FactCheck therefore gets around what “Tony,” a former senior executive at ITN told me was a basic hindrance during broadcast journalism’s adaptation to the web era: “The fact is, broadcasters don’t own many words … there just isn’t enough of it” (Interview 23, July 2010). The BBC, with massive resources at its disposal, solved this problem in the early years by buying in large quantities of textual news agency content that it could place on its website. Then, when online video took off after the emergence of YouTube in 2005, the BBC successfully transposed its power to the new audiovisual web, with the launch of its iPlayer web television platform in December 2007. Lacking the financial underpinnings enjoyed by the BBC, Channel 4 has found other, more sporadic models for integrating the web and television.
FactCheck reports are produced through a process of collaboration involving members of Channel 4’s web and television news teams. This collaboration is signaled symbolically by the way Channel 4 television presenters integrate the stories into their news packages by pointing viewers to the website for more information on a scoop. This practice of highlighting tie-in websites at the end of broadcast news bulletins has of course become extremely common over the last decade, but it is the tightness of the integration between television and the web that makes FactCheck different. Sometimes a FactCheck story will drive an entire package in the news bulletin, but even when it does not, reporters will make a point of mentioning the FactCheck blog in their pieces to camera and news anchors will often mobilize evidence from that day’s FactCheck when they interview government ministers; this happened, for example, when presenter Jon Snow interviewed shadow deputy prime minister Harriet Harman in 2010 (Interview 18, June 2010). Once the live television bulletin has ended, the news editors close the hybrid loop by embedding the television video clip featuring the FactCheck evidence at the foot of the textual online version of the story.
As Alice Tarleton explains, FactCheck is about “having the small scoop” by puncturing the bubble of politicians’ often selective use of statistics. This is achieved by having skilled journalists spend time calling insider sources in government departments and interrogating the data in its raw form, usually in dense official reports from the Treasury, the Office of Budget Responsibility, or the Office for National Statistics (Interview 18, June 2010). Tarleton explains how inserting a small scoop from an online story into a television bulletin extracts the maximum value from a story that might not match the news editor’s idea of an eye-catching television piece:
It can be a tricky thing, because actually with FactCheck you’re often looking at a lot of very detailed, boring tables and trying to make that into an interesting article and then to translate that into interesting TV is another step again. So what makes a good FactCheck may not necessarily make a good package on TV. But then again it might actually make a 30-second segment. Cathy [Newman] may be doing a live piece and may be able to say at the end “and my FactCheck team have also been looking and have found out that the speech I’ve just been telling you about from David Cameron actually contained a big untruth. Here’s the real truth.”
An important function of FactCheck’s website is building momentum on a story as Channel 4 News moves toward its important live early evening television show. Tarleton monitors social media “to gauge reaction to a story through the day,” deliberately targeting bloggers and Twitter users in the hope that they will “do the work” of spreading a story virally in order to build anticipation before the show. The online audience, especially on Twitter, can often provide a boost when an activist community engages with stories that are “about as worthy and number-crunching as we want to get,” she says. Blogs with large readerships, particularly Guido Fawkes, “will often send a decent chunk of readers your way,” she says, though there is an acute awareness that the big blogs are also in the business of breaking “small scoops.” As Tarleton says of a story about the Conservative MP John Bercow’s expenses claims, to which Guido Fawkes beat them:
Once, during the election, I’d spotted an election leaflet that John Bercow had put out which we thought had a slightly dubious expenses claim. Didn’t have time to look at it that day and thought it will keep, we’ll look at this later. But then Guido Fawkes had done a less comprehensive job than we’d done, he’d just kind of flagged it up and said it looked a bit strange. And I think you could then have made the judgement that we could do a more comprehensive job on it. In that case we thought well, he’s got the line on it. He’s done it first so that makes us less keen to do it. You always do want to have things first (Interview 18, June 2010).
Tarleton is also keen to draw boundaries between sourcing stories online and what FactCheck does: “I’d say it all overlaps. But certainly it’s not the case that you just look at Twitter all day rather than doing old-fashioned journalism … For many stories I’d use Twitter to gauge reaction to a story through the day but all of the research is going to be speaking to researchers, speaking to the Treasury, reading official Treasury forecasts, reading research papers that are available online and can be emailed to me … of course that is part of good journalism in general. That does make it important that you have normal press office channels and experts” (Interview 18, June 2010).
If FactCheck constitutes one mode of boundary-blurring between the logics of older and newer media, a different though related mode has emerged at the BBC’s flagship radio news show, the Today program. Kevin Marsh has worked in broadcast journalism for close to forty years and in 2011 he retired as the head of the BBC’s College of Journalism, a role he took on after having worked as editor of Today from 2002 to 2006. During his career, Marsh has edited what are arguably the three most important news shows in post-war British radio—Today, the World at One, and PM. He also had a spell in the 1980s working for ITV’s most important television bulletin, the News at Ten (Interview 27, June 2011).
