After Leveson? A 'State of the News Media' report for the UK

With each day of Leveson evidence new stones are overturned, shedding more light on the wider systemic and cultural problems that contributed to the phone-hacking scandal.

The ‘post-Leveson’ question becomes ever more pressing, as identified at yesterday’s University of Westminster conference, attended by a range of international media researchers, as well as regulation and legal specialists.

But how will the national media report the outcome of the Inquiry?

The media’s record in self-reporting is shaky, shown by its reluctance to give any credence to the Guardian’s initial story in 2009 revealing serious flaws in the media’s ability to self-regulate.

In an article for June's issue of British Journalism Review, Judith Townend and I demonstrate how a combination of personal, professional, political and commercial dynamics led to a failure of the media’s role as an accountability mechanism in the public interest.

We believe a useful new accountability tool would be an annual audit of all UK news media content.

The lack of coverage of phone hacking

The failure of almost every other news organisation other than the Guardian to regard phone hacking as newsworthy has been well-rehearsed and we have previously shown that perceptions are backed up by the numbers.

But it’s not a lone example of an issue that perhaps should have received more media attention or scrutiny.

We could also look at the reporting of financial institutions prior to the crash in 2008 or the build up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

As we demonstrate with phone hacking, working out why journalists regard some stories and angles as newsworthy requires significant analysis. But we don’t even have a way of systematically understanding and monitoring what news stories are being published and how they are being covered.

This is beginning to seem a little strange in an era when we can collect and organise vast quantities of data from online news articles. There is no longer any reason why we could not monitor the news values of the media in a far more comprehensive manner for the benefit of the future of journalism.

Accessing article data 

For the BJR essay, we were able to trace all news articles relating to phone hacking over a four year period. And academic research has benefited from resources such as the Nexis® UK database which allows searchable access to decades of news articles.

But research which considers all news topics is often limited to only a few media outlets for a very short period of time and Nexis® UK is only available through subscription.

In the past, it would have been exceptionally time-consuming, if not impossible to conduct an annual survey of every topic or subject that made the news. Today, nearly every news story that appears in print also appears online and news is relatively straightforward to archive.

Towards an annual audit 

By harnessing the potential of “big data” and digital search tools, we should be able to design a sophisticated piece of software which could be used to provide the public with an annual audit of all UK media articles for an entire year.

Data from news stories could be accessed to produce a breakdown of what news subjects were reported, how they were reported, by which journalists, how often and with how much prominence.

This data might be analysed in conjunction with data provided by audiences from clicks on web links and the number of times articles have been shared by web users on other websites. Information that is already being collected internally by news organisations.

This annual review of news could and should go beyond “newspapers” – a category of increasingly dubious relevance in a convergent media world. It could document all major online news sources whether they’re newspapers, broadcasters, new media websites or influential bloggers.

Independent researchers could then analyse this data to write an accessible and publicly available online report on the nature of UK news content.

A report which would provide the public with a more detailed understanding of what was regarded as newsworthy and how news topics have been reported.

Learning from projects in the United States

An annual review of this nature is not only possible, it’s also already being done outside the UK. In the United States, the Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media” report analysed 46,000 stories from 52 news outlets in 2011.

One section of the report offered a comprehensive understanding of which stories and topics were regarded as newsworthy by American journalists and included data for news being shared by bloggers and Twitter users.

There is also an interactive online feature on the Pew website which means the public can make their own comparisons between the coverage of news stories in different media outlets.

It would be useful to combine this approach with that of the Media Cloud project, run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. This project includes an open source online tool highlighting which key words were used in relation to major news topics on a weekly basis by individual news organisations.

In the UK, perhaps the closest we have to anything similar is Journalisted.com, run by the Media Standards Trust. This website monitors articles written by individual journalists as well as a weekly and yearly round up of which news topics are “covered lots” or “covered little”.

This represents a useful starting point, but the depth of data and analysis is limited compared with the projects in the United States.

The value of an annual audit

An annual audit of UK media content undertaken by an independent organisation would only be a small part of much more wide-ranging solution to the issues raised by the phone-hacking scandal.

It would not illuminate journalists’ decision-making, hold them to account prior to publication or tackle newsroom culture and practices.

But it is a practical step forward which would provide a comprehensive overview of what stories are making the news and trends in the way those news stories are reported.

It would be an accountability tool that could benefit both news organisations and the public.

For journalists and editors, it would be a useful resource helping them reflect on the shape of their coverage over the course of a year.

