From today’s Letters page. Thought it was worth posting:

Madam, - I am writing to you as a journalist and a concerned member of the National Union of Journalists. I’m concerned because, in my opinion, more and more reporters and sub-editors, especially in certain tabloid newspapers, are simply making up stuff and allowing it go to print.

There is massive pressure on many journalists working on big stories, a pressure which comes from certain news desks demanding they have the “real” story first and that a rival doesn’t scoop them.

In relation to the Clonroche tragedy, The Irish Daily Mail this week reported that six-year-old Mark Flood “was woken by a shotgun blast. . .left his bedroom and went out to the landing to see what had happened and this is where he died at the hands of his deranged father”.

In fact Mark died in his bed and never left his bedroom. This report must have been a terrible thing for relatives to read, especially when it just wasn’t true. Similarly, at least one article in the Irish Daily Mirror this week speculated on what thoughts were going through Diarmuid Flood’s mind and on his relationship with his wife Lorraine. Pure and utter conjecture, not grounded in the truth. And the use of the words “deranged” in the Mail and “Evil” on the front page of the Irish Sun does nothing to help people who are suffering depression or know people who have taken their own lives.

The NUJ’s code of conduct specifies that a journalist has a duty to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards and strive to ensure the information he/she disseminates is fair and accurate. There are also guidelines for the media on the portrayal of suicide.

Journalists, editors and sub-editors should read them. The Press Council should also investigate recent matters. Gardaí too have a responsibility to work more closely with journalists and avoid information vacuums which spawn lies and innuendo.

Journalists in Ireland have, in the main, a great tradition of telling the truth and we have spent decades building up the respect of the public. That respect is being undermined by relentless pressure from the market, the competition between newspapers and the stupidity of some journalists in failing to check the facts.

The headlong rush for circulation is ruining the proud tradition of journalism. - Yours, etc,

DAMIEN TIERNAN,
Chairperson,
NUJ Irish South-East Branch,
and Chair of the NUJ Irish Executive Council,
Passage East,
Co Waterford.

It’s clear that in the case of the apparent familicide in Wexford, the tabloids, especially, have found it easier to mirror the violence in their headlines than attempt to understand it.

It tends to be the case that when a man kills his family, and then himself, he is seen in a criminal light. Today, The Sun calls him “evil dad” and “deranged”. The Mirror also uses “deranged”. In cases where a mother kills herself and a child or children, the coverage tends to be more forgiving - “tragic mum” headlines, and such like. Mental illness, in the shape of post-natal depression, is often taken into account. But when the case involves men, the coverage is simplified and hyped. The delicacy needed in the reporting of any instance of suicide is jettisoned. They have entered the realm of the unexplainable, so they revert to what they know best: short words in big headlines and lazy adjectives.

Eoin Bassett has posted a comment in the previous thread on teaching journalism, but he has also posted on his own blog about his experiences of teaching a couple of modules of a part-time Diploma of Journalism. It’s interesting stuff, and while I’m posting an edited chunk here, it’s well worth reading the full post.

The students:

I learnt you cannot teach people to write, particularly if they do not read. In fact, you cannot really teach people, you can only facilitate them learning. Talented people, such as those who got published, will generally succeed even if you’re rubbish at teaching, and the untalented will remain pretty much as you found them, though with perhaps a better appreciation of punctuation. (more…)

Work always expands to fill the space created by the deadline

If you have two weeks to write a piece, you will intend to do it in one week but will instead file it at the last possible second.

This rule applies to any deadline, whether it’s six hours or three months away.

This paper has been offering comprehensive reports and analysis of Bertie Ahern’s resignation, Brian Cowen’s ascendancy, the Mahon tribunal and important domestic and international events - and the most read story on Ireland.com for about 48 hours now? A two-day old story about the disappearance of a tragic, but relatively obscure British children’s TV presenter.

There’s a lesson in that. Somewhere.

Kristine Lowe asks do journalists make good bloggers?

Una on Hot Press: Giving a Voice to Idiots. Ouch, ouch and treble ouch.

Jazz Biscuit. Guaranteed to be good.

The paper’s science page has a piece on the Large Hadron Collider and how it might create a black hole, but some wonder if it might bring time travellers to us.

Bubble wrap that you can pop forever.

In the past decade or so there has been a proliferation of journalism courses. They are everywhere, ubiquitous, viral. As noted some time ago, the Irish Academy of Public Relations started one, meaning that the alien had finally burst from the chest of journalism.

But here’s the thing: with so many graduates being pumped out of so many courses, has the standard of journalism improved? Are there better writers in Irish newspapers or magazines? Are the unqualified dinosaurs being put to shame by these hordes of Woodward and Bernsteins?

For those interested in broadcast journalism, a course must be of some use in grappling with the technical demands and perhaps learning how to be comfortable on air. Although, here too the standard doesn’t seem to have improved noticeably. There are still too many moments when you turn on RTÉ radio or television and wonder if a transition-year student has been accidentally given a chief reporter’s job.

Courses are helpful for an introduction to the law, to shorthand, to subbing, to deciding what end of the business a person wants to go into. And they definitely helpful in getting a foot in the door for those looking for sub-editing shifts in newspapers, or researcher jobs on radio or television, although experience quickly becomes an asset that outweighs the qualification.

But, in my experience, good journalists are often the ones who have had a different life other journalism, who bring something unconventional to their writing, who learned their trade on the job, and by reading (and learning from) a lot of others writers.

I’m not saying that talented journalists don’t come out of the colleges, but I’d be willing to bet that they were talented when they first went in. When students come into the office on work experience, you can almost always spot the smart ones immediately, and they always have qualities which they clearly didn’t learn in a lecture hall.