A central theme in Marsh’s discussion of the rise of online media is how growing torrents of audience feedback have come to shape the style and ethos of the BBC’s approach to political coverage. The rise to ubiquity of e-mail during the 1990s meant that by the time Marsh became editor of Today in 2002 he was receiving around “50,000 emails a year” from listeners who “wanted to push back about stories.” This was before the explosion of user comments on the BBC’s websites, before the launch of the iPlayer online video platform, and before BBC news’ increasing integration with social media during the late 2000s. However, Marsh suggests that the reality of massive audience feedback soon began to affect the culture of the big news shows. Marsh narrates how, during the 1980s and 1990s, the development of a more professionalized approach to media management among politicians, together with a decline in routine parliamentary reporting among elite print and broadcast media, opened up a space for more “serious” political news programs like Today to emerge as the main challengers to official power. By the time of Tony Blair’s election as prime minister in 1997 the political parties and broadcast journalists had arrived at a modus vivendi. On the one hand, there was a recognition among journalists that politicians would attempt to exert as much control as possible over news. On the other hand, reporters and interviewers were now expected to expose attempts to mislead, control, and manipulate the media through the use of new, more aggressive forms of what Marsh terms “on-air interrogation.” This led to the increasingly confrontational style that made BBC presenters like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys household names during the 1980s and 1990s.
Marsh argues, however, that the growth of online news and digital forms of engagement with the public around the basic news product have created the need for gentler and more intelligent “conversational” styles of political journalism. No longer is it about the model presenter as being a “ranting, frothing lunatic … shambling around the ring … looking for the next punch to land” from a position of some professional privilege. Instead, while a new generation of presenters like Evan Davis at Today and Eddie Mair at PM are certainly trying to pre
serve the preeminence of professional journalism at the BBC, not to mention broadcasting’s dominance in the coverage of politics, they also recognize that the public has not been well-served by the older, elite-driven game of confrontation and “attack journalism.” This is by no means a frictionless transition. Marsh mentions how mobilizing audience e-mails as evidence of public sentiment during interviews on Today has often met with resistance from government press officers. And the same experiments also provoke hostility from some presenters who fear that their status as the arbiters of relevant lines of inquiry during interviews is under threat.
Marsh’s is a narrative of the gradual incursion into elite broadcasting’s treatment of politics of some of the norms of informal online media discourse. These new norms privilege conversational styles of expression and a certain communicative egalitarianism. They are based upon the idea of the journalist who speaks from a position of parity with an informed audience rather than as a member of a detached elite that has more in common with the politicians the journalist is supposed to hold to account than the public he or she ought to serve. But at the same time there is a powerful residual norm of professional status and prestige. The norms of online discourse and the mobilization of online opinion are fused with the older, more obviously elitist norms of traditional broadcast journalism at BBC Radio 4. As Marsh says: “It’s still about saying ‘I’m the lucky journalist who has access to this guy. Nobody else has access. I’m the guy who can formulate the questions.’ Not everybody out there would know exactly how to formulate the best questions. So I’ve got these skills that I as a journalist can bring—the patrician approach if you like—the access, the skills, the application, the intelligence to ask the right questions. But I’m also listening to what’s out there.”
Despite the boundary-drawing that rests upon distinctions between the routines of professional journalists, bloggers, and social media audiences, FactCheck is a story of successful integration of the internet and broadcasting, while Today is adapting to the norms and expectations generated by the emergence of online media over the last decade. Experiences in the traditional magazine and newspaper sector are less straightforward, however. My interviews revealed diverse patterns of adaptation, resistance, and renewal.
Adaptation, Resistance, and Renewal in Evolving Newspaper Media
At the time of my interview, James Crabtree was Prospect magazine’s managing editor. I ask him if the web has changed the way the magazine works. Tellingly, he replies, “In a big sense, no, though I probably shouldn’t admit that.” He argues that the monthly magazine sector has largely been insulated from the impact of the web. Yet Prospect runs its own blog, records and publishes its own podcasts, and regularly offers unpaid online versions of articles that appear in its print edition; hybrid media in action. However, Crabtree still draws what he sees as a clear boundary between Prospect’s “more considered, long-form” journalism and what he calls the “what’s-new-in-the-last-ten-minutes” political journalism that was pioneered by Politico in the United States and now finds its equivalent in Britain in sites like Politics Home (Interview 7, April 2010).
