlessly scalable (for example, paywalls haven’t worked for tabloids), and neither is going to fill the gap left by the local press.
This isn’t just a hole in our media: it’s a hole in our polity. The form of public accountability we’ve settled on is one that relies on a robust, independent-minded, largely private-sector media to do the job of scrutiny. It hasn’t always done this job well, but no other body is equipped to do it. Now it’s falling away, and as we’ve already seen at the local level, this is not a vacuum that there is any rush to fill.
A schoolfriend of mine actually saw through my original plan: the degree, the training, the homecoming to the editor’s chair. She very sensibly went into PR. One of the papers I did my work experience on has now been absorbed by its larger rival, and the editorial staff on the two remaining wouldn’t fill the office of one of them from the time I was there. We have to get used to the idea that the press as currently structured can no longer do all the work we’ve loaded onto it, and we have to think about where — if anywhere — that work might happen instead.
Journalism still matters — however few people buy a paper, the front pages continue to strike righteous terror into politicians. I still love my work. But if I had the choice to make a third time, I don’t know if I would, or even could, go into journalism again.
This article first appeared on 27 August, 2020
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SubscribeThis is a very interesting article. But for me its fundamental problem is that it still takes the stance that traditional ‘journalism’ is to be valued and cherished. But the Press collectively (large generalisation here and of course subject to exceptions) has damaged its own position over the years by thinking that campaigning and trying to change the world is more important that simply reporting the facts in the most dispassionate way possible. A consequence of this is that when Donald Trump (appalling human being, whose failings need not be rehearsed here) attacks ‘fake news’ and ‘the very dishonest press’ that strikes a chord with many people who do not at all share his political worldview. Do I trust the MSM to produce a fair and balanced – and accurate – account of anything? No, certainly not. That’s why I no longer buy a daily newspaper and why I make very little effort to read one, even online. That is, for the press, an entirely self-inflicted injury; until they correct it, their credibility is shot, and so is their influence in relation to any important political question.
I wish I had read your response before posting my own. You echo my thoughts completely.
The press now days would be best equated to the Animal Farm character ‘Squealer’. We want and need a Benjamin.
Baroque theories about Cambridge Analytica? You mean fabrication, the politically-motivated concoction of falsehood.
This facet of the collapse of journalism: the failure now to even aspire to honest objectivity, is missing from your analysis. Most of us no longer trust journalists to be serious, dispassionate describers of the world. Rather, they seem untrustworthy, hectoring and sadly-often ignorant campaigners.
Why should anyone pay for that, unless it is simply entertainment?
The traditional model of journalism, with the slightly better educated – now a degree in English, the Classics, or simply ‘journalism – telling the public what journalists think they should be told, is as dead as hunter-gathering. For 2 reasons; 1. the MSM no longer has a megaphone monopoly; there are innumerable sources of information, some far better than the MSM. And 2. those degrees are utterly useless in understanding and being able to summarise or explain the many big issues of the day. As the Covid crisis has exposed, the MSM have next to no editors and journalists with any health, medical, scientific, crisis management, logistics, you name it, experience or expertise, yet have postured and pontificated endlessly, achieving little more than spreading confusion and distrust. The ridiculous Times ‘Insight’ report was a classic case. The repeated claims that journalists were ‘holding the government to account’ are even more laughable. The same journalistic ignorance applies to science, technology, education, defence, anything, in fact which requires specialist knowledge. There is a future for ‘resonsible and fact-checked journalism’, but it isn’t, I’m afraid, in people like the author. It’s in building a reference resource for all those key topics and issues, by people who know and understand them, and setting ‘the news’ in its context so that readers and viewers can gain a better understanding of events against the big picture.
I agree. And if print media is untrustworthy the situation is much worse in the case of broadcast media – which is also far more superficial.
Well it seems that most ‘journalists’ didn’t choose ‘journalism’ either, just opinion and/or falsehood and/or activism and/or race grifting etc. This is why the vast majority of us have consciously uncoupled from the MSM over the last 20 years.
Also why MSM without comments is suspect. No one can challenge this agenda driven fake news. Unherd is great in this. The writer skipped over this huge part of MSM, how most no longer take comments, and I would have loved to hear what it was like to read the ones you attracted. In The Guardian I suppose the writer got many, often bright ones, although the Guardian banned anyone who was not either echo chamber, or able to very apologetically, and self abasingly, give the contrasting view, later they banned those too.
Well done Sarah. This is the first of your columns with which I agree (although you might want to look up the definition of “solipsism”. It does not mean selfish or egotistical, in the way you have used it. It means that you believe you are the only consciousness in existence. A better word would be “narcisism”).
But your discussion of the failing profession of journalism is thoughtful and offers some new insights into its collapse, at least to me. As you point out, a healthy press is central to a healthy democracy, and current journalism is too financially dependent on becoming an echo chamber of woke orthodoxy to satisfy the need for rational, objective critique of the social and political zeitgeist.
