News editing, book editing, pondering

Today is my last work day as Techworld news ed. Max (Cooter) the editor tells me I have been working for the IT news website for three years. Good lord.

It will also be my last day for a while as a journalist and that feels really odd. I don’t think I realised until today how much of my sense of self was tied in with my profession. But if I’m being completely honest, my attachment to journalism has been on the wane of late and I need a break from it.

The idea of being a journalist hit me like a ton of bricks almost exactly 10 years ago when I was finishing my engineering degree and wondering what the hell to do with my life. I had spent more and more of my time on the university newspaper and I loved it. Oddly enough I didn’t catch the news bug until much later, and was instead music editor and film editor both of which I nearly got fired from – once by my girlfriend of the time who was editor. In fact, reflecting on it I remember I got her the job as editor with some entirely underhand tactics.

She got annoyed because I hadn’t produced the copy for a Blur interview I had had in Liverpool and it was nearly deadline. So she started writing it herself. I turned up in time to write it but by that stage she was so angry I told her to write what she wanted but take my name off it. The finished piece was rubbish, which was a shame because I had some great detail about Graham Coxon slagging off his bassist and Liverpool fans pulling drinks out of Liverpool football players’ hands at the gig because they were playing the next day.

All in the application

Once I’d left with my Masters degree and was sat in my parents’ house, I applied to every single national newspaper, every single large city paper, and every paper in Surrey. I also applied to every magazine that covered film, music and technology. Every day, the doormat would receive another five or six rejection letters. Mostly it was standard letters, sometimes it was the wrong standard letter.

But what I learnt, and what still holds true now, is that if you want to do something don’t moan about how difficult it is, just get on and do it, and do it as well as you can. Lots of people want to be journalists, or, more accurately, think they want to be journalists. About three-quarters of them are hopeless and should never be allowed near a keyboard. But they all get jobs. Fuck knows how.

The problem of late is that these hopeless sods have become the norm. It’s thanks to the commercialism of the media. The news values that used to be instilled in people: objectivity, awareness of what is news and what isn’t, a sense of doing a service and having a vital democratic role, have been lost. When the opening of a new film in Leicester Square is front-page news but the death of a tramp in the same square is lucky to make even a paragraph, the media has stopped serving its most important function.

The vast expansion of the PR industry; the readiness of journalists to base the importance of a story on the number of times a company representative calls them about it; the refusal to stand up to people and companies and sod the legal risk; the lack of budgets; the slow depressing death of investigative journalism; the hand-holding. This has all got much, much worse in the past decade.

When someone accepts an interview in which all the questions are vetted, instead of telling the person’s PR agent where to shove it, the foundation of journalism weakens a little. It’s not as if any of the people being interviewed are even interesting any more. Every day I see the news and wonder why on earth they are not covering all the interesting people and events that are happening out there right now. Fewer actual stories are covered, and they are covered badly. Readers are automatically assumed to be stupid.

That’s entertainment

I am exaggerating of course but it seems to me at the moment anyway that the reasons I became a journalist have been subsumed by an overarching fetish to provide “entertainment” rather than news.

I have noticed this particularly strongly because I’ve been freelance for five years and you have to sell every bit of work you come up with. Part of the beauty of freelancing used to be that anything that grabbed your attention or occurred to you, you could then research and try to find someone to publish.

But commissioning editors are no longer in this mindset. More than anything they want cheap, safe copy, preferably with nice, free pictures. They have become spoilt by a PR industry that does exactly this, all neatly packaged. The only problem being that a new product on the market is not news. That’s what companies do, produce products. Let them advertise but let’s not pretend its apperance is of newsworthy to anyone but the company itself – and they already know about it. Have a look at any newspaper these days and a dreadful amount of it is about new products rather than people and events.

Friends

In the past few years most of my work has been for a very small group of three publications: Techworld, The Register and The Guardian. They know me, I know them, we both know what they are looking for. Occasionally if I felt constrained I would do the odd piece for a magazine I’d never written for before or for a high-profile publication, or sometimes for anyone just because a subject interested me. But the old opportunities to come up with an idea, flick through a list of publications that might be interested and call up the relevant editor to offer the piece have massively dried up. And for no apparently good reason.

I have found in the past year that having my blog enabled me to write about things I have discovered, and not have to go through all the hassle of persuading an editor to run it. You see, the majority of the pleasure of the job, for me anyway, is actually getting the information out there. Finding out about something and then making it as widely available as possible. With the Internet, I can do that myself without compromise, word counts, rewrites, simplications, sub-editors and so on. And because PR companies provide so much copy for free, the pay for producing original content has gone down and down. Sometimes I wonder why I am bothering to spend five hours working on a piece when per-hour I could make more doing just about anything else.

I remember I worked on a small piece for a national newspaper that I don’t normally work for hours. And then they came back with questions – stupid questions. And then an editor higher up decided they wanted a different angle, so I rewrote it. Then I had more stupid questions. I was only writing it quickly because I thought it would be fun. When I was then told that the fee was actually going to be £50 rather than the £75 agreed, I had had enough and said so. “I’m sorry but this just isn’t worth my fucking trouble” and hung up. I have no idea whether they published the piece or not.

When you are not having fun, when everything is a hassle and where you see the value of fighting harder go down in value year-on-year, it’s time to get away from it.

Future plans

So my plan was to get a permanent job on a national that was going somewhere with the Internet – because the Net is the future of journalism and also because I specialise in the Internet. The Guardian seemed like a natural spot, although I don’t think there was a space because of recent hirings. The Times is entirely revamping its online side so I was watching it carefully.

Or I was pondering about trying television – try to find a TV channel that had noticed the Internet was also going to be its future and try to get into the front of what would probably a very dynamic unit looking at Net broadcasting. The BBC is doing some terrific stuff at the moment, and Channel 4 has some interesting ideas.

Or I might try to make a living from self-publishing – become an extremely professional blogger. Not even a blogger really, a self-published journalist. And then of course, depending on how my book goes down, perhaps I could spend a few years trying to make it as an author.

All these thoughts were in my head as I headed to my mate Jonny’s wedding in North Carolina on 29 December. I also had two weeks in Mexico chilling out and had decided I would make a decision on my future over there and then come back and make the change. But I was pre-empted by Paul Levins, ICANN’s head of corporate affairs, who I met up with socially in London because he was in town at the end of December. He asked me to consider this job of general manager of public participation.

Hobby horse

I have spent alot of time and money in recent years following ICANN and the United Nations around the globe covering Internet issues. More often than not, The Register would pick up the cost of my plane and hotel, but even so it was costing me personally alot of money – and unfortunately having being a journalist for 10 years, I have very little of it.

While I was thinking about the ICANN job, it suddenly occurred to me that it was the university newspaper all over again. I used to kill myself working on the newspaper because I had one of the very few degrees where you have to actually do some work. So I would be in lectures or the lab all day and then go to the pokey basement office of Impact afterwards. When I was revising for exams, I would clear enough time to make sure I could get the newspaper stuff ready. It was quite clear that was where my passions lied.

Caught in the Net

And it is quite clear now that my passions lie in Internet governance and trying to making everything work properly as this medium effects extraordinary changes in all our societies across the globe. For a second time I am going to be lucky enough to make my hobby my job. And I will use all the skills I have learnt from journalism to do the best I can in my new job.

It is very unlikely indeed that I won’t return to journalism at some point in the future. With any luck it will be as an editor who decides to take the pieces from freelance journalists interested in the real world rather than the PR men who are interested in having their client’s product appear in the newspapers.

And those are my meanderings on Friday 2 February 2007 as I prepare to hang up my journalism hat for a bit.