This morning I have spent some time looking at the BBC’s new document "From seesaw to wagon wheel — safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century".  

I pity the programme makers who are going to have to apply this to watchable, informative and entertaining TV and radio. First they will need to decide what "impartiality" is and will look at the section (page 23) which attempts a definition of what "remains an elusive, almost magical substance, which is often more evident in its absence than in its presence". On to the definition:

Imagine twelve bottles on the alchemist’s shelf, with the following labels: Accuracy, Balance, Context, Distance, Evenhandedness, Fairness, Objectivity, Openmindedness, Rigour, Self- Awareness, Transparency and Truth. None of these on its own could legitimately be relabelled Impartiality. But all the bottles are essential elements in the Impartiality compound, and it is the task of the alchemist, the programme-maker, to mix them in a complex cocktail. Different proportions may be needed for different genres. But, as the Guidelines make clear, a mixture there must be, in every part of the BBC’s output. The chemical reaction should produce not a solid (too rigid), nor a liquid (too fluid), but an odourless gas (harmless, of course) which will infuse the programme-making environment and be healthily breathed by those who work there. Impartiality is, after all, not a state of grace, but a state of mind.

So the programme maker, whether of a sitcom or the news, has also to be an achemist, attempting to turn dross into gold.

Even the title of the report needs explanation:

Impartiality in broadcasting has long been assumed to apply mainly to party politics and industrial disputes. It involved keeping a balance to ensure the seesaw did not tip too far to one side or the other.

Those days are over. In today’s multi-polar Britain, with its range of cultures, beliefs and identities, impartiality involves many more than two sides to an argument. Party politics is in decline, and industrial disputes are only rarely central to national debate. The seesaw has been replaced by the wagon wheel — the modern version used in the television coverage of cricket, where the wheel is not circular and has a shifting centre with spokes that go in all directions.

Not being a cricket fan, much of that is lost on me, but I know that any wheel which is not circular and has a shifting centre is going to result in a bumpy ride. And so it is.

The Telegraph draws comfort from the report and starts its story: "The BBC is operating in a ‘left-leaning comfort zone’ and has an ‘innate liberal bias’ according to a report commissioned by the corporation."

The first quote — "left-leaning comfort zone" —  is not attributed further in the Telegraph story and a search of the full PDF of the report fails to find it. Perhaps the Telegraph should be producing some of its own guidelines.

Adrian Monck’s blog has fun with the Wagon Wheel metaphor and sums up nicely:

The report reads like some earnest but sensible Church encyclical. You know it’s not going to suddenly pop out and tell you that God is dead and we’re stranded in a moral vortex.
Still, in a passing nod to Nietzsche, twelve aphorisms are offered for guidance.
The reality is that editors chart the limits of impartiality by weighing number of complaints, and the strength of public, political and press hostility. It’s called a "heuristic."

At least that approach is more reliable than alchemy.

Media executives have been beating a path to Tampa, Florida, for several years to see the future: the converged newsroom that brings together the Tampa Tribune, WFLA TV and tbo.com. This week the Tribune announced that it was cutting 70 jobs of which “fewer than 10″ will be from the 280-strong newsroom.

Lucas Grindley who works not that far away in Sarasota and is an advocate of convergence, says, “Not even convergence was a strong enough tactic to overcome the continuing drop in revenues felt across the industry.”

We need to be very careful about drawing any conclusions for the UK from what is happening in Florida where there are 42 daily newspapers serving a rapidly growing population of around 18 million.

The Tribune faces fierce competition from the St Petersburg Times across the bay and smaller newspapers in the region. Its plan is to withdraw from some fringe areas, focus on “hyper-local news” and trim half-an-inch from its page width.

President and Publisher Denise Palmer is quoted in Editor and Publisher saying:

Our newspaper is experiencing the challenges of changing reader needs and fundamental shifts in spending by our traditional advertisers. We are reducing resources in areas that are in decline and investing in areas of growth, including local news and the Internet.

Some neighbourhood editions are to be merged with weekly papers owned by the group. Palmer told her own paper:

We know from research that our readers want news that is hyperlocal and useful to their daily lives. We plan to provide more focused products to better serve changing reader and advertiser needs. At the same time, we will accelerate efforts to operate more efficiently.

