The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  Bienkov’s intervention in the Bullygate crisis was born of a different context and method, however (for a full analysis of Bullygate see chapter 4). The story was away from his regular beat and his blog post about the claims of the National Bullying Helpline was written and published in a couple of hours on a Sunday evening. As I documented in chapter 4, the article emerged from a combination of resources: a skeptical reaction to the BBC News Channel’s reporting of the story, some expertise in online fact-finding, some real-time monitoring of social media for quick feedback, and an assessment of a few tweets and e-mails that arrived from friends and acquaintances urging him to look deeper into the story. Bienkov’s blog condensed and provided some fixity to what had, until then, been a dispersed and fragmented set of messages and counter-messages on Twitter. As he describes it, “I did all of those checks and put it together in a blog post, spent about two or three hours on it, put it onto Twitter and literally within seconds it just went completely crazy. It was retweeted by ten people, then twenty people, then a hundred people.… And what’s interesting about Twitter, my blog was quite a well-known blog, but you can be anybody, you can be a person who’s only written two blog posts, but if you write something that touches a nerve like that it can snowball and before you know it, it gathers its own momentum” (Interview 1, March 2010).

  The morning after his blog post about the bullying helpline, Bienkov was bombarded with e-mails providing tip-offs and urging him to examine the story further. But he chose not to, due to a lack of time and resources. By then, the story had shifted and a new skepticism toward the bullying allegations had spread across broadcasters and the newspapers (Interview 1, March 2010). Bienkov did not have contact with the BBC at the time, but a few weeks later, while attending an event at a central London university, he ended up chatting with a senior BBC journalist, whose name he did not want to divulge to me. He was surprised to hear the journalist say that he “could not believe” that the BBC had run the story without adequate checks and that Bienkov had been “absolutely spot on” with his blog post.

  Bienkov clearly had the resources required to make a powerful intervention in the Bullygate affair. He is a “citizen journalist” of sorts, but one whose norms and practice blur the boundaries between blogger and professional. In turn, professional journalists have been influenced by his norms and practice. This boundary position has also enabled him to play a significant role in the reporting of London politics. Yet this position can be precarious. He is often dependent upon mainstream journalists’ goodwill in linking to his stories, and as a lone individual he does not have the resources required to follow up big stories, even when he has played a pivotal role in bringing them to the attention of a wider public.

  Similar forces are in play with another blog, Left Foot Forward. Established in 2009 by Will Straw, the son of former Labour home office minister Jack Straw, Left Foot Forward is a group blog that quickly grew to have around forty contributors. I interviewed Straw a couple of weeks after the 2010 British general election, a period when he and his fellow writers had emerged as one of the important blogs of the campaign (Interview 10, May 2010). (Straw left the blog to join the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank at the end of 2010.) What I found at Left Foot Forward was an intriguing hybrid. Left Foot Forward is a blog, a think tank, “serious” journalism, activist group, and partisan blog. It aims to mobilize progressive activists, but under Straw’s leadership it has also become partly, though certainly not wholly, integrated into the Westminster lobby and Britain’s national political reporting system.

  Left Foot Forward’s funding model is unusual. Describing himself as one of probably only “a dozen professional bloggers” in Britain, Straw tells me how a small group of wealthy donors paid for his modest part-time salary and a small office in Kennington, just across the River Thames from Westminster. These include YouGov pollster Peter Kellner, former chairman of Green and Black’s chocolate and human rights advocate Henry Tinsley, and millionaire Labour peer Pat Carter. These donations included “a £5000 cheque here, a £10,000 cheque there”; several other individuals established bank standing orders. Two trade unions also provided funding: the communications union Connect and Britain’s largest general union, Unite. Straw also managed to broker occasional advertising deals with broadcaster ITV and left-wing magazine Tribune, as well as event sponsorship from London think thanks like the Smith Institute and the Institute for Public Policy Research. Left Foot Forward encourages individual donations but at the time of the interview only a few thousand pounds had been raised this way. Straw supplements his income by writing the occasional paid article for professional media organizations.

  Left Foot Forward was established with a mission to conduct “evidence-based blogging” with a progressive bent. The meaning of evidence-based blogging is important in understanding the blog’s role in the hybrid media system. Like Adam Bienkov, Will Straw wanted to avoid the blog becoming another outlet for reactive commentary. Instead, he wanted to conduct background news gathering and break the occasional story. But more importantly, he wanted to provide rapid factual rebuttal to stories in Britain’s right-of-center dominated newspaper media, on a daily basis. Key to this aim was presenting Left Foot Forward as legitimately expert enough to meet the norms and expectations of professional media: “something a little bit different, a bit more highbrow, I suppose, a bit more policy-focused, and with a bit more credibility in the policy community,” Straw says (Interview 10, May 2010). Yet despite the blog’s think tank identity it also has strong links with the Labour Party and the trade union movement. Straw speaks of having worked “very closely” with Labour’s communications team to get information about the campaign and material for factual rebuttals during the 2010 general election (Interview 10, May 2010). The Labour press officers send Straw ideas for stories that will benefit the party, especially during periods when the blog is generating interest from big media, as it was during the 2010 election, when “live blogs” on the websites of the Guardian and the Financial Times routinely linked to articles on Left Foot Forward and other blogs. Echoing Adam Bienkov’s notion of “influencing the influencers,” Straw says the Labour headquarters “knew that getting stories up on Left Foot Forward was a good way of getting into wider elite media. I think if we’d had a readership of a couple of thousand a month, and rather less impact, they wouldn’t have bothered.” Straw filters story suggestions on the basis of how well they fit with the blog’s mission of using evidence-based blogging to expose news articles hostile to Labour. During the general election the blog was drawing an audience of ninety-two thousand unique visitors per month; the average is around thirty thousand per month. As a rough comparison, Prospect magazine, whose managing editor I interviewed (see below), has a monthly circulation of around twenty thousand copies. “When the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, talks about us we get a massive spike,” says Straw.

