How have cuts within the industry, the decline of newspapers and the turn to online news impacted the quality of reporting? What role have the news and social media played in recent political events? And how can journalism maintain its integrity in a time when unverified information circulates on social media under the guise of ‘news’?

Readers across the political spectrum are calling for new standards of accuracy and impartiality. In a new series of exclusive talks hosted by journalist Roy Greenslade, we are bringing together today’s leading news editors to discuss editorial policies and press freedom in an era of polarising politics.

Speakers:

Roy Greenslade is one of Britain’s foremost media teachers. He is a leading commentator and columnist on the media, and currently blogs for The Guardian. As a journalist he rose to the highest levels of management in a career taking in The Sun, the Sunday Times, and culminating in the editorship of the Daily Mirror.

Emma Tucker is Deputy Editor of The Times. Emma joined The Times from the Financial Times where she started her career as a graduate trainee eventually becoming Editor of the Weekend FT. During her career with the FT, Emma spent four years as UK Economics Reporter before moving to Brussels in order to cover the European Union.

With journalism as a profession undergoing an intense period of upheaval and self-reflection, Grapevine Events, in conjunction with the Frontline Club, brought together some of the industry’s most prominent editors on Thursday 11 September to discuss the major issues affecting journalism today.

Bringing out the big guns @amolrajan @AlexGAMiller @emmatimes2 #ftf Ian Hislop's looking for more @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/VHe638Cvgi

— Rebecca Choong Wilkins 钟碧琪 (@RChoongWilkins) September 11, 2014

Asking the panel what preoccupied them each morning, former deputy editor of The Times and chair George Brock remarked that what remained central to an editor seemed as true today as it was 30 years ago.

Emma Tucker, deputy editor of The Times, spoke of her desire to continually come up with the story that would “make a difference” whilst focusing on maintaining and expanding readership.

“In this noise, ultimately what makes people read you is good, original journalism that impacts people.”

For both Amol Rajan, editor of The Independent and Alex Miller, editor-in-chief of VICE, despite the emergence of new news formats, what drives any news organisation remains fundamentally “timeless”, as Brock put it, with the success of any story based primarily on the brilliance and commitment of the journalist who produces it.

With traditional news titles seen as occupying a difficult position inside–outside the establishment, Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, challenged that while journalists are often perceived as part of the old boys’ club, and by extension any way into the profession is one based on patronage, this proximity was ultimately the necessary price paid for access.

“What we try to do is say: we know how this works, we know the people who are there, let’s tell the truth . . . and the more people you know the more people who tell you things.”

“That being said,” commented Miller, “the only reason I am on this panel, is precisely because we [at VICE] have made the most of being entirely outside the establishment. Going and doing stuff that grey guys from BBC and ITV and Channel 4 have been doing for a very long time but changing it and presenting it on new media, in a slightly different tone. It’s made people pay attention – which really is the benefit of being an outsider.”

Elaborating on how the tone of emerging news outlets, such as VICE, had attracted and engaged a new demographic, Miller spoke of challenging “a collective decision that news was the preserve of a certain type of person, who wore certain type of clothes and who spoke in a certain type of way”.

“I think by just presenting news as you would have a conversation with a friend has actually managed to break down more barriers that we ever thought we would and at the same time disprove some bullshit that the establishment had all collectively agreed that young people didn’t give a crap about what happened outside their own lives.”

Moving from journalism as part of the establishment to establishing a community of readers, there was a general agreement amongst the panel that news was a product which should ultimately be paid for in some form (as it has always traditionally been).

While for Tucker and The Times paywall model, the concept of readers has now literally shifted to a point where “we don’t have readers anymore . . . we have members”. For Rajan, the “nostalgia around the history of Fleet Street” and specifically the role of local newspapers in the community belies the changing nature of the way people identify and define themselves as consumers of news.

“In the digital age there is a kind of unbundling. Now people are promiscuous buyers [whereas once you would have people loyal to one title]. The idea behind membership is to try to rebuild that attachment to a particular institution.

“Possibly the most viable future for most newspapers to go down is the model where you pay online, because actually one way of creating membership is to create customers and if you get people to pay for what you do, you create a sense of engagement and commitment.”

