The accusation by Ed Miliband earlier this month that the Conservatives are engaged in a "great deceit" over the history of the financial crisis would be somewhat more effective a line if the Labour leader had not also decided to mislead the public on the issue.
Miliband said the Tories' deceit was "that the deficit was caused by chronic overspending rather than a global financial crisis that resulted in recession and a calamitous collapse in tax revenues". But, as Philip Collins later wrote in The Times, "Mr Miliband’s position is this: if only it hadn’t gone wrong, it would all have been all right ... The accusation against him, to which he seems blind, is not that spending 'caused' the deficit, but that he was driving too fast, with no insurance, when there was a crash." Collins describes Miliband's position as "half right", but adds "denying all responsibility for the deficit is a serious political error".
I would go further than this, and suggest Miliband's decision is a disaster, both for his party and his chances of winning the confidence of the country. This is because many people, if they choose to think about it, have noted that the Labour shadow cabinet which now so enthusiastically bashes bankers and finance capital is pretty much the same Labour cabinet which in government enthusiastically embraced bankers and finance capital.
Miliband's decision not to admit his party has rejected many of its former policies is baffling, and, to use a word, deceitful. It also cuts him off from taking the line that many centrist voters might like him to take.
Imagine, instead of bashing the Tories and pretending the state had nothing to do with the build up of the country's financial sector, he had said something along these lines: "As progressives, when in government the Labour party sought to harness the dynamic forces of this country's financial sector for the public good. We aimed to rebuild the country's diminished public sector and wished to enlist the support of its world-beating financiers. However, while in some areas this worked, and investment has poured in to our schools and hospitals, in other areas it did not work, and speculation was allowed to flourish sometimes unchecked, while low interest rates and limited regulation helped asset bubbles to form, one consequence of which is that our young people have been stripped of the hope of home ownership. It is essential that as a party, and as a society, we face the past honestly so that we can learn the right lessons for the future."
Effective leadership, as Sarah Palin has been forcefully reminded this week, is about transcending people's limited assumptions and prejudices. It is about staking out the moral high ground and forcing your opponents to tackle you on these terms. Miliband – maybe in contrast to the other Miliband brother – has shown that he is unwilling to take such a stance. Given the importance of the issues at hand, this decision is somewhere close to a tragedy for this country's progressives.
Updated to add: it looks like someone in the Labour Party has been reading my post! (Or, more realistically, have shown their own disagreement with Miliband's approach.) The Guardian reported today, 13 January, that Miliband is "to concede that the last Labour government must take some responsibility for the deficit to the extent that it did not do enough to regulate the banks, and acted too late to create a more balanced economy less dependent on financial services for tax receipts".
Wednesday 12 January 2011
Sunday 19 December 2010
Time for an investigation
For students of international relations, there has been little in WikiLeaks that should have come as a surprise, indeed the main effect of the revelations appears to be that the world largely works as many educated people thought. They do introduce a few more solid facts into the foreign policy discourse.
As a journalist in a technical subject (debt finance), one of the surprises is that facts alone should make headlines. There are many facts – arguably far more significant than those in the Wikileaks - that could and should be reported. Why did this particular set of facts receive the star treatment?
The most obvious reason is the subject matter: the material sheds light onto the internal chatter of the world’s most powerful state. This is what They really think! The headlines claimed to reveal hidden facts about the world, we are suckers for being told secrets.
The second reason is the theatricality of the release of the information. Ahead of publication, there were claims that the material was so explosive it would bring down the US establishment. Moreover, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was under legal attack – what drama! – giving the human angle necessary to push the story through the usual 11-day news cycle. It is notable that following publication, such a high proportion of the news has focused on Assange, rather than the details of the cables, suggesting the information revealed is not sufficiently interesting to catch the interest of other news journalists. Indeed, that a Spanish judge privately thinks Russia is a quasi-Mafia state rarely generates 36-point headlines in the world’s media. This is not to dismiss the importance and potential interest of much of the information, but that journalism rarely works in the way that it thinks it should do.
Fetid
It is interesting that such secrets should be in our newspapers. It is unusual for a national newspaper today to reveal anything more surprising the contents of Charlie Brooker’s fetid imagination, or that England beat Australia in the cricket.
