The climate of complacency; this is something I’d be intrigued in hearing you elaborate on from your perceptions Willy. You may wish to watch this excellent lecture too:

Guardian journalist Nick Davies speaks eclectic about British print journalism’s decline.

It’s an hour long lecture in a single Youtube video, but Nick is quite a good speaker; active and enthused. Keeps attention better than bore orators where it’s more endurance and thinking about what’s for dinner the forthcoming evening.

If by ‘we’ you mean journalism in general then no we aren’t to settle on that because there will always be quality. Look at the News of the World wiretapping; that needed some old fashioned journalism to uncover. Allegedly we’d an editor trying to get a cheap scoop by illegally hacking phones – this just cropped up on the BBC and national news the past couple of days.

Romantically you might intone ‘that’s good journalism fighting the bad practice!’ – However if you look at the numbers involved in uncovering the supposed illegal practice…there were just a few people. A handful in an industry which employs well over 100,000 fixed rate plus freelancers, paparazzo etc. Almost all salaried journos just didn’t cover it or even express concern.

But if you mean ‘we’ as in the ideological minority who say ‘well quality journalism takes time, effort, resources…and whilst it isn’t as profitable as Jade Goody or reality TV it’s valuable for whole other reasons.’ – The very best in old school digging has changed the world; Watergate, The Times’ Insight team in their 1960s-70s heyday, countless worldwide scoops on corrupt public figures.

If by ‘deaf ears’ you mean the public that consumes – don’t expect them to start lecturing us en masse. They are largely anonymous consumers, with a minority writing in letters or phoning up to say ‘hey I like…’ or ‘hey this is wrong…’ – So it’s an assertion to say they’re deaf. They aren’t.

The truth in this is accentuated by how much circulations have fallen – people are voting with their wallet and just not buying paper’s. One can do a simple Google search to see that right across all the national newspapers (and most local rags) circulations are falling. People go online as it’s easy and one can better pick articles of interest…be it the 300 word BBC.co.uk summaries or the at-length financial analysis at FT.com .

People aren’t idiots; when they read or hear something they do appreciate it and feel it valuable – moreso than a garden variety bit of celeb gossip. I did a historical photoessay over at the community website Blog Preston that was published last week – the praise you get makes you think ‘well more than just people I know via Twitter must appreciate this!’

Pete, editor at Dirty Garnet.

That being said, even then the headlines were extracted from much larger sources. That doesn’t make the news less newsworthy. With nearly everyone traveling the information highway we can’t help but be beset with repetition.

The most pressing question is how to be a respected journalist within a climate of complacency. How do we answer our calling if our voices are falling on deaf ears?

Are we to settle on the Jane Goody and Dancing with the Stars revelations or can we still be a strong force in the culture of instant gratification?

“There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance” – Ali bin Abu-Talib

What the papers produce is inferior, and many in the trade know it. For instance; consider all that strife that goes on in Africa week-to-week, and also optimistically all the attempts at improvement. To report on that is expensive as you need at least one staff member over there, it will take time, and associated expenses like an intepreter and so on may be necessary too. It is thus almost entirely a realm covered by TV news which is often edited and obviously has to cram itself into slots of 5-15 minutes. So it’s principle over money.

Instead we have fascination over Jade Goody or Andre/Price or the Millenium Bug; all of which tell us nothing about anything tangible. None of it matters in the principled, quality sense. Compare the magnitude of British reportage on the 1994 Rwandan genocide to the magnitude of reportage of Jade Goody’s cancer, wedding, and death. One woman died. 800,000 and more died in the other event…the levels of coverage here was actually greater for the ‘heroic’ Jade, and persisted much longer. If you asked a people about the 1994 genocide now they’d mightn’t even know about it – likely far less than know who Jade was. Something’s going wrong wouldn’t you say?

You’ve news where tens of thousands a day die, and news where one psuedoceleb person perishes after several months, accompanied to the emotional chorus of journalists posturing themselves as caring when infact they don’t give one chunk of chicken turd. You can cherry pick examples everywhere over how journalism blindly approaches the cheap and easy to report to the neglect of things of greater importance domestically and abroad…

But then you realize there are hundreds, thousands of instances of it in recent times. It is why we know more on Africa from Bob ‘Effin” Geldof than people whose job it is to inform us about things. So you’re not cherry picking at all, you’re just fishing in abundant waters for a member of the common species that point to the number one rule: Cheap, easy churnalist crap.

If that’s ‘economic efficiency’; diverting much-needed funds for good stuff to corporation owners/directors/chief editors pockets to detriment of fine and truthful news, then frankly that is a crock that needs to be curbed or our ‘profession’ will not survive as we know it.

-Pete @ dirtygarnet.com

Surveys can give a bit of indication of this or that; often they are mere corporate astrology where it means something to whoever happens to be intepreting it. If you’re conducting a survey and want something concise, concrete and definite out of it then you are deluded all of the time when it comes to media.

I mean think about it: People who read news don’t often contemplate the principles behind it – they haven’t formed a composite, organized opinion on what’s good and bad, what should happen what shouldn’t etc. So when they get this survey saying ‘Hey what you do you think should go in our mag?” – more often they’ll ummm and ahhh a bit then just put something general they like in that might not have much thought behind it.

When I was young, I loved the principles behind journalism – the idea of going out and exposing some hypocrite or liar for what they were seemed romantic and worthwhile. Or doing a piece with substance and meaning to people reading: That’s a tall goal to shoot for today – and if you say to a local or national sub/editor ‘Listen I need time to get this up to scratch’ they’ll get a disgruntled half the time and can even deny to publish it due to ‘deadlines’.

Content is king. You wouldn’t buy a dodgy product in any other field so why settle for cannibilized subpar pseudo-news and glossed up crap? The pigheadedness obstinacy of the trade in favouring quantity over quality is what really makes me dismayed. OK I can still do good work, but it shouldn’t be hard to sell it simply because I ask for more per article & photo over what some office hack can put together off the PA wire in two hours which appears in a dozen other places.

-Pete @ dirtygarnet.com