While news markets are very different in the US even there the Tampa operation is unusual in owning both the paper and the TV station. But the emphasis on practical local “news you can use” is relevant to the UK.

A couple of weeks ago one of my oldest friends in journalism visited us in Suffolk, picked up a copy of the East Anglian Daily Times and said: “This is what all newspapers will be like in a few years.”

Headline figures from a world survey of newspaper editors are necessarily all that illuminating — the devil is in the regional detail. But I was struck by a couple of pieces of information from the first Newsroom Barometer report from the World Editor Forum and the accompanying Trends in Newsrooms report.

First was a quote from Bertrand Pecquerie, director of WEF, who said:

Eighty-five percent of senior news executives see a rosy future for their newspaper, and it’s quite a surprise.
Editors recognize competition from online sources and free papers, and in turn are making efforts to adapt to 21st century readership. They know how to effectively make the transition to online journalism without reducing editorial quality. Editors-in-chief realise that content matters more than ever and cutting newsroom resources is not at all an effective solution: the reshaping of news will take place with journalists, rather than at their expense.

The second was that half of the editors believed that shareholders and advertisers present threats to editorial independence.

That suggests a worrying lack of accord and trust between editors and and owners in this period of rapid change when 40% of editors believe online will be the most common way to read news ten years from now. Only 35% believe print will reign supreme.

The research was conducted for the WEF and Reuters by Zogby International who interviewed 435 editors worldwide.

A debate about the effectiveness of journalism training and education in meeting the needs of rapidly changing and converging mainstream media is taking off in the United States. The issues are similar here.

I was alerted to the discussion by Ryan Sholin who is working on a thesis at San Jose State University about the adoption of weblogs at US newspapers. He wrote in his Invisible Inking blog:

Hey Spartan Daily kids (and all J-School students everywhere). Those of you just writing stories for the print edition, not participating in the blogs, not asking your faculty advisers when they’re going to get you one of those great audio recorders, not asking where you can borrow a video camera from, not asking the online editor to show you how the content management system works… WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Good luck at the internship with the weekly paper, but seriously, if you want more than that out of a journalism career, it’s time to either start learning on your own, or asking for more from your school.

If you ask them to teach you more, maybe they’ll get the idea that they should be teaching you more.

It is tough for the teachers too. How do we cram more into a course? What goes? J-schools like mainstream media have business models which are slow to change and people who do not want to change. Then there is the need for alterations in courses to go through validation processes which were not designed to meet the needs of anything which is changing rapidly.

And, yes, there are teachers who don’t get the web and would rather carry on doing what they have always done. You spend time in some pretty bruising meetings on the way to change. But we are getting there. It was pleasing last week when a visitor said he found better multi-media capabilities among our students than he did in other places.

That is reflected in the jobs our students get but I know we have to do more. We are making some progress so I was interested by Rob Curley’s post revisiting the state of journalism eduction which he wrote about in 2004. He writes:

I still see much of that same near-disdain-for-new-media attitude in far too many of the younger reporters in our newspaper newsrooms. In fact, if we want to do something cool on one of our sites, we’re much more likely to get help from either a mid-career journalist or a senior reporter.

He recently gave this advice to an aspiring journalist:

Know how to write. Know how to tell a story. Know how to conduct an interview. Know how to research your ass off.

Traditional journalism skills will *never* go out of vogue. I don’t care what the latest gizmo is, the foundation that everything will be built upon are those core journalism skills.

But also understand that things are changing rapidly in our industry.

Hear. Hear. Those are the skills that have to be applied to all journalism but the web is here and that means a lot of exciting new ways of applying the basic skills.

Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at Gatehouse Media, writes:

I’ve run across far too many recent J-school grads that are as traditional in their thinking as any crusty old city editor you care to name. I’ve talked to other hiring managers about how hard it is to get recent J-school grads to take positions in the online departments — they all want to work for print. I’ve seen shiny new grads in newsrooms who won’t pick up a video camera or file a web-first story. It’s a pretty amazing phenomena.

In a separate interview with Innovation in College Media, Owens gave this advice to J-schools:

One of my big concerns about j-school professors today is that many of them don’t get the web. You blog, but how many others do? How many have done anything to participate in the participant culture, even so much as be a regular on a message board or mailing list?