This is largely because in the place of investigative news journalism, with its careful understanding of detail and context, written by irritating and obsessive journalists, modern-day newspapers prefer scandal, alongside rewriting opinion and lifestyle concerns as news. Ever was it thus so, I hear you cry, but we cannot hide the fact that the media pack now moves in large herds, all with similar, safe anti-establishment opinions, reflecting precisely the prejudices of their targeted readers.
But alongside the rewritten press releases and wire stories, the literary rewrites of celebrity sensation and the elegant sports report, comes the out-of-the-blue data dump. The data dump provides an opportunity for the newspaper lucky enough – or rich enough – to polish the newpapers’ reputation for exclusives, and serves to boost the newspapers’ own perception of itself.
Do such data dumps enhance journalism? The Telegraph’s expose of MP’s expenses last year relied upon stolen information and the public’s lack of understanding of the context. The bulk of the bad claims were a product of a long-standing fudge between those that ran Parliament and MPs and the Fees Office. That the context weakened the strength of the story meant it was airbrushed out of the scandal.
Such strategic leaks tend to be quicker and easier for a newspaper to reveal. Though the Telegraph made great play of how many hours they spent processing information this should not distract us from how easy a story this was for them (once the six-figure sum was paid to the fence); if only every story we write was bought for us on a CD!
Longer-term, what do we get from these bulk downloads of information? The MPs’ story cleared one bunch of representatives out, smeared the reputation of Parliament and brought in a newer, slightly cleaner system for MPs expenses. The release of cables will lead the US to tighten its procedures for accessing such information; a few foreign governments will hesitate next time they are in conversation with the US ambassador.
These temporary infusions of facts give newspapers a shot in the arm but should not lead us to think we are living through some kind of golden age for investigative journalism. Buying a dodgy CD, or doing a deal with Julian Assange, does not in itself halt the decline in longer-term, patient journalism that only large news organisations can support.
As a journalist in a technical subject (debt finance), one of the surprises is that facts alone should make headlines. There are many facts – arguably far more significant than those in the Wikileaks - that could and should be reported. Why did this particular set of facts receive the star treatment?
The most obvious reason is the subject matter: the material sheds light onto the internal chatter of the world’s most powerful state. This is what They really think! The headlines claimed to reveal hidden facts about the world, we are suckers for being told secrets.
The second reason is the theatricality of the release of the information. Ahead of publication, there were claims that the material was so explosive it would bring down the US establishment. Moreover, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was under legal attack – what drama! – giving the human angle necessary to push the story through the usual 11-day news cycle. It is notable that following publication, such a high proportion of the news has focused on Assange, rather than the details of the cables, suggesting the information revealed is not sufficiently interesting to catch the interest of other news journalists. Indeed, that a Spanish judge privately thinks Russia is a quasi-Mafia state rarely generates 36-point headlines in the world’s media. This is not to dismiss the importance and potential interest of much of the information, but that journalism rarely works in the way that it thinks it should do.
Fetid
It is interesting that such secrets should be in our newspapers. It is unusual for a national newspaper today to reveal anything more surprising the contents of Charlie Brooker’s fetid imagination, or that England beat Australia in the cricket.
This is largely because in the place of investigative news journalism, with its careful understanding of detail and context, written by irritating and obsessive journalists, modern-day newspapers prefer scandal, alongside rewriting opinion and lifestyle concerns as news. Ever was it thus so, I hear you cry, but we cannot hide the fact that the media pack now moves in large herds, all with similar, safe anti-establishment opinions, reflecting precisely the prejudices of their targeted readers.
But alongside the rewritten press releases and wire stories, the literary rewrites of celebrity sensation and the elegant sports report, comes the out-of-the-blue data dump. The data dump provides an opportunity for the newspaper lucky enough – or rich enough – to polish the newpapers’ reputation for exclusives, and serves to boost the newspapers’ own perception of itself.
Do such data dumps enhance journalism? The Telegraph’s expose of MP’s expenses last year relied upon stolen information and the public’s lack of understanding of the context. The bulk of the bad claims were a product of a long-standing fudge between those that ran Parliament and MPs and the Fees Office. That the context weakened the strength of the story meant it was airbrushed out of the scandal.