  The Left Foot Forward blog’s visibility has also been enhanced by a number of television and radio appearances by Straw, though these are less than straightforward. The mention of the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones provides a hint. Though Straw made nothing of this, he is often asked to appear on broadcast news packages that are driven by frames about the novelty of the internet and blogging in election campaigns. He is presented as a representative of the online political community. The policy-related stories and statistical rebuttals published by Left Foot Forward are often downgraded in these appearances, as if that is the more serious material that only “proper” and “legitimate” journalism and think-tanks can provide. This is an important aspect of the power relations among political bloggers and professional political journalists in Britain. Straw’s broadcast media appearances often fit a “medium is the message” logic that is part of a process of boundary-drawing by broadcast journalists, as journalists often seek to position online media as intriguing but marginal to the production of political news. The focus is the “whizz-bang” new technolo
gy of blogs and social media in the campaign, not the substance of the blog’s content. As we saw in chapters 5, 6, and 7, these logics have played a role in older media’s representation of internet activism in U.S. presidential campaigns, and in some journalists’ approach to WikiLeaks.

  On the other hand, this framing does not always work. Straw is clearly plugged into London’s networks of professional political journalism; a legacy, he says, of his days as president of the Oxford University Students’ Union and spending a year as a press officer at the Treasury. He describes how he approaches stories that he thinks are most likely to attract journalists’ interest. He e-mails journalists from an extended list. Among the most receptive are Andrew Sparrow, the Guardian’s senior political correspondent; Jim Pickard and Alex Barker, who run the Financial Times Westminster blog; Paul Waugh, once of the Evening Standard but now of the Politics Home website; and Sam Coates, chief political correspondent at the Times. Straw also finds some lobby correspondents to be receptive, particularly Michael Savage at the Independent and Allegra Stratton, then at the Guardian and now a television reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight. In common with most political journalists, when in the office Straw is permanently tuned to the rolling news coverage on television. He monitors this coverage so that he can time his attempts to intervene with Left Foot Forward stories: “I tend to have BBC News and Sky News on all day. So I get a sense of what they’re talking about. If there’s a journalist talking about a particular story and we’ve got a particular angle on it, I might send them a direct message by Twitter or text or an email flagging our particular angle to them … and try and get our stuff out that way” (Interview 10, May 2010).

  Straw clearly interacts with professional journalists but how is he received by them? Like Adam Bienkov’s, the experiences have been broadly positive, but this is not the whole story. Straw recounts examples of friendly journalists who seek information from bloggers, but there have also been episodes of conflict that reveal his relatively precarious structural position in the news-making system. For example, a story he posted in March 2010 about contradictory statements by senior Conservative politicians, including then-party-leader and now prime minister David Cameron, over plans to introduce a banking levy, almost backfired. The editor of the Conservative Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson, wrote an article attacking Straw’s argument, but Nelson’s piece was also framed as a general criticism of poor standards of research among bloggers. Straw responded later in the election campaign by exposing the highly selective statistics behind a Spectator article claiming that “98%” of the new jobs in the British economy since 1997 had gone to “foreigners.” The Daily Mail and the Daily Express had lifted the Spectator story for their front pages and BBC Radio 5 used it as the basis for their popular morning phone-in show. Straw asked two researchers at the Trades Union Congress to examine the data. In fact, the Spectator’s figures were less straightforward than they appeared. It transpired that the story referred to British citizens born abroad as “foreigners,” it did not include workers of pensionable age, and it only included private sector jobs—a point about which the Spectator was clear but the Mail and the Express were not. By lunchtime the same day the Spectator’s editor was forced to issue a clarification on the magazine’s website. “The story died because we killed it,” says Straw.