So, again, you’ve got to understand to teach. You can’t just read about it in a book. Of course, I have no numbers to know if my perception is accurate or not, but I’ve run into so many recent J-school grads who seem intent on protecting old-school journalism, or worse, would rather write for print than web.

Educators who get the web, and get what needs to be done can communicate with some authority. I know some have required students to blog. They should make sure that student publication policies reflect the three prime strategic initiatives I outlined above. Students and faculty should just assume their future is online, and design curriculum and publication efforts accordingly … be even more dismissive of print than mainstream pubs are right now.

Overall, I agree with him but don’t think we should be dismissive of print. It is going to be an important part of journalism for a long time both for magazines and newspapers. There is a focus in these US posts on newspaper journalism but the web is having a profound effect on broadcast journalism too. All aspiring broadcast journalists now need to be able to write for the page (web or print) as well as for speech.

Most of our students are now blogging, some are coming up with innovative ideas for the web and I don’t see much of this “I only want to work for print” attitude. From what I have read of student blogs from other UK universities that is a fairly general situation.

In some ways the issue for journalism eduction is that when students arrive we don’t know what the industry will be looking for at the end of the course. How do we cope with that?

Later: I have just read a great post from Mindy McAdams who teaches online journalism in Florida. She asks this question: “How many j-schools are permitting students to graduate with a journalism degree and inadequate skills to pursue a career in journalism?”

An extraordinary editorial in the new edition of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests something close to panic among some of the people who think about the newspaper industry in the United States. It boils down to telling stock market companies to get out of newspapers and hand over to benevolent billionaire proprietors.

The case for this stems, bizarrely, from a comparison of the Tribune company and Donald Rumsfeld. A “Rumsfeld moment” has arrived and it is time for the Tribune company to sell its newspaper business.

As if that metaphor is not enough, the editorial goes on to equate the Tribune company’s behaviour at the Los Angeles Times which it owns with the motorcycle thugs in Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. Back in November the LA Times editor, Dean Baquet, was forced to resign by the owners over his refusal to cut editorial staff. The Chicago-based Tribune business owns 11 daily newspapers and 24 TV stations.

From the specific, the CJR moves to the general (”public ownership” does not mean what it would in the UK):

Public ownership of newspapers no longer makes the kind of sense it made when the industry was rapidly shedding labor costs thanks to new technology, and when the money that stockholders poured in was invested partly in editorial. Today newspapers need owners with the patience and the guts to ride through this valley of transition, with its attendant economic uncertainty, and find the next high ground, which will probably have something to do with the Internet.

There is a strong argument for saying that shareholders take too short- term a view to see newspapers through the trauma of the internet and convergence. But I question whether the “gaggle of billionaires”, said to be ready to buy, are the answer and, as the CJR says, some may turn out to be “pirates”.

In the UK, Express newspapers has fallen into the hands of Richard Desmond who took £27.28m in earnings and pension contributions in the last reported year. He is also planning to run the Sunday Express with just 16 full-time journalists. Roy Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror who is now the media blogger at the Guardian, believes Desmond is driving his newspapers into the grave.

The Barclay brothers, who bought the Telegraph from the ruins of Conrad Black’s empire, are investing £150m in the business with the new print and web integrated newsroom and new presses. But 54 jobs were lost in the move and a strike threat was eventually called off this week after an agreement on Saturday working.

In cutting jobs the Barclay Brothers were behaving in a similar way to the Tribune company at the Los Angeles Times.

Not only are rich proprietors generally trying to make themselves richer, but media companies are finding it difficult to divest themselves of newspapers. Shareholders will not accept fire sale prices.

In the UK, Daily Mail and General Trust called off its attempt last year to sell the regional Northcliffe group and carried on making deep cuts in costs. Trinity Mirror was expected to announce divestment of either its national or regional interests but said an offer for the Daily and Sunday Mirrors “substantially undervalued” them. Instead it has put some smaller papers on the market.

I doubt if the situation is really very different in the US except that there is probably more scope for short term profits though cost cutting there.

This year there has been almost a frenzy as mainstream media websites bring on the latest technology with video, podcasts, more blogs with talk of social media, conversations and communities.

Could this rush be a mistake. Two items in yesterday’s Guardian suggest it might be. First on the business pages, Richard Wray reports that the Upload 2007 conference on social networking has been cancelled because there was not enough interest to make it viable. He wrote:

Fashions change fast on the internet and the latest “new new” thing - online social networks - has already become passé if the surprise cancellation of a conference early next year is any indication.