Such strategic leaks tend to be quicker and easier for a newspaper to reveal. Though the Telegraph made great play of how many hours they spent processing information this should not distract us from how easy a story this was for them (once the six-figure sum was paid to the fence); if only every story we write was bought for us on a CD!
Longer-term, what do we get from these bulk downloads of information? The MPs’ story cleared one bunch of representatives out, smeared the reputation of Parliament and brought in a newer, slightly cleaner system for MPs expenses. The release of cables will lead the US to tighten its procedures for accessing such information; a few foreign governments will hesitate next time they are in conversation with the US ambassador.
These temporary infusions of facts give newspapers a shot in the arm but should not lead us to think we are living through some kind of golden age for investigative journalism. Buying a dodgy CD, or doing a deal with Julian Assange, does not in itself halt the decline in longer-term, patient journalism that only large news organisations can support.
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Non-sense
Along the way we are going to meet a large cast of characters, some old, some young, some on the Left, and others on Right. What we’ll find is that journalism, unlike sciences or the professions, does not require experience or even expertise to succeed. Not even financial journalism, which is much more technical than most areas. Unfortunately it is much more nebulous than that.
Most mainstream financial journalists are young generalists, seemingly employed on the basis of having the appropriate background or university. Until this year, none of the journalism schools offered substantial training in financial journalism.
Once in work, the financial journalist on a newspaper has little incentive or ability to step outside the office and find out their own stories. A steady flow of stock exchange announcements, press releases, rewriting news wire articles as well as the occasional public-relations-driven leak is more than enough work for the tiny teams of journalists that newspapers employ.
The newspaper journalist is also encouraged to find their own voice by writing comment and opinion pieces, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. For many journalists, this allows them to live the dream of the agenda-setting campaigning journalist. Most who are given the opportunity take the bull by the horns, and write doom-laden pieces about the state of the world, highlighting the terribly misinformed actions of governments and Europe (if you write for the Telegraph), or the markets and bankers (for the Guardian). I exaggerate, but only very slightly.
Disappointingly, the quality of these articles is difficult to find, and rarely do professionals in the financial world take them seriously; most don’t even bother to read them. Instead, what these articles usually do is reflect the prejudices of the newspaper back at the reader which hopefully makes the reader feel a little bit better about their own views, and maybe gives them an extra reason or two why they were right all along. Rare it is for a journalist to aim to challenge the newspapers pre-established views, and none tolerates more than one or two of these.
A typical example of a newspaper insider, faithfully replicating the senior editorial line, is a young Guardian journalist called Aditya Chakkrabortty. He is the economics leader writer, which means he gets to write some of the unsigned articles in the centre of the newspaper, giving the paper’s own view on matters. It sounds like a senior job but in reality it is often a job of younger staff, specially picked because they are seen as particularly bright or insightful. They get to work alongside the newspaper’s most senior comment writers and management and as such it is generally a route through to career advancement within the newspaper.
As such, reading Chakkraborrty’s work gives us a good insight into the Guardian’s thinking on finance and economics, and what it thinks of the future. Hardly surprisingly, his views are distinctly familiar to those of Economics Editor Larry Elliott, who rarely misses an opportunity to blame markets for the majority of the world’s ills. We’re likely to meet him later on.
First, let’s meet Chakkrabortty. This young man took the traditional elite route into the centre left media - Oxford University, the BBC, the Guardian. At the Guardian, Chakkraborrty writes leader columns as well as signed pieces. In these signed pieces we can see that Chakkraborrty adopts a cosy leftwing view with little or no financial sophistication. Unsurprisingly, his background appears to be more Marxist than markets; he read Modern History at Oxford. A typical signed piece comes from 3 August 2010, and is titled: “What the £35,000 cocktail taught us”. On reading it, I noted to a friend that it is articles like his that made me stop buying the Guardian.
His argument runs as follows: shortly before the financial crash the super-rich were spending like no tomorrow. He remembers writing a silly-season piece in December 2007 in which Movida, the nightclub for people who want to be seen to be rich (footballers and other forms of the grotesque rich), offered a cocktail for £35,000. It was basically a stunt, as the cost of the drink came largely from an 11-carat diamond ring. Stunt or no, the cocktail got the club in the papers, which one suspects was the point all along.