Until people restore the link between quality journalism and paying for it, Rajan continued, that sense of community is going to be fractured. If you are a company which is ultimately trying to hit the bottom line you need to establish a bond between customers and product.

Amol Rajan: 'There is no editorial solution to the commercial problems of papers' #ftf @frontlineclub

— Harriet Line (@HarriLine) September 11, 2014

For Hislop, the very act of buying a copy of Private Eye is like belonging to a club.

“Eye readers are a people with a particular attitude and a particular desire and I like the idea of them. I think they form their own club.”

However, while Miller agreed that creating a community was important, the debate within traditional news organisations into how best build this community is ultimately outmoded. “The internet does that on its own.”

Alex Hern of The Guardian commented that these technological advancements, which have so disrupted the practice and organisation of journalism, have also shifted the way in which we communicate.

“It is really important to remember that our generation is the first one ever where writing and the written word has been the primary way of communicating. We are more comfortable than ever before expressing ourselves, not just in considered journalism, but in every register of written language.”

Surely a development which can ultimately only benefit journalism and the industry.

Dan Knowles, Nicola Hughes and Michael Blastland discuss data journalism

Blastland, along with fellow data journalists Mona Chalabi of The Guardian’s Datablog, Dan Knowles of The Economist and Nicola Hughes of The Times, chaired by Conrad Quilty-Harper of Ampp3d and formerly The Telegraph, had been brought together by Grapevine to give aspiring journalists an insight into the industry. The evening was a follow up on the organisation’s first event in April 2013 which brought together the country’s top student newspapers.

Read highlights of the second panel discussion here.

It's a full house #fbj pic.twitter.com/QeLUOOZdNz

— Max Benwell (@Max_Benwell) January 23, 2014

Quilty-Harper started the discussion by asking Blastland how data journalism had changed since he published his book The Tiger That Isn’t in 2008.

Blastland:

“The origin of the data does get better, we have a lot more people watching it for a start…[but] there’s huge amounts of uncertainty in recording numbers, there’s great difficulty in the interpretation numbers that go up and down all the time…there’s a lot of data.”

Hughes said that part of a data person’s job is trying to find out where problems can arise and to be constantly asking questions.

“A data person would be able to see whether the numbers are telling the truth or has an agenda. It’s about really understanding the integrity.”

http://twitter.com/bspeed8/status/426445622871605248

Knowles said that a lot of his job is looking at data, which has already been told, and debunking it:

“Mostly it’s just how do you get past the headline statistic and digging through spread sheets and finding a trend that nobody’s spotted… You have to self police and make sure that something that looks brilliant and gives you a fantastic statistic isn’t actually a blip.”

Quilty-Harper added:

“Interrogating the data is an intrinsically journalistic activity. You’re checking verifying, finding out whether it’s true essentially.”

Chabali said that the key to data journalism is going deeper into the story than just the data and interviewing people on the ground:

“They provide us with the backstory of the ‘why’ because so much of what we do is just describing ‘what’.”

http://twitter.com/kathryn42/status/426451235781488640

Knowles added:

“You have to combine it with interviews, it’s not enough to have a spread sheet and go ‘oh this is really interesting’… you have to start with the spread sheet but…then you go visit somewhere and you interview people and then you write the story.”

Oliver Franklin of GQ in the audience asked how has the Internet and social media changed the representation of data?

There are many more ways to tell it Knowles replied:

“The freedom of the internet is that you have an unlimited amount of space. You can have this story told through data visually as well as the text underneath it.”

But with so many ways of representing the data do all journalists need to be able to handle data to some degree?

Hughes:

“What you need is more data journalists to let you deal with the raw ingredients and not wait for the press release or the end result statistics…what they’re [organisations] doing now is they’re releasing the data raw… saying ‘we’ve done what we said we’d do we’re not hiding anything’. The problem previously was access to the data, now it’s too much data.”

The initial problem was that data was inaccessible, now it's that it's overwhelming. #fbj

— Hari Sethi (@Hari_Sethi) January 23, 2014

http://twitter.com/MirrenGidda/status/426450151918813184

Quilty-Harper ended by asking the panel, what are their dos and don’ts for those wanting to get into data journalism?