One point you pass by too quickly, however, is the narrowing of opinions among journalists themselves, who must now genuflect to political correctness in order to fit into the ideological culture of the newsroom.
This is a trend that has become apparent ever since schools of journalism adopted a post-modern view of knowledge, which maintains that truth is subjective, objectivity a power game, and the aim of journalism is not to find the truth, but to disseminate woke propaganda. When activism replaces journalism, journalists lose their objectivity and with it, the respect of the educated public.
Once upon a time, journalists were more educated than their readership. Now, however, we are barraged with the shallow opinions of 20 something writers with a BA in grievance studies lecturing us all about why we are guilty of offense for holding views that don’t conform to the proper ideology.
Feelings are not more important than facts, and journalists who replace research and objectivity with ideology deserve to lose the respect their profession once deserved, to the detriment of us all.
This VERY usefully tells most of the story – the obituary – of what has happened to journalism in the United Kingdom, and I thank Sarah Ditum heartily for laying out so clearly all the decline-features in this autopsy of its corpse.
There are other aspects, namely at the behest of political ideology; and an article by Jeff Davidson in the U.S. “Townhall” magazine sets those forth: ‘The Hellish World of Modern Journalism’.
Alison Morrow (I think that’s her name) is an ex-MSM journalist in the US who has done some good podcasts on the appalling nature of contemporary US journalism.
A very interesting resume about journalistic decline. Even Warren Buffet cannot make local papers work. I moved away from the UK in 1985 and returned for visits every year or so since (not recently of course, marooned as I am out here). Every visit I would buy every daily paper just to get caught up… cost about 2 pounds at the beginning, way more than that later of course. So much content, so much drivel. This came at the same time as my children were doing their O and A Levels and I came across the travesty of school work that is the work book. When I looked at what my children were working through, it struck me that they could have just ticked boxes with crayons and still got an A or A star. Quite simply, the standard of tuition had declined so far, requiring no analysis, simple or otherwise, comprehension, powers of summarising succinctly, punctuation and of course the god awful hand writing. Mine was/is bad but this is an all new level of utter horror. The quality of modern day writing, punctuation, spelling (there are at least 4 syntax errors in the above article and I am sure an equivalent number in my own note here) and all the rest of it is simply appalling. What do editors do? Do they just rely on useless spellcheck? Bottom line, I stopped buying British newspapers probably 10 years ago as I found them unreadable. It is only online sites like Unherd (and a couple of others) that have remotely interesting articles and writing such as this. I may have zero sympathy with journalists but do comprehend what some issues are. I just would have preferred a soupçon more backbone.
Where are you?
How do the papers there compare with those of the UK?
How do the papers there compare with the the same titles from 1985?
What of the schooling there, now versus then, versus the UK?
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I also left London decades ago, but return to stay at the old family house, and how weird that is, back home, the buildings and roads all the same, but the community and people all different. This year I could not return even though it was very important for family reasons.
Anyway Mark, reading on-line papers is all about the comments. Guardian got rid of comments BTL almost totally, and now it is not worth bothering with. The Daily Mail is still a free-for-all in comments, and I have personally proved it is impossible to get banned, and so all kinds of people get a voice. Breitbart has terrible comments, just ignorant one line anger, so what could have been a good place to see some news, I never bother with.
In the 80’s, I too ventured into journalism via a rare vocational course in London. It robustly prepared students for women’s mags, local rags and the front line of Murdoch’s Fleet Street takeover. (I copped out and chose a less combative career.) Something is lost when hacks know they won’t actually face their sources or subjects in the flesh but can distil narrative from the safety of an online keyboard. Even a Twitter or Comments backlash won’t focus a writer like face to face accountability. Local press (not local Facebook) is invaluable in developing, protecting and reflecting this democratic opportunity and a robust reincarnation is long overdue.
Ouch.
“the odd, self-celebrating clique that every site will attract in the name of building a ‘community'”
Yeah, I noticed that line too. Probably best for columnists not to be too dismissive of the groundlings way down in the comments section because, presumably, those are the people Unherd expects to pay for a subscription when a paywall goes up.
Otherwise a great article. It provided the best explanation I’ve yet seen for why the MSM has become such an ideological monoculture and why they appear to have such contempt for their own society (although I still don’t really understand that part).
Some of these points are valid – I don’t doubt that wokey cowardice is in part a function of economic insecurity.
But I can’t help but refer to one of my own formative experiences of the MSM as a young adult – the years following 9/11 when there seemed to be unanimous agreement among journalists across the political spectrum that the invasion of Iraq was a great idea and any dissent merited mockery and accusations of treason. It seemed perfectly clear to me that it was a terrible idea, and I was mystified that all of the “experts” could be lined up on the other side. Can’t say I have much nostalgia for that arrangement, although it was certainly instructive about how the world actually works.
I’m not sure I remembered it that way much, there were plenty in the media warning against it, and the country seemed pretty split about the whole thing. True most of the public voices warning against it had no political clout but I do distinctly remember figures like Simon Jenkins, Robin Cook and Ken Clarke being firmly against it.