Not to Chakraborrty. Just as any good young journalist with limited experience should do when asked for a weighty opinion, he mined his life history for events on which he could attach meaning. And so the silly stunt becomes a representation of capitalist society, “a potent sign of how unequal boomtime Britain had become”. He quickly moves beyond standard left-wing canards about inequality to another idea: “it can just as well indicate imminent economic failure”. Chakraborrty has just skimmed through a book that has landed on many reviewer’s table that week - Raghuram Rajan’s ‘Fault Lines - and cites his argument that the subprime meltdown - apparently at the heart of the financial crisis - was because the middle class had to borrow to buy houses and maintain their lifestyles in the face of stagnating wages, meanwhile the rich just got richer. And, in some unspecified way, this might happen again: “sorting out the wealth gap is essential if we are not to repeat the financial crisis.”
This article is the Guardian’s current economics thinking in microcosm, and not in a good way. Firstly, it is credulous. The cocktail may have been outrageous but it was likely a PR-driven stunt, so hardly something safe to generalise about. Second, it relies on flawed evidence. Chakraborrty cites ‘The Spirit Level’ to demonstrate the evidence that more equal societies are happier and more successful. He either hasn’t noticed, or does not care to note that this book has been widely slated by most respected - and non-political - writers as drawing conclusions that its data does not show. (John Kay’s review is worth a read.)
Thirdly, it misinforms readers about the financial crisis. Rajan’s argument about the rising level of debt being largely a product of the poor trying to make up for their spending weakness is interesting - and has some basis in truth - but hardly reflects the financial reality of the credit boom, a time in which almost every institution in society was borrowing - both rich and poor, American and European. Why should it only be the poor’s borrowing that causes financial crises?
There is a curious parallel argument made by the government-hating wing of the US Right, which alleges it was government pressure on the US mortgage giants to lend to the poor that triggered the financial crisis. Rajan appears to have taken this view and remixed it for the Left.
But however it is presented, it is not true. The credit boom and the inevitable financial crisis that followed was caused, broadly, by a combination of cheap money - due to central banks, bad regulation, and a highly competitive globalised banking system. These three combined with a strong dash of free market ideology and statist governments blinded by the power of big finance. The borrowing of the poor was a symptom rather than a cause.
Most mainstream financial journalists are young generalists, seemingly employed on the basis of having the appropriate background or university. Until this year, none of the journalism schools offered substantial training in financial journalism.
Once in work, the financial journalist on a newspaper has little incentive or ability to step outside the office and find out their own stories. A steady flow of stock exchange announcements, press releases, rewriting news wire articles as well as the occasional public-relations-driven leak is more than enough work for the tiny teams of journalists that newspapers employ.
The newspaper journalist is also encouraged to find their own voice by writing comment and opinion pieces, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. For many journalists, this allows them to live the dream of the agenda-setting campaigning journalist. Most who are given the opportunity take the bull by the horns, and write doom-laden pieces about the state of the world, highlighting the terribly misinformed actions of governments and Europe (if you write for the Telegraph), or the markets and bankers (for the Guardian). I exaggerate, but only very slightly.
Disappointingly, the quality of these articles is difficult to find, and rarely do professionals in the financial world take them seriously; most don’t even bother to read them. Instead, what these articles usually do is reflect the prejudices of the newspaper back at the reader which hopefully makes the reader feel a little bit better about their own views, and maybe gives them an extra reason or two why they were right all along. Rare it is for a journalist to aim to challenge the newspapers pre-established views, and none tolerates more than one or two of these.
A typical example of a newspaper insider, faithfully replicating the senior editorial line, is a young Guardian journalist called Aditya Chakkrabortty. He is the economics leader writer, which means he gets to write some of the unsigned articles in the centre of the newspaper, giving the paper’s own view on matters. It sounds like a senior job but in reality it is often a job of younger staff, specially picked because they are seen as particularly bright or insightful. They get to work alongside the newspaper’s most senior comment writers and management and as such it is generally a route through to career advancement within the newspaper.
