In this perspective, sourcing properly and not following the online “herd” is a key aspect of what defines professional journalism. Here, the traditions of the lobby emerge as an important bulwark against what Stringer describes as “a huge cluster of new noise that may or may not be useful to journalists and may not be instructive.” The agency model and the lobby are thus mobilized as a way of articulating an argument about older media standards in the digital era.
Yet lobby reporters are still compelled to compete with each other to be the first to frame an unfolding story and to reveal important breakthroughs as a story develops. As I argued throughout this book, preemption has become an important aspect of exercising power in the hybrid media system, as the temporal rhythms of the fast-moving online environment have been adapted and adopted by traditionally “slower” media forms, particularly print media. I ask Stringer if he sees it as important to use online tools to try to frame stories early in the day, as some television and radio reporters now do, to preempt their own scoops with blog posts and Twitter updates that come before their appearances in a news bulletin. He talks about the peculiarities of putting out in the open what was previously a relatively private process “between a reporter and his notepad” or in the journalists’ “huddle at the end of a big speech.” He also suggests that there are commercial pressures that compel elite media organizations to compete across all platforms and that having senior reporters blogging and tweeting is as much about “getting value for money” from a big-name reporter as it is about attempting to seize a story early in the day. The point, though, is that these two aims—preemption and getting value for money from journalism brands—are interconnected. But above all, for Stringer it is broadcast media that are still the most powerful in political reporting. Interviews on BBC Radio 4’s morning Today program often dictate the news agenda across all media during the rest of the morning, and Today is joined soon after by the rolling television news channels, he says. Of the latter he adds: “Their influence is absolutely huge. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s dictating the news agenda, but it’s not far off it. There is a sense now, and particularly for journalists and people working in newsrooms, who invariably have multiple news channels on and dozens of TVs in their office, when there is a breaking news flash across Sky News or the BBC News channel there is a scramble.”
At the same time, Stringer mentions that in his experience there are always examples that contradict the power of broadcasters. Bloggers may post “something salacious” that gets followed up by professional journalists. And in any case, as I will demonstrate when I discuss the Guardian later, “print” media and the wire organizations are using digital tools to enable them to compete with television in new ways, and very much on television’s own turf as the preeminent real-time medium. Stringer has integrated social media into his routines and in AP he works for a company that requires journalists to extend their repertoires, to provide what he describes as “the whole works.” “I don’t feel personally threatened,” he says, “because my company is using these platforms. During the [2009] Copenhagen climate talks, we had people blogging. Our reporters, in addition to their normal duties, were posting pictures, doing blog posts on Facebook, Twitter updates, the whole works. We worked across that whole range. You see that with dozens of traditional news outlets.” (Interview 25, October 2010). There is a recognition among journalists, he says, that “we’re not the only dog in the race … Members of the public can see the process of stories develop in a way they never could before … You can see the workings. Perhaps that’s a good thing.”
The sense that it was when the internet became an important real-time medium that its role in shaping political news became more powerful is borne out strongly in my interview with BBC News political correspondent, now (in 2017) BBC News political editor Laura Kuenssberg. Kuenssberg describes the transition from a time in the early 2000s when the online environment was essentially oriented around retrieving information, to the mid-2000s when the expectation emerged that television reporters should write companion pieces for the BBC website, to the “complete transformation” of the last two years and “the kind of journalism where essentially you’re filing stories all the time” (Interview 31, January 2012). In contrast with David Stringer, Kuenssberg is more forthright about how print and broadcast journalists have adapted to the digital environment and how they now see these tools as an important part of their attempts to be first to frame the news agenda. Broadcast journalists can now break stories “off air” through blog posts and Twitter updates and, as Kuenssberg says, “you get credit for your story.” This is in contrast with the older temporal logics of “the papers,” where “the instinct is you save it for the splash” and older broadcasting logics, where the tradition was that you work toward the flagship evening bulletins: “you get as many goodies as you can and you keep them for the time when you’re going to have the most eyeballs on them.” This older temporality made sense in the days of media scarcity, but for Kuenssberg this is “fading away very, very fast because news cycles have sped up. People don’t wait for their news, so it doesn’t make sense any more to make your stories wait.”
Kuenssberg argues that, contrary to many predictions, broadcast journalism has resisted becoming the hapless victim of online competition from bloggers and online news sites and she believes that political bloggers like Guido Fawkes are now essentially a part of the Westminster bubble and not the radical upstarts that they once were. And at the same time she says the “main players have moved online in a very healthy, big, serious way.” Indeed, if anything, the internet is allowing broadcast journalists to further enhance their personal brands. In 2011, Kuenssberg left BBC News for its old television rival, ITV News (she returned to the BBC in 2015). When she decided to change her Twitter username from @BBCLauraK to @ITVLauraK, she instantly took her 59,000 followers with her to her new job at ITV. The episode caused a mini-storm, as journalists speculated on what this meant for the independence and power of those reporters who have been able to build big personal brands online. Kuenssberg says that the move was “genuinely very amicable” and that she “took a risk” that people would stop following her account. However, she also reveals that the reputational damage to the BBC would have been potentially quite significant had the organization decided to try to force her to switch accounts and start afresh at ITV without her follower base.