  This competition and precariousness in the context of integration and interdependence is a thread that runs through even the most successful moments for Left Foot Forward. To take another revealing example, during the 2010 election campaign the blog was the first to break the story of allegedly homophobic remarks made by a Conservative shadow cabinet minister at the time, Julian Lewis, in a speech he delivered at a meeting in his Hampshire constituency of New Forest East. One of the audience, a local student named Andrew Tindall, tweeted that he had “just spent an hour listening to the scaremongering of a corrupt, paranoid homophobe” (Tindall, 2010). Straw picked this up on Twitter and sent a private message to Tindall asking for an e-mail describing the details. Tindall replied and Straw then wrote a story on the basis of Tindall’s account and posted it to the Left Foot Forward blog. As Straw says: “I was the first news outlet, if I can call myself that, to put the quote up” (Interview 10, May 2010). This was, in reality, Straw’s scoop and another example of how fragments of information gathered online can now be integrated into the news-making process. However, professional journalists were soon circling. Michael Savage, the lobby correspondent at the Independent, saw the story on Left Foot Forward and decided to call the candidate Julian Lewis to ask him about his remarks. Lewis responded by sending Savage a letter he had written earlier to a constituent, outlining in more detail his opposition to sixteen as the age of consent for gay men. The following day’s Independent ran with Savage’s story on its front page, but Straw did not get a mention. When asked privately by Straw why this was the case, Savage was apologetic but argued that he did not “need” Straw’s blog post or even the tweet from Andrew Tindall to run the story because he had better evidence in the form of the letter from Julian Lewis himself.

  The Julian Lewis story is revealing in several respects. Left Foot Forward clearly “broke” the story, but in what Straw himself describes as “only a technical sense.” As Straw says: “I don’t think putting up a tweet or a blog post is breaking a story, except in some technical sense … . The point at which it’s broken is by the mainstream media, not the tweet but the whole story.” Professional journalists eager for the latest piece of news during a campaign now see blog stories as fair game, especially when those stories have broken on the basis of publicly available fragments of information found online on social media services such as Twitter or Facebook. There is a residual but still powerful hierarchy of sourcing in political reporting and it relies on the idea that a story is a packaged entity that goes beyond a simple blog post or tweet. In short, even among some bloggers, it is seen as something that can only really be meaningfully produced by a professional journalist.

  Integrating Broadcast and Online

  Bloggers like Adam Bienkov and Will Straw occupy an increasingly important liminal space between the logics of older and newer media in news making, but they move into this space from positions that are formally outside of mainstream media organizations. But how do things look from the perspective of those working within elite broadcast media? I turn now to explore an illuminating example of an attempt by television news journalism to integrate the internet into its practice: Channel 4 News’ FactCheck.

  FactCheck began shortly before the 2005 British general election campaign and was originally inspired by the FactCheck.org website at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Annenberg’s center first came to prominence during the 2004 U.S. elections as a result of its regular debunking of claims made by presidential and congressional candidates. Channel 4 relaunched their own feature as FactCheck with Cathy Newman in time for the 2010 general election, and this time they added a new section of the Channel 4 News website with a blog that allows user comments. Cathy Newman was then a well-known political correspondent for Channel 4 News and she went on to join the studio presenting team.

  During the 2010 election campaign the FactCheck team were responsible for two particularly important news stories. First, in March 2010, then-prime-minister Gordon Brown appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war and claimed that U.K. defense spending had increased in real terms every year under the Labour government. Official Ministry of Defence figures obtained by FactCheck showed this to be untrue. Second, on the day after the election campaign’s first live televised prime ministerial debate on April 15, FactCheck debunked a claim made by David Cameron during the debate that he had visited a police station “the other day” that was about to buy a “£73,000 Lexus” car. It transpired that Cameron’s supposed example of public sector inefficiency was not all that it seemed. FactCheck revealed that he had visited the station eight months earlier and that the car cost closer
to £50,000 ($80,000) (Interview 18, June 2010).

  FactCheck’s rebranding as FactCheck with Cathy Newman is indicative of how it has developed as a hybrid form of political news making, because it positioned a well-known presenter alongside a team of back-room web journalists. As Alice Tarleton, a longstanding member of the FactCheck team told me when I interviewed her in June 2010, the editors “wanted to personalize it a bit more … you’re working with Cathy Newman and it’s in her name and it’s her brand” (Interview 18, June 2010). FactCheck’s significance lies in its hybrid recombination of some totemic practices of television journalism and online journalism. It is best interpreted as a shrewd reaction to the challenge presented by the rapidity and multiplicity of online news. It is about asserting broadcast media’s power to maintain a certain form of investigative reporting, despite the unfavorable context of newsroom cuts. But this has not been achieved by pumping significant financial resources into long-term background investigations. Instead, FactCheck takes accelerated newsgathering and hypercompetition as its starting point, while seeking to position Channel 4’s television news at the center of political information cycles. In one sense, FactCheck is skeptical and investigative reporting of a high standard. But the stories that it produces are usually reactive and they are often researched and written in the space of just a few hours. FactCheck is news designed for broadcast television and yet the stories appear first on the web, most often in the late afternoon. This is based upon a recognition among journalists that such news can often be better presented online, because the genres of television news dictate that stories designed to debunk politicians’ claims with statistical analysis are not likely to work well in the packaged, fast-edited environment of contemporary broadcast news.