As such, reading Chakkraborrty’s work gives us a good insight into the Guardian’s thinking on finance and economics, and what it thinks of the future. Hardly surprisingly, his views are distinctly familiar to those of Economics Editor Larry Elliott, who rarely misses an opportunity to blame markets for the majority of the world’s ills. We’re likely to meet him later on.
First, let’s meet Chakkrabortty. This young man took the traditional elite route into the centre left media - Oxford University, the BBC, the Guardian. At the Guardian, Chakkraborrty writes leader columns as well as signed pieces. In these signed pieces we can see that Chakkraborrty adopts a cosy leftwing view with little or no financial sophistication. Unsurprisingly, his background appears to be more Marxist than markets; he read Modern History at Oxford. A typical signed piece comes from 3 August 2010, and is titled: “What the £35,000 cocktail taught us”. On reading it, I noted to a friend that it is articles like his that made me stop buying the Guardian.
His argument runs as follows: shortly before the financial crash the super-rich were spending like no tomorrow. He remembers writing a silly-season piece in December 2007 in which Movida, the nightclub for people who want to be seen to be rich (footballers and other forms of the grotesque rich), offered a cocktail for £35,000. It was basically a stunt, as the cost of the drink came largely from an 11-carat diamond ring. Stunt or no, the cocktail got the club in the papers, which one suspects was the point all along.
Not to Chakraborrty. Just as any good young journalist with limited experience should do when asked for a weighty opinion, he mined his life history for events on which he could attach meaning. And so the silly stunt becomes a representation of capitalist society, “a potent sign of how unequal boomtime Britain had become”. He quickly moves beyond standard left-wing canards about inequality to another idea: “it can just as well indicate imminent economic failure”. Chakraborrty has just skimmed through a book that has landed on many reviewer’s table that week - Raghuram Rajan’s ‘Fault Lines - and cites his argument that the subprime meltdown - apparently at the heart of the financial crisis - was because the middle class had to borrow to buy houses and maintain their lifestyles in the face of stagnating wages, meanwhile the rich just got richer. And, in some unspecified way, this might happen again: “sorting out the wealth gap is essential if we are not to repeat the financial crisis.”
This article is the Guardian’s current economics thinking in microcosm, and not in a good way. Firstly, it is credulous. The cocktail may have been outrageous but it was likely a PR-driven stunt, so hardly something safe to generalise about. Second, it relies on flawed evidence. Chakraborrty cites ‘The Spirit Level’ to demonstrate the evidence that more equal societies are happier and more successful. He either hasn’t noticed, or does not care to note that this book has been widely slated by most respected - and non-political - writers as drawing conclusions that its data does not show. (John Kay’s review is worth a read.)
Thirdly, it misinforms readers about the financial crisis. Rajan’s argument about the rising level of debt being largely a product of the poor trying to make up for their spending weakness is interesting - and has some basis in truth - but hardly reflects the financial reality of the credit boom, a time in which almost every institution in society was borrowing - both rich and poor, American and European. Why should it only be the poor’s borrowing that causes financial crises?
There is a curious parallel argument made by the government-hating wing of the US Right, which alleges it was government pressure on the US mortgage giants to lend to the poor that triggered the financial crisis. Rajan appears to have taken this view and remixed it for the Left.
But however it is presented, it is not true. The credit boom and the inevitable financial crisis that followed was caused, broadly, by a combination of cheap money - due to central banks, bad regulation, and a highly competitive globalised banking system. These three combined with a strong dash of free market ideology and statist governments blinded by the power of big finance. The borrowing of the poor was a symptom rather than a cause.
Monday 19 July 2010
responsibility
In our information-soaked age, it is shocking to see how little our newspapers know of money. Yes, newspapers are hardly advertisements for financial acumen, as they lose both money and readers at a quite astonishing rate, but one would have thought that finance was one area of our newspapers immune from distractions such as celebrity culture and sensationalist reporting. Surely, money would be too important to trivialise and surely people couldn’t make mistakes over simple numbers.
A general reader glancing through The Financial Times - the high point of London’s financial journalism - would be forgiven for thinking that readers of the finance pages are treated with a certain respect. It might be not be very entertaining, but it looks pretty solid, what with lots of numbers and graphs, and clever-looking men staring out from columns full of weighty-sounding economics talk.