With Kuenssberg, there is a sense that despite elite broadcast media’s uniquely privileged position in reporting political news, particularly its huge audiences, the trappings of the broadcast environment can be inhibiting for journalists. She speaks of having witnessed the freedom that Twitter provided to reporters during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and of enjoying the ability to “just file” without needing a satellite link or camera operator. This idea of an individual reporter having the freedom to post immediately to the internet without the usual collective editorial processes that shape broadcast news caused some initial “nervousness” at the BBC when she asked for permission to start tweeting as part of her daily routine. Kuenssberg says it “took a few months” for a paper she wrote for the BBC news board to be approved after the BBC news managers “had to sit down and think quite seriously about what it was going to do on that new platform.”
Kuenssberg decided early on to be highly strategic about her use of Twitter. She integrates it into her real-time television reporting routines, focuses on breaking new information, adding color to evolving stories, and layering-in details (though “not gossip” or anything “personal”) that will never find a way into the television bulletins. She recounts the story of when she tweeted from backstage at the Labour Party conference that Lord Mandelson had lost his security pass and had been refused entry because the police officers did not recognize the former cabinet minister. In this sense, Twitter is seen as something like a public version of mobile text messaging, which Kuenssberg says has been crucial for Westminster journalism for more than
a decade: “I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody texted me while I was on air and I would look down and read it—not read it out—but that would then inform what I was then saying” (Interview 31, January 2012). Still, fitting digital media into the rhythms of rolling television news is what is most important for Kuenssberg. As I have argued at several points throughout this book, television and the internet now share family resemblances as real-time monitorial media. Kuenssberg reports with some enthusiasm how the 2010 general election was a “TV election” dominated by the televised leader’s debates and the live reporting of Gordon Brown’s off-camera remarks after his troubled encounter on the streets of Rochdale with disenchanted Labour voter, Gillian Duffy.
Twitter also fits with an approach to political journalism that is quite distinctive in its emphasis on pulling back the curtain on the hidden world of the lobby. As we saw in chapter 4, Kuenssberg tweeted from behind the scenes in the “spin room” during Britain’s first televised prime ministerial debates in 2010. These fragments of the backstage processes of negotiation that take place among politicians, their communications staff, and elite journalists were an important part of the hybrid mediated experience of the debates. Kuenssberg says that she has never treated the lobby as a secret realm that ought to be protected and instead sees it as the journalists’ duty to “bust the doors open and tell people as much as you possibly can.”
At the same time, Like David Stringer, Kuenssberg also discerns the rise of a new approach to digital media among politicians and spin doctors: a diminishing fear of losing control of the online political space and a growing confidence in using social media to bypass professional journalism. Those running for high office must still put themselves up for scrutiny in broadcast media, but they now also have vast swathes of the media system—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, direct e-mails, their own websites—that are relatively free from these traditional constraints, though not from citizen monitoring. Kuenssberg is quick to defend the standards of professional journalism and the importance of television media in holding politicians to account. While she suggests that journalists should move away from the role of gatekeeper and try to become online “curators” that assemble news as part of an ongoing process throughout the day, she contextualizes this with reference to the “avalanche of information” that must now be effectively filtered. As such, curation is here still very much a professional role requiring skill and knowledge, a role that is mostly seen as the preserve of journalists. This is therefore an assertion of the power and identity of broadcast journalism in the context of an abundance of information and a perceived scarcity of attention and skills among the broader public.
Occupying Boundaries Between “Professional” Journalism and “Amateur” Blogging
In chapter 4 I discussed the hybrid news-making assemblages during Britain’s Bullygate scandal of 2010, which centered on allegations that Gordon Brown had mistreated staff working inside Downing Street. Recall that a key actor in that episode was London-based blogger Adam Bienkov. From 2008, Bienkov published at blogger.com under the title Tory Troll. It was Bienkov who responded decisively to one of the key turning points in Bullygate: the BBC News channel’s report that staff in the prime minister’s office had allegedly called a bullying charity “helpline” to complain about their treatment. Within a few hours, Bienkov posted what turned out to be an explosive late-night article to his blog revealing the dubious credentials of this bullying “helpline.” By the following morning the bullying claims were well on the way to being discredited. About a month after Bullygate, I interviewed Bienkov about his role in the affair, but I also wanted to learn more generally about his practices as a blogger, his interactions with politicians and professional journalists, and how he positions his work in the context of the broader media system (Interview 1, March 2010). The interview proved highly revealing. The norms by which Bienkov operates situate his practice in a liminal space at the boundary of professional journalism and amateur blogging.
Bienkov’s Tory Troll blog was established during the Spring of 2008 and focused on London Assembly politics in the run-up to the city’s third mayoral election. In that campaign, London’s daily paper, the Evening Standard, favored the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson and it ran a particularly hostile campaign against incumbent Labour mayor, Ken Livingstone. This spurred left-of-center activists to think about establishing an alternative voice online. Tory Troll and another blog, Mayorwatch, were the products of this context and, following Boris Johnson’s election as mayor, Bienkov went on to establish himself as an independent source of news about London politics.