Chabalis:

Do have an instinct to not merely describe – also analyse why.
Don’t be afraid of being able to master different things, you can’t just be a good writer, you can’t just be familiar with spread sheets, you need to know the basics of coding, you need to know several different tools (or know someone who does).
Do not be arrogant – not only checking other people but check yourself.

Knowles:

Learn to use the ONS (Office for National Statistics) website – that will give you an advantage.
Learn how to find statistics quickly.
Learn how to pick a statistic that’s valid and that can debunk or prove a story.

Hughes:

Do not feel you need to be taught something to be able to do it, do not rely on anyone else to teach you – Google it. There are so many free resources.

Blastland:

“Don’t be seduced by the glamour of exciting flashy stuff, remember that you can produce rubbish very easily and seductively with all those techniques. If you do not have the skills of statistical inference to make sure that you are saying something legitimate, all the rest is rubbish. Exciting rubbish.”

Following the success of their events, Grapevine are launching a data-focused site in the coming months. Get in touch with Harry Lambert (@harrylambert1), Max Benwell (@maxbenwellreal) or Rebecca Choong Wilkins at contact@grapevinevents.co.uk.

Watch and listen back:

A reception and two discussions about the future of British journalism was held at the Fronline Club on April 17, 2013.

Sam Coates, Banking Editor at The Times, hosted the first panel of young journalists and addressed the audience of representatives of 35 of the country’s best student papers:

“I wanna give you a flavour about what is brilliant about journalism. About why it is the best job. It’s a job that my friends now are jealous of.”

Joshi Herrmann, Lucy Fisher and Jennifer O’Mahony were giving helpful advice to student reporters.

The panel included James Ball, data journalist at The Guardian and City tutor, Joshi Herrmann, feature writer for The Evening Standard, Lucy Fisher, world affairs journalist for The Sunday Times and Jennifer O’Mahony who works at the Online News Desk for The Telegraph.

All four got into full-time journalism jobs through different paths: Fisher “jumped at every internship opportunity and slept on friends’ couches,” O’Mahony started blogging in France, interned in Malta and in the US then got into freelancing, Ball worked for a small trade publication in Crawley and Herrmann edited The Tab in Cambridge.

Advice to journalists who think it's cute not to understand data from @jamesrbuk "if you don't know numbers, piss off right now" #FBJEvent

— Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) April 17, 2013

Herrmann recommended:

“I think there is a slight danger in student papers when they are commenting on national events(. . .). When you show your cuts in an interview, editors often want to see what things you have discovered in your university. That shows that you could transfer that skill. If your portfolio only shows opinion pieces about the Middle East, that will have less appeal for editors because they already have people who are great at that.”

When the discussion was opened up to the packed forum, a member of the audience asked if and how the interests of owners and advertisers affect their jobs.

The panel agreed they have never been told what to write or when to be kind to people, although Ball addressed a more subtle problem:

“When you do a story, you want it to get as much space as possible. You are always serving a particular readership. I know what story would go on page one and what would go down on page seventeen, and that affects what story I chose.”

When Ball asked Fisher whether the only future for print will be the Sunday papers, Fisher replied:

“I definitely think that Sunday journalism will and should remain in print because part of the joy of the Sunday Times is that it’s got these beautiful supplements. (…) The photography is world-class, and it’s just not the same even on a shiny new iPad. I think in terms of daily journalism, there is more need for it to be 24-hour online, whereas weekly journalism is much more investigative.”

Relating to the value within online journalism, a student raised the controversial question about whether the future are pay walls. O’Mahony summarised:

“We [The Telegraph] have gone into a system that is very similar to the New York Times: You get 20 articles for free and then start to pay. Before working for a a national paper, I was coming from a blogging background. A lot of the time that’s people who are very committed to open-source and who want all content for free. I no longer believe that’s right. I don’t see why my colleagues in Syria who are risking their lives every day should come for free. I hope that people always pay for quality.”

