Charles on… anything that comes along

Kieren is off to Icann, and in a look back at what he’s been doing for the past ten years finds that he’s come over all Daily Mail. If the Daily Mail were about technology journalism.

He started out writing letters asking for jobs. He got lots of rejections. (I saved myself that bother. I didn’t write letters.)

But what I learnt, and what still holds true now, is that if you want to do something don’t moan about how difficult it is, just get on and do it, and do it as well as you can. Lots of people want to be journalists, or, more accurately, think they want to be journalists. About three-quarters of them are hopeless and should never be allowed near a keyboard. But they all get jobs. Fuck knows how.

The problem of late is that these hopeless sods have become the norm. It’s thanks to the commercialism of the media. The news values that used to be instilled in people: objectivity, awareness of what is news and what isn’t, a sense of doing a service and having a vital democratic role, have been lost. When the opening of a new film in Leicester Square is front-page news but the death of a tramp in the same square is lucky to make even a paragraph, the media has stopped serving its most important function.

The vast expansion of the PR industry; the readiness of journalists to base the importance of a story on the number of times a company representative calls them about it; the refusal to stand up to people and companies and sod the legal risk; the lack of budgets; the slow depressing death of investigative journalism; the hand-holding. This has all got much, much worse in the past decade.

Wurl, what’s changed principally is that there’s a lot more space and a lot fewer people writing directly to fill it; but lots more sources pumping stuff out. So rather than generating the news directly, we’re more likely to be a filter or a mixer. I think the tendency towards American-style “they said it so we should repeat it, who are we to judge?” journalism is a bad move; journalism ought to be guided by some ethical thinking too.

The weird thing, looking at the London freesheets (for example) is that doing those incredibly busy layouts is *amazingly* labour-intensive. Always needing a different pair of shoes to photograph, a different dress, blouse (it’s all for girls, this stuff) and then coming up with snappy captions for this celeb and that is not for the fainthearted. Yet it’s all to so little effect.

So see ya, Kieren. He’s going to become “general manager of public participation” for Icann.

Ooh, I think he’s going to hate the phone ringing soon. We’ll keep a place warm for you.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• How much coffee can a bunch of hacks drink? A lot, if you're paying (10 September 2004; score: 31.52%)
• The 9 rules of journalism.. just marvellous (13 June 2007; score: 30.74%)
• ..though equally, people think you've evil even when you're not (22 October 2006; score: 29.95%)