For the wider public, it would provide a much more informed starting point for a broad debate on the how the media reports the news.

We would welcome comments, criticisms and suggestions to help us take this idea forward.

Phone Hacking: Exploring 'media omerta'

“[Nick] Davies’s work…has gained no traction at all in the rest of Fleet Street, which operates under a system of omerta so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the big New York crime families"

Peter Oborne, The Observer, April 2010

"There seemed to be some omerta principle at work that meant that not a single other national newspaper thought this could possibly be worth an inch of newsprint" 

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian, Newsweek, 2011

Tomorrow I'm heading into London to go to Coventry University. (Yep, you heard me right.) I'll be attending the book launch of The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial. And you can still get tickets here if you are interested.

Judith Townend and I have written a chapter for the book exploring Oborne and Rusbridger's assertions that the press significantly under-reported the phone hacking scandal - a news story which would eventually lead to the demise of the News of the World, several high profile resignations and the ongoing Leveson Inquiry.

We thought it would be interesting to find out just what 'media omerta' looked like by tracing how many articles were written on the subject from June 2006 to November 2011 and when they were written.

Using the Nexis database, we counted up the number of articles written on the topic in various newspapers. (At the bottom of this post, I have provided a more detailed explanation of the methodology we used including the limitations of the data.)

The table below shows the total number of articles written and even further below I have produced (at some personal cost to my capacity for patience with Google Documents) a few pretty graphs which show the cumulative total number of articles at 6 month intervals.

If you roll over the blue dots at each point it will tell you the cumulative total at the relevant point in time. (Pretty cool, huh. And really straightforward to produce with Google Docs...see hindsight kicking in already).

Table: Total number of articles June 2006 - 10 November 2011

The Guardian 879
The Independent 489
The Telegraph 436
The Times 332
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday* 318
Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror 162
The Sun 112

Graphs: The Broadsheets
Graphs: The Tabloids
Our Chapter

In the book, we use this as a starting point to explore what all of these numbers mean.

We reckon that explanations for the non-reporting of the phone hacking scandal need to delve beyond simplistic, if valid, assertions of industry cover-up.

To understand why the majority of national newspapers didn't regard phone hacking as newsworthy, it is necessary to unpick a tangled web of contributing factors.

In the chapter, we explore competing professional, political and commercial interests; the failure of other organisations – particularly the Metropolitan Police – to investigate the matter thoroughly; and the intimidating power of News International.

Note on Methods
We retrieved articles for the following search terms in news articles between 1 July 2006 and 10 November 2011: (‘phone tapping’) or (‘phone hacking’) or (‘voicemail interception’) and (‘news of the world’). The articles were filtered for ‘moderate similarity’ ensuring that most duplicates were discarded. Some duplicates may not have been filtered out and it is possible that articles relevant to phone hacking which did not satisfy the search terms were not counted. The data should therefore not be regarded as completely accurate in terms of unique numbers but the approach nevertheless provides a valuable assessment of the comparative weight of coverage given to phone hacking by each title. 

*The Nexis database groups Daily and Sunday together.

Drones: At war and at home

Continuing my recent theme on the use of drones in journalism, I came across this Guardian article rather strangely entitled: 'Drones in the hands of the paparazzi? It's an ethics and privacy minefield'

There are some interesting observations here and the article lists some of the important questions raised by the increasing use of drones in military contexts:

"Do drones lower the threshold of war, encouraging those who deploy them to be more bellicose? Can they or their operators sufficiently discriminate combatants from civilians in order to comply with international law? Are they proportionate, or so horrifically cruel as to qualify, along with anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, for prohibition? Does their cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon? What effect does their deployment have on the "hearts and minds" of civilians, or the morale of soldiers? Should we worry that Iran appears to have assumed control of a US drone, having kidnapped it out of the sky? And who is to blame when drones go wrong?"

But then right at the end, the article notes that drones are making the leap from foreign to domestic policy which left me with the impression that the piece was suggesting that what we should really be worrying about is the paparazzi using drones.

In other words, there are a few complicated questions about killing 'other people' in foreign lands, but when governments and the media start taking photos of 'us' using drones then we should really become concerned.

I am as worried about privacy, ethics, the media and the use of drones for domestic surveillance as the next person.

But as the article rightly points out (if you read past the headline and the inadvertently misleading structure) there are more pressing "ethical and legal concerns" which we must not lose sight of in future domestic debates on drones.  