“Frank” is a senior journalist at the Independent whose role involves integrating a digital strategy into the paper’s daily practice (Interview 5, April 2010). During a long interview he tells me in some detail about the realities of working inside a resource-starved newsroom that was forced to adapt to the rise of hypercompetition in online news. The Independent went through a period of deep cuts in the late 2000s, including a 25 percent staff reduction in early 2009. Frank tells amusing folklore tales of older journalists who are used to the pre-CNN and pre-internet rhythms of the newsroom and who “bugger off and come back at about four o’clock with purple lips” after having had a “couple of bottles of red.” It has taken such characters a “while to settle down to the ‘and where are your other four stories today?’ process that we’re up against,” Frank says.
Frank speaks of resistance among all journalists, even the new recruits, to writing stories for the web. In 2010, unlike other British papers, particularly the Guardian and the Telegraph, the Independent had still not moved to an integrated print-and-web newsroom. There are still entrenched divisions between the paper’s web operation and its print edition. Powerful norms of resistance to the culture of online news have been established. In time-honored traditions of the pre-digital era, even when stories break early in the day, some journalists will deliberately hold copy back until around six o’clock in the evening, in the hope of catching the editor’s eye with a story as the print edition is being finalized and the British online audience have gone home for the evening. The attitude is “well, there’s not much point in me doing this, because it will never get in the paper, so I won’t do it at all … Some people would just blatantly and unashamedly ignore it and refuse to deal with it,” Frank says. Senior journalists still want a “front-page splash” and will resist “top of the website,” which they see as second-best. Even in papers where the distinction between web and print journalists is not formalized, Frank speaks of an informal hierarchy of medium that remains particularly strong in political reporting. He also reports editorial apathy about the website, manifested in senior staff “never speaking” about the site and asking for a story to be removed “only once” (Interview 5, April 2010).
Even though the audience for the Independent website far exceeds that for the print edition, the fragmented nature of audience attention in the online realm weakens further the internal argument for publishing on the web. Frank makes a great deal of the “granular” nature of online news. The assumption among editors specializing in digital news is that individuals are much more likely to arrive on the website from a Google search or by clicking through from Twitter or Facebook or a news aggregator like Google News or Reddit. When the “average number of pages per user per month is only eleven” and when “most people will read only one story per month and they’ve got that through search” and they will probably “have read about it yesterday on the BBC website anyway,” reader loyalty is not convincing as an argument about the importance of blogging and publishing stories to the web among a community of already skeptical professional newspaper journalists. This context explains why the paper tends to populate a good proportion of its website with unchanged news agency stories from PA, for fear of diluting its print edition. Not only are PA stories already sub-edited for clarity, they have also been pre-screened for potential legal complaints. Each day, the aim is to start replacing PA stories with those written by in-house reporters as the paper moves toward its print deadline in the late afternoon, but some columnists resist the “web-first” approach and want to see their stories debut in print. Frank suggests that a lack of staff time at the Independent means that resources for sub-editing and legal checks are both stretched. Ironically, digital technologies make it much easier to integrate agency stories and stock images and make them look like they are the product of your own reporters, but as Frank jokes, “with no journalists, a fairly limited PA feed, and a bunch of pictures off Getty, it’s a bit like one of those funny cookery programs: you’ve got a pepper, you’ve got a potato, and an orange—make something out of that. There’s a fairly limited amount of recipes you can concoct … ” (Interview 5, April 2010).
Agency content on the newspaper website stands in stark contrast with the commentary and campaigning stories which usually break in the print edition and for which the Independent has become well known. When it comes to basic reporting, however, the picture presented by Frank is bleak, especially in areas like foreign news. There is gallows humor. For example, the paper’s “one bloke in America” covered the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake but also Hollywood. “He flies in from Haiti, a major disaster, to the red carpet … so in the morning it’s death, disaster, and pulling bodies out of rubble, and then he’s brushing the dust off himself and trying to do the Oscars. Nobody can sustain that. It’s just putting people in stupid positions … ”
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br /> I move from the Independent to the Guardian, where things are different. The organization began its transition to a “web-first” approach to publishing in the mid-2000s and this accelerated under the force of editor Alan Rusbridger’s “digital first” announcement in 2011. From 2007 to 2008 the Guardian’s print and online editions became much more closely integrated and it became the norm to publish important stories and break news to the web in order to compete with other media organizations, including the television news channels. The Guardian now effectively runs a global twenty-four-hour news desk for at least five days a week, made possible by editorial staff based in America and Australia. As “Carol,” a young member of the senior editorial team at the paper summarizes: “We went from having a web desk and a paper desk that had no interaction, to having an integrated desk which had a small proportion of people working on more web-focused stuff, with a majority of news editors still working on the paper. Now we’re in a situation where there are still specialists dealing with each platform but the desk as a whole is just creating content and more and more of that is being focused on the website than on the paper” (Interview 30, September 2011).
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