Stronger together weaker apart?

In common, I suspect, with most journalists who swap the newsroom for the lecture hall I was initially bemused by the sheer hostility of academic media studies towards the press.

Despite the fact that Marx wrote I think next to nothing about the media,  Marxism is often presented as a fundamental starting point for critical analysis of the western media.

In time I’ve come to learn that media studies and practical journalism are just two separate subjects.  Once you get that clear, it’s possible to examine each on their own merits.

Starting out as a lecturer, one of the few academics who didn’t appear to actually hate all journalists and media organisations was Brian McNair.  His textbook, News and Journalism in the UK,  was also accessible – not something that can be said of all media studies writing.

Today Brian plugs a new edition of the (very good) book in allmediascotland.com but ends the piece with a bizarre and seemingly out of nowhere attack on Independence, even including a paraphrase of Labour’s favourite anti-SNP slogan – stronger together, weaker apart.

The idea seems to be that Independence would be a disaster for Scottish newspapers - although the evidence base for this seems to be, well, zero. I’m not quite sure exactly how The Herald, Scotsman, Record etc. with their plummeting sales are  currently benefiting from the Union. 

Indeed given its plight the  Scottish media seems to be the worst possible industry to use to promote the status quo.

The fact is Independence would be the best  thing to happen to Scottish journalism. With a normal Parliament to report on and a government setting economic, European and foreign policy the papers would instantly become more interesting.

What would be the point in buying  a London title in such circumstances?

If you don’t believe me – take a look at the Irish Times site and compare it to The Scotsman’s.  There’ s no contest.

Up-date:  more evidence of how well Scottish papers are doing under the Union – some significant redundancies at the Daily Record.

Scottish newspaper turmoil

So there’s to be yet another change of editor at a Scottish title – with the replacement of Mike Gilson with John McLellan at The Scotsman.

This  item here from allmediascotland.com has a startling comparison of an era of stability before the year 2000 compared with the revolving door policy ever since.

The Scottish newspaper market  should not of course be looked at in isolation – we are not insulated from the economic and technological turmoil that is sweeping through newspapers world-wide.

This uncertainty is bound to lead to more frequent changes at the top. But there’s still something depressing about the current state of what should be one of Scotland’s great industries.

I don’t actually think any Scottish newspaper has come to terms with devolution or the wider change in public attitudes.  Far too many papers are out of touch. They give the  impression that they don’t actually like Scotland that much and think the whole idea of any kind of self-government is rubbish. 

No paper is central to the Scottish political debate in the way The Scotsman and Herald were in the 70s and 80s. I realise that simply being in touch with the country you are trying to serve is  not sufficient to put on sales – but it is at the very least a necessary pre-condition.

A cast-list of columnists that includes the likes of Jenny Hjul and Gerald Warner along with the usual tired, political hacks says more about the lack of vibrancy in Scottish papers than even the top-line circulation figures. (I confess to an interest here  that some may, uncharitably, call sour-grapes – I’ve had a few pieces  published myself but have had quite a few more rejected having refused to go down the SNP/Scotland is crap line). 

Whoever takes over at The Scotsman and/or Scotland on Sunday has a massive and difficult job – but a good starting point would be to understand that Scotland in 2009 is very different to 1989. If you think 1989 was better then perhaps editing one of our national papers is not for you.

It’s the Scots wot done it

I’ve written before about the casual prejudice against Scotland that is now acceptable in the London “national press.”

Probably  the worst examples of this can be found in the Daily Telegraph, but even in The Guardian today,  the liberal Jackie Ashley includes a gratuitous and inaccurate reference to Scotland, designed to remind people that the stupid Jocks are apparently primarily responsible for the global banking crisis.

“He, (Gordon Brown) she writes, “made friends with the same Scottish bankers now in disgrace.”

Apart from the fact that as far as I can see there is nothing particularly Scottish about Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, their nationality seems irrelevant – unless you want to whip up some anti-Scottish sentiment.  

I cannot imagine a Scottish political commentator  talking about ”English” bankers in reference to Northern Rock or Bradford and Bingley, so why is it ok to make this kind of remark about Scotland?

Why are journalists so bad at this stuff?

I’m of the generation of journalists who started out about 20 years ago (that can’t be right, surely) in well-staffed offices which were just coming to terms with what was grandly called “new technology” -  ie computers.

I cut my teeth in a district office of a big regional daily. In my office alone (never mind the main newsroom) we had eight reporters. Circulation was also about 20,000 higher than now.

It’s tempting to say that newspaper sales have fallen because newsrooms have lost so many staff and therefore decent content – tempting but also naive.

While I think it is madness for Scottish papers in particular to be cutting back on Scottish reporters (which means tossing away their big advantage over the London “nationals”) there’s obviously a hell of a lot  more to circulation falls than staff cutbacks.

But if papers do have to make redundancies why do they have to do it so badly?

There’s a brilliant example of this in The Guardian media section which publishes memos from Rebekah Wade, John Witherow and other News International editors, explaining why they are making  job losses.

Any quarter-decent journalist reading these memos would recognise that the top line is the job losses themselves. All the stuff about investing in editorial and the necessity of combining online and paper editions may well be true – but these memos read like the kind of useless spin operations governments and companies out out while burying the obvious (and usually damaging) news angle further down.

Only one editor uses the word “sorry” about the redundancies and there’s a general tone of “don’t worry about these minor job losses – onward with News International!”

Why not just be honest with the people who know what the real news is: sorry, we have to make these redundancies. We think there is some good news but we know that most of you will not be concerned about that at present.

It’s almost as bad as the  incredibly insensitive interview given by the managing editor of The Herald titles, who went on Newsnight Scotland to talk about the exciting time ahead for the group on the same day that all staff had been told they would have to re-apply for their jobs.