All eyes on Ed Miliband? Some thoughts on live blogging.

This is no criticism of Andrew Sparrow personally, who is an expert in the art of live blogging for The Guardian, but, if you've ever tried live blogging, you'll discover that it's pretty hard work and not without its difficulties. Even for journalists who have racked up a number of live blogging marathons like Sparrow.

During his latest effort, blogging Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour Party conference, the Guardian journalist offers some "3.40pm instant analysis". Sparrow says he found the speech "less inspiring than I expected".

But he then highlights some of the problems of making an assessment about quite how inspiring the speech was given his preoccupation with frantically tapping out a live blog:

"...although I admit, not having watched it properly (I've just had my eyes on my keyboard, for obvious reasons) I'm not necessarily. (sic)"

Which rather sums up one of the key challenges facing a live blogging journalist. (Perhaps we could finish the sentence for him "...in the best position to make a judgement" or "able to take in everything while trying to write everything". [In fact, the update was subsequently corrected and now reads: "...the best judge"])

Personally, whenever I've done some live blogging I've always felt it would be better if there were at least two people contributing to it to compensate for my own live blogging inadequacies. One blogger could get down the outline facts and key points, the other could provide instant analysis and comment. Perhaps even a third could pull in information from other sources.

But Sparrow told me that he writes most of the material for his live blogs himself. He says that sometimes others do contribute, particularly if a live blog lasts a long time and that a Guardian editor will actually post his copy to the blog. (Presumably the editor does some quick checks before posting.) But in terms of writing the thing, an Andrew Sparrow live blog is essentially (a rather impressive) one-man show.

The advantage of this approach is that it gives the blog a clear voice, and allows one journalist to retain control over the direction of the blog. But I would still question whether there are not occasions when it might help to have more hands on deck throughout a live blog.

Of course, there is also a question of resources here and I wonder how often The Guardian can afford to devote more than one staff member to writing lengthy live blogs especially as they seem to be running them on a regular basis and for all sorts of events.

Help? The legal questions raised by Guardian gagging

There's a great summary of the Guardian's reporting parliament gag by Carter-Ruck on behalf of Trafigura over at the Online Journalism blog in case you missed today's news.

But I'd be interested in any help answering the following legal questions.

1. Does anyone have any legal insight into Carter-Ruck's case for arguing that the Guardian's reporting of parliament would have been Contempt of Court? Did Internet coverage, and specifically Twitter's hashtagging frenzy, actually make a legal difference to the case or would they have lost the appeal in the High Court anyway?

2. From the BBC website: "No injunction was served on the BBC, but ever since the Spycatcher case in the 1980s news organisations which knowingly breach an injunction served on others are in contempt of court, so the corporation too felt bound by the Guardian injunction."

This implies there is a legal definition of a 'news organisation'. If there is such a thing when was it last tested in court and does it make any sense anymore? Presumably, the Spectator breached the injunction under law. But who else would qualify as having breached it?

Any links, comments etc greatly appreciated.

Updated

• This is useful background on the scope of injunctions but obviously is not specific.
• Roy Greenslade says 'the action of the firm at the heart of the case' was 'entirely undone by the freedom of the internet'. But that's all we get for the time-being.

More 'Gaza media coverage' on the soon to be improved Frontline Blog

I've got a couple of other bits on Gaza up on the Frontline blog.

One post on War 2.0 and another about discrepancies in the figures the Israelis are giving out on the number of rockets being fired into Gaza.

The latter was picked up by The Guardian's live Gaza blog.

Incidentally, the Frontline blog is currently undergoing a makeover and I'm hoping that very soon you'll be able to bask in the shiny new glow of the updated blog.

From my point of view, it should mean blogging will be much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to being liberated from the blogging dark ages where moving photos involves coding in the phrase 'align="right"', (by hand), and resizing means taking out a calculator.

(Maybe one day I'll look back at these days with a sense of nostalgia. But probably not.)

Blogging makes reporters more human?

Earlier this year, I wrote about the challenge that blogs present to the BBC's long-cherished ideal of impartiality.

In his Media Guardian column, Jeff Jarvis, lays down the gauntlet to 'impartial' TV broadcasters in the UK and the US:

"The more journalists tell us about their sources, influences and perspectives, the better we can judge what they say".

Transparency means revealing your opinions, he argues, and a blog provides an outlet for this sort of discussion.

Read the whole article here.

Ahmadinejad's blog in The Guardian

I can't think where The Guardian got the idea for this article from.