Bienkov’s approach is striking in its fusion of the genres and norms of blogging—independence, irreverence, and narrowly focused content—with those of professional journalism: the importance of breaking stories, attention to sourcing, and writing in a broadly accessible, at times almost tabloid style. When he started the blog, Bienkov deliberately sought to avoid becoming another commentary blog—there were already many of those in British politics. Instead, he decided he would try to write original stories and break news. “If you want to break through and get your stories into the news,” he says, “you need to be breaking something that is new, not just saying ‘this is my opinion about X’ … You’ll never get noticed.” This was easier to achieve in what was effectively a new and rapidly evolving political system that emerged in the aftermath of the capital’s first few mayoral elections. It soon became clear that reporting on the London Assembly was not going to run on the same lines as the tightly controlled lobby system that operates at the Westminster parliament. As a result, Bienkov was able to make an impact inside the bureaucracy and build up networks of contacts. Relations of journalist–source reciprocity emerged. As London Assembly members and their press officers and civil servants started to notice Bienkov’s blog posts they sensed that he might play a role in shaping the news. They began to feed him information. A division of labor of sorts has emerged. Press officers are more likely to send him the detailed policy documents that professional journalists might ignore, but they do so in the hope of indirectly catching the eye of professional media: “They read the blog, they know that when I write stories there’s a chance it will be picked up by the Evening Standard or by the BBC, whereas if they’d sent a link to a 20-page document to a time-strapped journalist at the BBC they probably wouldn’t have had the time or the interest to look into it,” he says (Interview 1, March 2010).
While it might not always be possible, breaking news is seen as central to “getting noticed” by professional news organizations. This logic is what drives Tory Troll and is key to its integration into the hybrid media system. It results in regular interactions between Bienkov the blogger and sources inside City Hall, as well as professional journalists at the BBC, the Guardian, and the Evening Standard. Bienkov speaks highly of journalists at the Guardian who will often link to his stories and give credit, and of some broadcast journalists whom he says “sometimes tip [him] off about things.” He goes on: “Through doing the blog I’ve built up relationships with them and I pass them stories, they pass me stories, so it’s not so much the direct influence that it has on the public, it’s the influence it has on the people in the mainstream media who then bring it to a wider audience” (Interview 1, March 2010). “Influencing the influencers” is how Bienkov describes it. For example, a story he posted to the blog after he issued a Freedom of Information Request to the mayor’s office asking for details of letters sent by Prince Charles to Boris Johnson was picked up and splashed across the front page of the Evening Standard, complete with a quote from Bienkov. Elsewhere, norms of credit-giving among professional journalists are less clear, though Bienkov is also quick to suggest that “it’s got a lot better” recently (Interview 1, March 2010). Bloggers, then, are influenced by some of the norms of professional journalism, but some of the norms of blogging have also started to move in the other direction, and now influence professional journalism.
Credit-giving is one example of this process of norm diffusion, as bloggers are presented here as the savior of journalistic standards:
That’s something that the blogosphere has changed. It’s brought this new culture of openness, of giving credit for stories, of backing up your stories with documents, of linking to your sources, and blogs get a lot of criticism from some journalists, who say “they can just say what they like, they don’t have to back it up with facts.” In a lot of cases, I think the opposite is true. A lot of newspapers don’t back up their facts, they don’t link to documents, they cherry pick quotes from them without you being able to see the original source. And when they get things wrong, often it never gets corrected … In some ways I think blogs are improving the behavior of journalists (Interview 1, March 2010).
Bienkov goes along to public committee meetings at City Hall, only to find that journalists stay away from all but the monthly mayor’s question time. He downloads long policy documents from the Greater London Authority website and pores over the details, hoping to pick up stories that professional journalists do not have the time to gather. Paradoxically, he marks the distinctions between himself and professionals by trying to uphold what he considers to be older, “proper” values of journalism that he thinks have been lost as a result of commercial pressures in newsrooms. He fills the gaps now left by the mainstream: “It’s what journalism used to be before the big cutbacks at newspapers, before journalists got tied to their desks as they do these days. It’s just simply because I’ve got the time to do it, I guess, whereas they’ve got to turn over five stories a day or whatever. They haven’t got time to get down there, whereas bloggers can do that” (Interview 1, March 2010). Trained as a journalist at a local vocational college, Bienkov earns income from a mixture of paid shorthand work, freelancing, and helping out with local news websites in southeast London. Some of his freelance pieces are for the Guardian’s network, Comment Is Free, which is a hybrid that brings together professional journalists from the paper with a distributed network of thousands of part-time contributors. This serves to further integrate his practice into the system of professional news media, though in a way that still distances him and other bloggers from the authentically “professional.” Blogging is seen here as a way of getting a paid job in professional journalism, but on one’s own terms, unlike the classic trainee route. While Bienkov admits that most of his research takes place online, he adheres to the professional norms and routines of news-gathering in more traditional journalism. He has a beat and he usually sticks to it. The sources on his beat provide him, through face-to-face meetings or e-mail tip-offs, with the best stories, because these are people to whom he can sometimes gain exclusive access.
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