Ball ended the first discussion with optimistic closing remarks:

“Today, more people are reading journalism than ever before by a huge number. We’re not diminishing, we’re growing. We just have to work out a way how to not run out of money”

Been on a panel with @samcoatestimes @LOS_Fisher and @jamesrbuk at the Frontline Club. Now the big dogs are up. pic.twitter.com/koHK79ind4

— Joshi Herrmann (@joshi) April 17, 2013

After a break for drinks, nibbles and networking, the second panel discussion began. Hosted by Steve Richards, chief political commentator at The Independent, a team of editors from the UK’s most influential papers came together to discuss issues such as the funding of investigative reporting and the future of magazine publishing.

 John Witherow, Editor of The Times, said:

“I think this is a fantastic age for journalism. People are under such scrutiny now, people who know a lot more about you as a journalist and are gonna comment on it. So all the time, standards are rising in the quality of what you’re reading about. (. . .) I don’t think people realise that newspapers today are so much better than 50 years ago. Back then, they were pretty mundane.”

Addressing some of the problems of investigative journalism, Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of The Guardian, concluded:

“Investigative journalists produce a relatively small amount of words per year but often they are the most important ones. But they need a lot of legal and expert support. The big challenge is how we fund that. What we see around the world now is that there are a lot of non-profit foundations who support the work of these journalists. It must be at the core of what we do.”

Steve Richards, Ian Katz, John Witherow and Sarah Baxter were addressing issues like pay walls, funding of investigative reporting and ways into the industry.

Sarah Baxter, Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine was asked about whether magazine journalism was as vulnerable as the rest and how its future looked, particularly online:

 “I think it’s one of the great myths that people don’t enjoy long pieces on the web. One of our exposés about Goldman Sachs had a great impact in America, that wouldn’t have been possible without the web. (. . .) I find it’s a great test. If a story keeps me me engaged on my iPhone, I know it’s a winner. It’s either good journalism or it isn’t and I don’t think we should worry too much about platforms.”

The event was sponsored by City University London, Cardiff University , Teach First and Orillo. It was organised by Grapevine Events.

Watch both discussions here:

Strictly by invitation only. Please contact the organisers for inquiries or view the website here.

On Wednesday 17 April, the editorial teams of the top 40 student publications in the country are coming together for an evening at the Frontline Club.

The evening will begin with a reception before moving to panel debates and talks with speakers, including: John Witherow, editor of The Times; Sarah Baxter, editor of The Sunday Times Magazine; Ian Katz, deputy editor at The Guardian and Steve Richards at The Independent.

The event will be an opportunity to meet the other students running the best campus papers, with publications from the LSE, Imperial, UCL, Birmingham, Oxford, Durham, York, Cambridge, Warwick and Bristol among those attending.

"An extraordinary time to be a journalist"

All the panellists expressed their excitement at covering the Arab Spring. Tom Coghlan began by comparing the limitations on his reporting from Afghanistan over the last four years with the "fabulously unrestricted" nature of his reporting from Libya.

Covering the conflict from the perspective of the rebels, Coghlan noted that it was "completely chaotic" and journalists were welcomed by Libyans who were keen to tell their stories to the world. 

He said it was a "fantastically optimistic" story to cover with "ordinary people" doing "extraordinary things". 

Lindsey Hilsum described 2011 as "the reason" she "went into journalism". She said it was amazing to have access as a journalist to what was happening at Tahrir Square and the aftermath of Gaddafi’s departure from Tripoli.

In Libya, she said journalists benefited from the fact that battles took place on main roads – journalists could drive up, film the story and then retreat from the front line to file.   

Hilsum believed that for all the dangers and risks of reporting the Arab Spring, her generation of reporters have been "very privileged". 

Lyse Doucet agreed: it is "an extraordinary time to be a journalist". But she observed that the story of the Arab Spring, which began with great "excitement and euphoria" was now entering a new stage.

She said that there were parts of the story that were causing "awe and anguish" as the ‘revolutions’ faced opposition and challenges in the aftermath. 

Reporting Syria

In particular, there was concern on the panel for what was happening in Syria.

Tom Coghlan described his six days reporting from there as exceptionally unpleasant and said the risks that Syrians were taking meant he had not been able to report a single name of anyone he had interviewed.

He revealed that The Times would now only send journalists into Syria with bodyguards.