Decent news reporters tend to have an intuition for a story and a strong work ethic. All good writers - news and features - have an innate skill with the language. They know how to inject personality in their writing; to act as a prism for a story; to entertain and inform. Can you really teach all of this? I don’t know. But I haven’t seen it yet.

During a four-year spell as this newspaper’s TV reviewer, I would get an occasional, but forceful, sense of a subject’s displeasure.

I was once called a cretin on live radio.

A passing remark about a particularly ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer was followed by a letter accusing me of having an anti-Northern bias. I didn’t, but I had developed an anti-ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer bias. (more…)

The paper’s changed this morning, both in its look and with the addition today of a new photographic supplement and an extra page of opinion and analysis.

Any thoughts?

Every so often in here, we need to get a new byline picture done. Today’s that day.

It’s no fun. If you get that expression wrong, it will haunt you every time you open the paper. You don’t want to be a guffawing idiot alongside a piece about one woman’s battle against the disease that wiped out her entire family. Nor do you want to be too miserable. So, in order to find a decent medium, you aim for a half-smile, not-too-jokey, but-not-depressing contortion. Which only makes you look as if you’ve been told to “act natural” by a man pointing a gun to your head.

Besides, people never look like their byline pictures. There is a running debate among colleagues about who looks least like their byline picture. There is one reporter who would only be less like his photo if it was replaced by a picture of a small gazelle. (more…)

There can be a mistaken view that because a person is given space in a newspaper to air their opinion, then they automatically attain some authority. Appearing under the banner of a national newspaper doesn’t make anyone a better writer, nor does it make them more authoratitive. It does give them an important platform, of course. I don’t pretend that this blog would have the kind of traffic it does if it weren’t on Ireland.com. But authority still has to be earned.

It’s why successful blogs deserve a great deal of credit. Most have had to earn that traffic and authority through their own hard work. They’ve had to do it in a crowded market, and without being able to hide behind good editors and sub-editors (I know this because I would long ago have sunk without them). It doesn’t mean that all blogs - even successful ones - are good, nor that there isn’t a debate to be had about their value, attitude, what attracts attention and what doesn’t. But newspaper opinion writers have an entire structure on which to lean, and despite that some are very bad indeed.

Yes, blogs are unfiltered, but what value is a filtering system when it is aimed only at bringing in opinion writers who agree with the editorial line of a newspaper? Ultimately a blogger’s opinion is as legitimate as any opinion writer’s. It might be badly written. It might be poorly thought-out and woefully explained. It can be hysterical or nonsensical. But so can the opinion columns in our national newspapers.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed the author Sebastian Faulks, only to discover the next day that my digital recording device had wiped the interview. Or, more likely, that I had wiped it. Either way, this was not good.

I tried to think back to what he had said. Perhaps my memory would save me from ignomy. But as I rummaged through my brain, the only things I could really remember where that, during the interview, he had used some nouns, a selection of verbs and perhaps a compound adjective. And that his hair was very impressive. (more…)

When you interview John Cusack, don’t confuse him with Kevin Spacey.

Emily O’Reilly’s last couple of years have been marked by occassional headline grabbing speeches about the state of modern Ireland that could - were you so minded - be construed as part of an early run for the Presidency.

Yesterday, launching new journalism courses in Limerick, she took a swipe at the media. And she had a point. (more…)

The current Morrissey row with the NME is obviously focussed on the “racism” issue. But, as it’s gone on it has revealed a journalist’s great fears: that the interviewee will turn the tables.

When you interview someone, you are in the powerful position of relaying not only what a person said, but also how they acted, their mannerisms, their reactions, and something of the personality that you met you during the interview. In an age when many interviews are conducted in hotel rooms over the course of, if lucky, an hour (if unlucky, in as little as 15 minutes) you’d want to be pretty sure you’re reflecting the reality of the meeting and being fair to a person you have spent only a sliver of time with. If, with all that taken into consideration, you still feel it’s fair to criticise them, then you need to be confident that it’s warranted. (more…)

The BBC’s current affairs radio programme, Today, has unveiled the guest editors who will run the show during Christmas week. A show each will be edited by:

Dame Stella Rimington – former Director-General of MI5;
Damon Albarn – from the bands The Good, The Bad And The Queen, Gorillaz and Blur;
Professor Peter Hennessy – historian and author of The Secret State;
Sir Martin Evans – winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in stem cell research.

(more…)

The Mirror pulled off a deft sleight of hand in its front page coverage of the Madeleine McCann story.

Portuguese police called Kate and Gerry McCann back in but refused point-blank to tell them why. Both now fear that today they will be named as SUSPECTS

Which seems measured enough, except that SUSPECTS was printed in massive type above pictures of Kate and Gerry McCann.

The Sun’s front page was different here, but in the UK it went with the straightforward: “DID YOU SEDATE MADDIE?”, although its editorial blames the “plodding” Portugese police, and maintains a sense of calculated sympathy by asking: “Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

This case has been a big one for the media over the summer - as much because it is considered to have a been partly repsonsible for the unusually strong sales over the summer. It may be about to wind up again in the most disturbing way, and given the double-edged approach of morning’s headlines we will get another reminder that there is one thing the media loves more than a hunting for a missing girl - a witch hunt.

Via Lifehacker comes a useful link to a page on the 10 Biggest Mistakes Freelancers Make. It’s for an American freelancer, rather than the Irish hack trying to make his/her way in the small pond of Irish journalism. But Irish newspapers and magazines increasingly rely on freelancers, and will never ignore good ones. (more…)