But it was out of these pages that emerged the single biggest crisis the world has seen, certainly in the last decade, maybe even the last half-century. Somewhere in those boring pages lay the causes of the biggest economic crisis since the Second World War, a crisis that came close to tipping the western world into depression and collapse, that loaded taxpayers with hundreds of billions of pounds of debt, and longer-term ramifications that are only just starting to be felt.
As a financial journalist reporting on the world of credit throughout the build-up to the crisis, I had a remarkable vantage point to understand the credit boom, and also to get a sense of what would happen if the house of cards came tumbling down. During this time I started - but never finished - a book about debt, because people did not seem to see it for what it was, and what it could do. I regret never completing that book - which would have been called IOU - though I suspect that even had I finished it, I would have struggled to sell it to even the most enlightened of publisher, because during the credit boom no-one wanted to hear the prosaic truth of how things would all end soon.
It is damning criticism of my business, financial journalism, that we failed to stand up, look at the credit boom, and call it for what it was, and what it would mean. Instead, what happened, was we stood up the day after it happened and pointed to all the reasons why we knew it would have happened, and highlighted the small number of examples were we mentioned it in passing. Then a few months passed, and we forgot everything we might have learnt from the biggest disaster our industry has known in recent times, and reverted to populism.
Blame the banker was an easier game to play than the intellectually difficult, and quite worrying, truth: that ignorance was central to the crisis, that a profound and systematic intellectual failure undermined almost every one of the world’s financial and government institutions. And while it was not journalism’s fault that credit boomed, and assets bubbled, and banks tweaked structures, and governments’ took advantage, it was journalism’s responsibility to tell the world what was going on.
A general reader glancing through The Financial Times - the high point of London’s financial journalism - would be forgiven for thinking that readers of the finance pages are treated with a certain respect. It might be not be very entertaining, but it looks pretty solid, what with lots of numbers and graphs, and clever-looking men staring out from columns full of weighty-sounding economics talk.
But it was out of these pages that emerged the single biggest crisis the world has seen, certainly in the last decade, maybe even the last half-century. Somewhere in those boring pages lay the causes of the biggest economic crisis since the Second World War, a crisis that came close to tipping the western world into depression and collapse, that loaded taxpayers with hundreds of billions of pounds of debt, and longer-term ramifications that are only just starting to be felt.
As a financial journalist reporting on the world of credit throughout the build-up to the crisis, I had a remarkable vantage point to understand the credit boom, and also to get a sense of what would happen if the house of cards came tumbling down. During this time I started - but never finished - a book about debt, because people did not seem to see it for what it was, and what it could do. I regret never completing that book - which would have been called IOU - though I suspect that even had I finished it, I would have struggled to sell it to even the most enlightened of publisher, because during the credit boom no-one wanted to hear the prosaic truth of how things would all end soon.
It is damning criticism of my business, financial journalism, that we failed to stand up, look at the credit boom, and call it for what it was, and what it would mean. Instead, what happened, was we stood up the day after it happened and pointed to all the reasons why we knew it would have happened, and highlighted the small number of examples were we mentioned it in passing. Then a few months passed, and we forgot everything we might have learnt from the biggest disaster our industry has known in recent times, and reverted to populism.
Blame the banker was an easier game to play than the intellectually difficult, and quite worrying, truth: that ignorance was central to the crisis, that a profound and systematic intellectual failure undermined almost every one of the world’s financial and government institutions. And while it was not journalism’s fault that credit boomed, and assets bubbled, and banks tweaked structures, and governments’ took advantage, it was journalism’s responsibility to tell the world what was going on.
Friday 16 July 2010
spinning the good spin
Politicians come under all kinds of criticism for 'spinning', but really it is journalists who are the experts at overplaying a story. Indeed, it is an essential part of the occupation. "I didn't get into this business to write small, boring stories," a former colleague used to say. Given these skills, it should not be a surprise to remember that both Tony Blair and David Cameron came to power with ex-tabloid newspaper editors at their side.