The role of "citizen journalists" and "activists" in accessing the story from Syria was also discussed.

Coghlan was impressed by the innovative and clever use of online tools by activists, while Lindsey Hilsum said news organisations are developing increasingly sophisticated techniques to verify video material coming out of the country.

Interestingly, an example Hilsum gave of trying to verify a video from the Free Syrian Army included an appeal to Twitter users to see what they made of the footage – effectively crowdsourcing part of the verification process to a networked audience. (Although it should be noted that this was just one of several verification strategies.)    

Nevertheless, prompted by a question from the chair Richard Sambrook, the panel emphasised the importance of "objective", independent reporting and "bearing witness".

Lindsey Hilsum said it was difficult for governments outside of Syria to formulate a policy towards the country, but she argued that it would be even harder if journalists were not going there to gather news and information.

By Alan Selby

The advent of new media has seen an increasing pressure placed upon journalists to become multidisciplinary, but often to the detriment of each medium. During an evening moderated by David Campany, reader in photography at Westminster University, writer A. A. Gill and photographer Tom Craig mounted an impassioned defence of collaborations between photographers and writers. The duo were speaking in the lead up to a new exhibition of their work, a collection of 20 of Craig’s unseen photographs accompanied by text from Gill, which is opening at the Flaere Gallery in March.

The audience were guided through an eclectic series of images from Gill and Craig’s travels, which have taken them from the blistering heat of Chad to the freezing depths of the Arctic. As their presentation began, Craig explained that his dissatisfaction with the news media was a driving force behind their collaboration:

“I was becoming disillusioned with the imagery that I was seeing appearing in the news and feature print media. The reason for that was I felt increasingly individual photographers were going to places with very specific agendas. They had a photograph in mind before they even got there… I think it’s a dangerous place to be in, because it represents a place where it’s very difficult to be impartial.”

Discussing the unique marriage of text and imagery that the pair have produced, Craig added:

“I believe that the power of the image and the written word are great on their own, but they’re a lot greater when they’re combined… I’m at an advantage, I can tell the quieter story because I know there are other things that will be said about it.”

Craig provided the foil to Gill’s inimitable sense of humour throughout the evening and, despite claiming that Craig’s interests amounted to taking photographs of people taking photographs, and of the backs of people’s heads, Gill praised his approach:

“What you want is a photographer who’s aware of himself, and aware of changing the dynamic he is in. Tom does that, he’s very sensitive.”

In response to questions from the floor, the pair discussed how they first met on assignment in Chad, and how they approach the assignments that they undertake. As the proceedings reached their conclusion, Gill offered up his own evaluation of their work together:

“What we do gets rarer and rarer, because a lot of journalists now are expected to take their own pictures. A lot of us are expected to have phones that can take print ready pictures. Then there’s everything that’s happening on the internet: everybody is a photographer, and everybody is a journalist. What you have is this babel of karaoke news. I feel like we’re a Farrier and a Thatcher, we’re doing two jobs that are from the last century, but that’s what we do, and we do it well. When we do it well I don’t think there’s anything else that can touch it.”

Watch the event here:

The debate featured Defence Editor, Michael Evans, Matthew Parris and David Aaronovitch as well as questions and contributions from the audience.  

I got in touch with Robin Ash at The Times to ask a few questions about the debate:

We are experimenting with interactive services as it’s a great way to engage readers and will certainly be used more and more as online news technology develops. We wanted to cover Afghanistan and thought a debate would be more interesting than a standard Q&A.

The journalists who contributed are all heavyweights on the paper…I was rather surprised how eager and willing they were to take part – in fact we had to reschedule because one of them was so disappointed not to be able to make the planned time.

They took no persuasion, despite not having done this before, and were very accommodating when it came to organising a time that suited everyone which wasn’t easy as they all have deadlines for the paper and are often busy with radio interviews and television shows.

They all enjoyed the experience and were keen to do more. They said that it was slightly disarming as there is no time to polish your answers – even less so than radio, they felt.

I felt it went very well, although it was originally conceived as a debate between journalists with rival stances, it evolved into a wider debate with all the participants contributing. Since reader participation is the raison d’être of doing these things that worked well.