In Media Guardian, Kim Fletcher reviews the year for newspapers, writing that while a digital strategy might not guarantee success, not having one is to look like a failure. But the race may not go to the first. He writes:

There is still time to get involved, for Associated is proving that you can build an audience even if you start late. The success of the expanded Mail website suggests that there is no overwhelming advantage in being first mover. The Mail’s online audience is growing fast, and management calculates that it can catch up with any rival initiative that is shown to work. It is not a bold or imaginative strategy, but promises a safe return at low risk.

There is a lot to be said for that approach. By watching the “beta phase” for new ideas in journalism many of the mistakes can be avoided. As I have remarked before there are some terrible newspaper blogs out there and others have made similar comments about some of the video newspapers have been putting up.

The Christmas holiday is a good time to pause and think about where we are heading as the inevitable development of MSM websites and media convergence continues at a bewildering pace.

The progress of newspapers in developing online business to keep the money flowing in to finance quality journalism, and prevent newspapers from entering a “downward spiral” is examined in Editor and Publisher. Steve Outing asks: “So how is this going?”

He finds a mixed picture but says: “Just about everyone — finally — is on board and working to address the big problem.”

But his conclusion is not optimistic:

With all the hand-wringing in the industry about how to cope — and the acceptance at the corporate level that big changes are required right now to address the challenges faced by newspapers — I’m surprised in looking at today’s state of the newspaper website that the changes aren’t more dramatic.

To sum up, we’ve got some industry leaders doing outstanding work — but often instituting change more slowly than is required for an industry that is being challenged to remain relevant to today’s information consumers. And we’ve got too many newspapers with websites that are far behind the leaders, missing even some obvious fundamentals.

Today’s state of the newspaper website doesn’t leave me terribly optimistic about the industry.

To illustrate the lack interactivity on many sites, he provides a link to the Seattle Times which has no more than an email link to a reporter. “The topic cries out for reader participation, discussion and feedback. But there’s no way to leave a comment for others to read,” Outing writes.

He might have bitten the hand that was paying him by looking no further than the bottom of his Editor and Publisher column. They offer no more than an email link for letters to the editor.

Outing’s column covers a lot of ground including weaknesses in the handling of classified advertising which must have an important role in increasing online revenues.

He also call for better blogging, a sentiment with which I heartily agree. But his argument is strangely rooted in the days of shovelware. He writes:

Many newspapers have embraced blogging by now, with staff members now including blogging in their workdays. Hey, I couldn’t be happier about that; after all, I’ve been harping that “reporters should blog” for a long time — because I’ve long thought and still do that online-exclusive content is critical for newspaper websites, and newspapers for too long relied on republishing content that originated for the print product.

Of course, online needs exclusive content: there is little point in having a rolling deadline if you don’t use it. But Outing says a technique that is too often missing is the breaking-news blog.

He complains about his local newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, not doing a breaking-news blog for a page 1 story about a threat to the local high school. “The paper’s editors treated it like a normal newspaper story, gathering the facts and publishing the next morning — choosing not to share right away what they knew with anxious parents who needed information,” says Outing.

Crazy. But why a blog? Why not just go for a web first policy like that adopted by the Hemel Hempstead Gazette in the UK when the Buncefield oil terminal blew up at the end of last year? I wrote about this for Media Guardian.

To suggest that a blog is a suitable reaction to a breaking story where your audience needs fast information is typical of too much of the woolly thinking around about the purpose of newspaper blogs. We really have to do better than that if newspapers are to avoid that “downward spiral”.

The Independent on Sunday has found a soul mate in the editor of its rival, The Observer. In an IoS interview with Roger Alton, Jane Thynne points out that the two papers have both stuck to good old-fashioned journalism and have outperformed their rivals in the Sunday quality market. In reply to her question, “Do you get excited by the digital future?” Alton replies:

No. I get excited by newspapers more. Significantly, for a large amount of our future, this is the platform that matters. Britain makes very good newspapers. The thrill you get online is the viral jokes, the bits of YouTube, the sheer enterprise and wit. Clearly, elements of what Will Lewis [editor of The Daily Telegraph] says are right, but if everybody’s having to do everything all the time, there’s a problem about the paper. If that’s not actually any good then the role of the other stuff will be sabotaged.