Remembering the Blair government's injudicious and often disturbing use of simplification and exaggeration, particularly during time of war, it is easy to see why cherry-picking supportive evidence is problematic. However, cherry-picking is a key skill of the journalist; if they did not select the best parts of the juiciest stories, their articles would be uninteresting, book length and published days after the event. The need to entertain as well as inform disciplines the successful journalist to steer towards those issues and events that people want to know about, in a style they would want to read.
Moreover, simplification is not inherently a bad thing either. Again, simplification is a core part of the job of the journalist. It is difficult to think of an area of public life - outside of sport - where to tell the whole story does not require some degree of dramatic simplification. Indeed, good journalists sweat blood and tears writing the perfect first sentences, as these are the ones that lead the reader from the simple grab at the top of the article through to the detail in the body of the piece.
The approach taken by the Economist magazine is said to be "simplify, then exaggerate", and when one reads the magazine (though by some odd convention The Economist calls itself a newspaper) it is easy to see the virtue in this approach.
Picking up a copy at random, the 17 July edition contains a short article on the UK online food delivery business Ocado ("Keep on Trucking"), which shows the magazine's approach at its best. Opening with an arresting description of Ocado's "eerily sentient" warehouse, the article asks whether the sector can make money, introduces the reader to the industry, its recent past, Ocado's competition and draws to a close with some sense of where both Ocado and its rivals may be heading - "supermarket chains and online outfits will gradually come to resemble each other".
In just a few hundred words, the reader has learned a lot. More importantly, the article's compression has not come at the expense of truth, the facts are used judiciously, and opinion is carefully measured. Clearly, there is much that has not been said - and indeed Ocado's potential listing on the stock markets has generated thousands of words of comment in the newspapers - but as a general starting point into the industry it's not bad. It does no harm. However, it's a bit tepid. The company has put a value of itself at close to a billion pounds, and it has never made any money. Unsurprisingly, many of the newspaper comments have been somewhat sharper.
Remembering the Blair government's injudicious and often disturbing use of simplification and exaggeration, particularly during time of war, it is easy to see why cherry-picking supportive evidence is problematic. However, cherry-picking is a key skill of the journalist; if they did not select the best parts of the juiciest stories, their articles would be uninteresting, book length and published days after the event. The need to entertain as well as inform disciplines the successful journalist to steer towards those issues and events that people want to know about, in a style they would want to read.
Moreover, simplification is not inherently a bad thing either. Again, simplification is a core part of the job of the journalist. It is difficult to think of an area of public life - outside of sport - where to tell the whole story does not require some degree of dramatic simplification. Indeed, good journalists sweat blood and tears writing the perfect first sentences, as these are the ones that lead the reader from the simple grab at the top of the article through to the detail in the body of the piece.
The approach taken by the Economist magazine is said to be "simplify, then exaggerate", and when one reads the magazine (though by some odd convention The Economist calls itself a newspaper) it is easy to see the virtue in this approach.
Picking up a copy at random, the 17 July edition contains a short article on the UK online food delivery business Ocado ("Keep on Trucking"), which shows the magazine's approach at its best. Opening with an arresting description of Ocado's "eerily sentient" warehouse, the article asks whether the sector can make money, introduces the reader to the industry, its recent past, Ocado's competition and draws to a close with some sense of where both Ocado and its rivals may be heading - "supermarket chains and online outfits will gradually come to resemble each other".
In just a few hundred words, the reader has learned a lot. More importantly, the article's compression has not come at the expense of truth, the facts are used judiciously, and opinion is carefully measured. Clearly, there is much that has not been said - and indeed Ocado's potential listing on the stock markets has generated thousands of words of comment in the newspapers - but as a general starting point into the industry it's not bad. It does no harm. However, it's a bit tepid. The company has put a value of itself at close to a billion pounds, and it has never made any money. Unsurprisingly, many of the newspaper comments have been somewhat sharper.
Wednesday 14 July 2010
why do it at all
A few years ago, The Guardian made a bold decision and brought its financial pages forward, ahead of the comment and opinion section. However, few other newspapers followed suit and for most – other than the Financial Times - the financial pages are stuck, unloved, at the back, like an embarrassing relative at a big family occasion. For tabloid papers, such as the Mail and the Express, even finding the finance coverage is a significant task. (That said, the Mail on Sunday's financial coverage is surprisingly good, and of its rivals is probably second only to the Sunday Times in the range and detail of its output.)