Why can’t these people just tell it straight?

anti-Scottish ranting – why?

Gordon Brown and Jeremy Clarkson actually have a fair bit in common – they both for their own purposes like to wrap themselves firmly in the Union Jack.

Brown’s motivation is clearly political – a rather lame attempt to disguise his, well, Scottishness, and Clarkson’s is presumably commercial – there’s a market apparently in having a go at the French,  Germans etc.

I don’t know if Clarkson is the kind of person the Prime Minister has in mind when he talks about the “British genius” but I’m guessing after today probably not.

On their own,  I can’t actually take the The Top Gear’s latest moronic comments seriously - citing Brown’s disability and nationality and branding him an idiot (when no matter what you think of him he clearly is not) is just not worth bothering about.

But it’s interesting that it’s now ok to use Scottish and Scotland as terms of abuse. Read some of the comments on the above link and that’s clear.

Simon Heffer, in the Telegraph,  has recently essentially compared Scots in public life to dogs that need training. We used  know how to behave apparently, but sadly not now.  I should let this kind of stuff go, but a serious newspaper should be ashamed to allow this bile to appear in print.

The remarkable thing of course is that no TV presenter in Scotland or serious political commentator here would ever describe the English in these terms. (If they did we would be subjected to acres of newspaper coverage beating ourselves up over our dreadful anti-Englishness.)

But the reality is that such ingorant prejudice  just wouldn’t take place.

Journalist doing his job outrage

Why are MPs wasting their (valuable?) time interrogating the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, about his many scoops.

If I have got this right, then Peston is a journalist. His job is to break stories. And, er, that’s what he’s doing.

He’s not an arm of UK economic policy.  He may or may not have caused some discomfort to the government or to the City. But that’s part and parcel of being a good reporter.

Instead of holding pointless inquiries, perhaps these MPs might spend their time thinking about how they could become as good at their jobs as Peston is at his.

I am the weatherman

I’ve written before about the stupid use of the cliche “bucking the trend” by Scottish journalists writing about the housing market here. This phrase is usually wheeled out when the Scottish market diverges in some way from the UK position.  It never seems to occur to the writers of these pieces that there is no general ”trend” – there is a market in England and a market in Scotland and they are often, well, different.

But the use of the words “the trend” is revealing – what this means is that something in Scotland is only worth reporting if it can be read in comparison with England. The housing market in Scotland on its own is not worth bothering about – only if it is better/worse or the same as south of the border.

There’s another startling example of this cringe in the Scottish media this week. The previous post referred to an item on Radio Scotland earlier this week about the weather. Since then it seems you can barely pick up a paper without hearing the phrase that we have “escaped the worse of the snow.” The Herald was at it again today.

What does this actually mean? It means in large parts of Scotland there wasn’t much snow (although where I live there was plenty). But again this is only deemed important because there was a lot in England.  Just think about this for a minute – whenever there is heavy snow in Scotland, how often do you read pieces in UK papers, saying:  ”England has escaped the worst of the weather.”  The point is as far as they are concerend “the weather” is the weather where they are (not unreasonably).  They would either report a story about heavy snow in Scotland or more likely ignore it.

But here in the North Britain world of too many Scottish journalists, once again the weather is interesting only if it is relative to England.

Where did this demeaning lack of self-confidence come from?

GMS or Today?

Such is the inferiority complex of so many journalists in Scotland that they will treat Good Morning Scotland as if it is some Alan Partridge type community radio station up against the mighty Radio 4 Today.

This says more about their self-loathing than the quality of the respective programmes: if it’s Scottish it must be crap.

That’s not to say that GMS is not without its faults. As a former producer of the programme I was probably personally responsible for quite a few of those.  Since I left, an obsession has developed with conducting pointless “lives” on stories that simply don’t merit inclusion in a national news programme. Last week, there was what seemed like an endless series of interviews  about a school whose pupils were entering a competition to make salads for M and S.   Why?

But when Radio Scotland’s news output really breaks down is when it relies on editorial lines formulated in London. Today was a classic case in point. The news bulletins were running strongly on the line that there was massive snow disruption in England but Scotland had “escaped the worst.” That must have been interesting news to those stuck on the M8 or M77 trying to cope with horrendous driving conditions.  I suspect that this was a cue essentially cut and pasted from London with a Scottish paragraph added in. It seemed a combination of journalistic laziness (not bothering to re-write the top line) and an example of the Scottish cringe – it must be more important if it’s happening in England.

On the whole though, GMS is still the only programme worth listening to if you are actually interested in what is happening in Scotland. Today will have the occasional Jock-slots but you know, and they know , this is out of duty and because they have been told to get out of the M25 by the BBC Trust.

The occasions when GMS is in a genuinely no-win situation is when there is a major UK story or a story for which a UK Cabinet minister is the best interviewee. The story has to be covered but the producers know they are going to get a second division guest. This was the case today when Today interviewed Lord Mandelson about “British jobs for British workers” and GMS wheeled out Brian Wilson. 

Incidentally both John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie are clearly high-quality journalists and broadcasters.  But there is a real element of parody to their performances now. Naughtie’s “message to the nation” style reports on President Obama’s inauguration just seemed at times like a series of lectures, albeit stylishly delivered.

Humphrys’ assaults on politicians now just seem ritualistic. Today he tried to press the Business Secretary on what it must feel like for someone on Tyneside (ie short-hand for working-class, struggling) who fears having their job “nicked” (his words) by someone from, I think, Poland. I understand that he’s only asking questions, but to use that kind of language – the idea that “our” jobs are being stolen by the foreigners is just distasteful.

Oh and by the way – both programmes are doing really well according to the latest RAJARS – so what do I know?