In The Observer, an interview with Will Lews, not surprisingly, paints a very different future. He says:

Go to other news organisations and they are in a right tizzy, aren’t they? If you aren’t doing this it’s already too late. We are following the reader, and they are moving pretty rapidly into new places. Everyone who’s not started this process - they’re already dead.

Can they both be right?

Many cheers for Kim Fletcher who devotes the On the press column in today’s Media Guardian to praise of the sub-editor. He looks at the idea that the media world is now all about reporters and finds it wanting.

He writes:

What you tend not to hear from writing journalists is praise for colleagues who can synthesise copy, pictures and headlines to create compelling pages; direct a reader’s eye with clever design; take information from diverse sources and turn it into a clear narrative. What you will never hear from journalists is that their copy is frequently ungrammatical, sometimes barely literate, usually over-written and typically misspelled. There are many writers who have won awards for the cleverness of their subs and few who have not been rescued from disaster by them.

For that reason it is impossible to conceive a new-media world that does not offer a powerful role for subeditors. They have the opportunity to reinvent themselves, being perfectly qualified to embrace the multi-tasking that everyone says is the future. Who else, for instance, is going to take a piece of journalism - let us hold out against that grim word “content” - and repurpose it for the different platforms the world envisages? Here it is at newspaper length, this is the mobile phone version, it runs like this on the website and we can edit it - so - for the podcast and broadcast bulletin. Oh, and here are the pictures, cropped several different ways, and a piece of video.

If we expect the reporters to do all that, they are not going to have time to find anything out. And, without the benefit of a second pair of eyes on their material, they are not going to produce work of the professional standard that is required. In a world where media organisations that are “trusted” will succeed, that would be a disaster.

As a reporter I have often cursed subs for changing the meaning of something. On reflection what I wrote was usually unclear. Other times I have read a piece in the paper and thought: “Didn’t I write that well.” Then, on closer inspection, comes a realisation that the sub has subtly made changes, removed spelling and grammatical errors. Mostly, I have forgotten to thank the sub and enjoyed the praise for a “good story”.

I have argued that blogging is not journalism because there is no editorial process, with editors questioning and subs adjusting. That is why applying the term “citizen journalist” to bloggers, in general, is wrong. Wordblog is not journalism.

But sometimes I do ask my wife to sub a piece before posting. Lesley joined the Guardian in the days of hot metal as a features sub and maintains that careful eye on copy. She has taken to emailing and texting me pointing out mistakes. Repetitions of words, the “the the” problem, someone’s name wrongly spelled and all the other things subs spot.

Yes, everyone needs a sub. This piece has not been subbed and it probably shows.

The government is set to slash the licence fee rises the BBC wants to below the rate of inflation and have a review half way through the new charter, putting the broadcaster on a political leash, according to the front page of the Observer today.

Already the BBC has scaled down its 2.3% a year above inflation request, made to help meet increased costs including the switch to digital TV and the move of chunks of the organisation to the Manchester area. It now stands at 1.8% above inflation but, according to Nick Temko, Number 10 and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, are pressing for a settlement of 1% below inflation.

The BBC had not been making a lot of friends. Threatening not to move parts of the organisation to Manchester, which has always had a whiff of the pork barrel about it, was probably a mistake. And last week Mark Thomson, the director general, was rowing back from the very local TV plans which have infuriated the regional media (Press Gazette).

At the same time Rupert Murdoch is dangling Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the Tory leader, on strings. They both want his support and he hates the whole idea of the licence fee which he sees as being unfair to his Sky TV operation.

And commercial media has not been overjoyed at the way the BBC has used the licence fee to move into text journalism through its web site with local, national and international news services.

Will Hutton, on the Observer’s op-ed page, makes an impassioned plea to save British TV for the nation. He is not only concerned for the BBC but the beleaguered ITV (facing a possible bid from cable company NTL and maybe Bertlesmann) and C4 whose ad revenues are falling.

He concludes:

Digitalisation does not mean that only commercial television and the market rule. Rather, we have to think differently about how to maintain their same constructive tension with the notion of public-service broadcasting and have the confidence and conviction to do it. And that begins with Brown’s decision on the licence fee.

I would just add that as media converges similar arguments apply to the BBC’s financial ability to continue to invest and innovate on the web.