Of course the papers that actually matter were firmly in favour of it but, well, what can one say? Since the time of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook patriotic war stories have always sold well.
In the US there was probably more unanimity.
Yes, I was thinking of the US media, I don’t really know what the mood was in the UK.
Ms. Ditum, I have disagreed with several of your articles. May I commend you for this one. I feel I’m likely to refer to it several times in future.
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On second thoughts, I’ve not been emphatic enough.
This is a brilliant article. Thank you.
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I should be at work, but self employed I work only when can beat myself into going to work as I really dislike doing what I do. And so, the ‘Given my time again’ header of the article, I wonder who would chose to do what they do, now they know better.
My whole adult life was a case of beginning with a bad choice, and then building on it again and again, with even worse choices, till ending up here and now. I absolutely would not choose to have done it this way if I could change it. It sounds like you have it together and no real reason to wish it had all been different, like you are regretting a good life because you wish you had had a better life. (although I realize this was more of just a way to critique the state of journalism)
In my life I have managed to hit about all the low points, but as I was always up to something they were recovered from, till another mess would be self induced. But then looking back, it was really a hard, and pointless, life, but I did get to see a great many weird and unique things and people, and that is why I do not live in complete regret.
What an extremely elegant and wise piece of writing. You, Miss are are Master (Mistress?) of your craft.
My father became a journalist at 15 in the 30s. I began in the 70’s. For me the route in was television. But local news programming, like local print, has almost vanished, with the ITV companies collapsing into a single entity with no franchise requirements. In my experience, journalism has always had a large dollop of laziness and a bad record of catastrophising to gain attention. But I’m encouraged that the spirit of enquiry and the passion to pursue the truth is still clearly alive in many contemporary writers, including obviously the author of this piece. Toby Young for example has shown impressive dedication in running LockdownSceptics.org on nothing more than donations, keeping us up to date with all the research and thinking that challenges government policy on Covid. (I recommend you check him out and donate too, if you can.) This forum, Unherd, provides a wonderful service in curating good writing and interesting points of view, from which we have all benefitted -and that includes Lockdown TV. And there are podcasts galore offering unheard voices, most of which gain viewers via word of mouth. The problem is how to monetise the quest for truth. There are too many begging bowls and too little regular subscription.
I don’t think it was inevitable. Newspapers made a huge mistake at the turn of the century when they started giving away news for free on their sites. The ad revenue was supposed to compensate for the fall in print sales but never did. Instead it acclimatised the public to think of news as a free good that fell from the sky.
Next there was the woeful design of newspaper sites, especially local ones. Difficult or even impossible to navigate, overloaded with pop ups, you needed an ad blocker just to read them.
The ad model forced newspapers to chase eyeballs. It became all about clicks. The more controversy the better. But in this game they could never compete with unregulated social media.
And finally there was the asset stripping. In pursuit of illusory economies of scale, local independents, family owned and embedded in their communities, were bought up by large newspaper groups using borrowed money. With so much debt to repay, and a dividend to shareholders essential to keep the stock price high (bonuses, bonuses…) there was no money to invest in the actual product.
The death spiral need not have happened. Increasingly serious people will subscribe for a deep dive into serious news. Local papers like the Seattle Times survive because a residual family stake prevented the quality of the product being taken too low.
For the very long term I’m more optimistic. But we, the readers, must learn to pay and go behind the paywalls. Free news is crap news. And you’re the real product.
“academia has even lousier pay and even lousier security for work that is supposedly valuable, and even less tolerance of what I suppose I’m going to have to call intellectual diversity”
Do journalists really get better pay and more job security than we academics? I find this surprising – certainly we’re modestly paid by professional standards, but an academic household’s median income is still likely to be well above the UK 2019 median of £29,600. Compulsory redundancies tend to happen only when entire departments (eg Russian Language) are closed down, my impression is they’re still much less common than in the private sector. Diversity of opinions has certainly declined since the 1990s but I don’t think enforcement of orthodoxy is worse than in other fields.
The fact that academia may be as infected with woke ideology is not much of a defense, given the way the woke now control discourse on campuses throughout the West, as well as media and cultural outlets. Companies now kowtow to political correctness to protect their bottom lines, while in Canada we have a Prime Minister who never tires of tedious displays of virtue signaling. So the problem is now everywhere, and is well-entrenched in elite circles. It’s a big part of what animates Trump supporters to rebel against modern cultural norms.
I just think she’s probably mistaken that academics are worse off than journalists on average.
Great article. It’s a shame how local press and broadcasting has shrivelled to almost nothing. I loved my time on a local newspaper. A move into magazines was better paid but nothing like as exciting. There’s no feeling like reading your words on newsprint just an hour or two after you wrote them. Local newspapers were a great training ground. Now I fear that social media and the lure of clickbait have infected journalism. I’m just glad to have worked as a journalist at the end of its golden age.