The system we use allows you to view and moderate comments before publishing them. There was some attempt to bunch comments into a relevant stream but they were coming in so fast this was not a major aspect – luckily this seemed to happen organically anyway.

The challenge was to keep things moving by publishing comments/questions regularly while maintaining a coherent debate in which questions and expert answers don’t get separated and lost.

We have some traffic stats – about a third of people viewing participated with comments as the event was happening, but the main number of views will come later as people replay the debate. We won’t know the total for a while yet.

Jeremy Page had a surprise wating for him upon arrival at Colombo’s Bandaranaike International airport in Sri Lanka. After multiple rejected visa applications to enter the country, The Times South Asia Correspondent decided to go the tried and trusted tourist visa route…

A message flashed up on his screen: “DO NOT ALLOW TO ENTER THE COUNTRY.” With that, my passport was confiscated, I was escorted to a detention room, locked up for the night, and deported the next day. I can’t say that I was surprised, though it was my first deportation in 12 years of reporting from China, the former Soviet Union and South Asia. link

The situation for Sri Lankan journalists both in and out of the country is dire – arrests, killing and the ban on reporting from inside the war zone continues unabated.

Photo of No Entry sign taken by autumn leaf

I’m currently waiting for 2,383 queued tweets on a #G20 search of Twitterfall (and later I realised that I need to keep it ticking over at 4 tweets per second to keep the queue down). I hardly need to say you can also track #G20 here and here.

Twitter has been comprehensively integrated into mainstream media coverage.* Here’s an inevitably incomplete run down of how Twitter has been used to tell the story. 

1. Twitter and Liveblogging

Sky News and The Times are both using CoverItLive. Sky have added reporters’ pictures which is a nice touch. They have decided to disable comments, whereas the Times is frantically trying to publish them all.

The Times admitted they were struggling to keep up:

Joanna Geary:  Sorry Dozi, we’ve had a sudden surge of comments coming through. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to publish them all. I will try my best.

Joanna Geary:  No censorship going on here guys. Just one comments editor trying to keep pace with all your great comments! The only comments that might be rejected are those that would be offensive (swear words) and those that break the law (defamation, incitement to violence).

UPDATE 4.10pm:

There were also difficulties with mobile phone batteries:

Joanna Geary:  It is true that a couple of our reporters have run out of battery on their phone (they have been reporting since 9am. We do have others still in the field and some filing stories in the office. I will be linking as soon as they have finished.

The Guardian has a liveblog including embedded audio and video. They have a separate page for Twitter updates from their reporters. Matthew Weaver is using audioboo.fm to provide audio snippets. UPDATE: And here’s the Guardian’s Google map.

The BBC continues with the live text commentary approach that they’ve used for past events such as the attacks on Mumbai. They’ve also produced an interactive map.

UPDATE: The Financial Times has a dedicated G20 Twitter account.

But not everybody’s impressed with Twitter’s extensive use.

"@chilesl: anyone else finding the Guardian’s #g20 ‘reporting’ via #twitter distinictly annoying? http://tinyurl.com/d5x663"

2. Twitter sources

Journalists are now well aware, or should be well aware, of how to use Twitter to provide information and eyewitness accounts to enhance their coverage of events. Here’s the work of BBC News Online journalist, Ana Lucía González, which includes numerous shout outs for interviews and information like this one:

"@unslugged Hi from BBC, we would like to quote your tweets on our website, is this OK? We’d also like to speak to u. Pls DM me. Thank you!"

@unslugged later apears in the BBC’s live text commentary:

"Unslugged tweets: It’s like Tiananmen Square out there. Except the rioters brought their own tank. Read Unslugged’s tweets."

3. Twitpic Fail

Twitpic went down some time in the afternoon (reported by Sky News liveblog at 2.10pm), presumably due to the sheer volume of photos being uploaded. It does seem to have recovered at around 3pm. New competitor Tweetphoto was only too happy to point out its temporary demise.

UPDATE: More on a similar theme by Kate Day at the Telegraph.

*Today, this newspaper apparently converted it’s whole operation to Twitter-style updates from staff and trusted communities.