However, where newspapers place their stories is usually not a good indicator of their wider importance. Finance rarely generates a good front page splash, in journalism speak. Partly this is because financial stories are almost always complex and technical, partly because it is so difficult to inject human interest and scandal into them.
Newspapers that do try to go big on a financial story can end up with burnt fingers. A memorable - and probably worthy - attempt by The Guardian to tell the story of corporate taxation backfired rather spectacularly when it made several inaccurate accusations against Tesco relating to tax avoidance.
Overall, the paper wanted to show how big corporations in the UK dream up highly complex schemes to cut their tax burden, usually in partnership with the big accountancy firms. With these types of stories the devil is truly in the detail, and if you try to take on the big names - ie those your readers will actually have heard of - then these are exactly the same companies who have sufficient money to defend their reputation loudly and aggressively.
So every detail has to be right, and the conclusions have to be precisely in line with the evidence. So when The Guardian ran the headline: "Tesco's £1bn tax avoiding plan", the story had to back this up 110%. Unfortunately for the newspaper, the story didn't. It went some of the way there, but not enough. As a result, Tesco did what any large company would do after such a major challenge to its reputation: made a huge legal complaint and forced a front page apology from The Guardian, and a near-complete retraction (or a "revised assessment", in the words of its media commentator Roy Greenslade).
I remember speaking with a Guardian journalist about the Tesco story a few months after the newspaper made its apology. The journalist - not one that worked on the piece - said the Tesco story hadn’t put the paper off digging into corporate affairs that others might not like, and anyway the story had been ‘basically right’, but for a few technicalities.
This latter idea was a worrying thing to claim. The Tesco story led to the Guardian issuing a front page apology, printing that "revised assessment", and cost the paper vast amounts of money. For a journalist, a 'basically right' story that would bankrupt all but the largest newspaper is not right at all.
It is not just the economics though. A story that is partly wrong, even if that part makes up a relatively small percentage of the article, is still wrong. A 70% right story should never get anywhere near the pages of any newspaper; its only destination is back with the journalist that wrote it with a note attached saying: 'confirm sources and details'. Unfortunately, we will meet the 70% story on these pages time and again.
However, where newspapers place their stories is usually not a good indicator of their wider importance. Finance rarely generates a good front page splash, in journalism speak. Partly this is because financial stories are almost always complex and technical, partly because it is so difficult to inject human interest and scandal into them.
Newspapers that do try to go big on a financial story can end up with burnt fingers. A memorable - and probably worthy - attempt by The Guardian to tell the story of corporate taxation backfired rather spectacularly when it made several inaccurate accusations against Tesco relating to tax avoidance.
Overall, the paper wanted to show how big corporations in the UK dream up highly complex schemes to cut their tax burden, usually in partnership with the big accountancy firms. With these types of stories the devil is truly in the detail, and if you try to take on the big names - ie those your readers will actually have heard of - then these are exactly the same companies who have sufficient money to defend their reputation loudly and aggressively.
So every detail has to be right, and the conclusions have to be precisely in line with the evidence. So when The Guardian ran the headline: "Tesco's £1bn tax avoiding plan", the story had to back this up 110%. Unfortunately for the newspaper, the story didn't. It went some of the way there, but not enough. As a result, Tesco did what any large company would do after such a major challenge to its reputation: made a huge legal complaint and forced a front page apology from The Guardian, and a near-complete retraction (or a "revised assessment", in the words of its media commentator Roy Greenslade).
I remember speaking with a Guardian journalist about the Tesco story a few months after the newspaper made its apology. The journalist - not one that worked on the piece - said the Tesco story hadn’t put the paper off digging into corporate affairs that others might not like, and anyway the story had been ‘basically right’, but for a few technicalities.
This latter idea was a worrying thing to claim. The Tesco story led to the Guardian issuing a front page apology, printing that "revised assessment", and cost the paper vast amounts of money. For a journalist, a 'basically right' story that would bankrupt all but the largest newspaper is not right at all.
It is not just the economics though. A story that is partly wrong, even if that part makes up a relatively small percentage of the article, is still wrong. A 70% right story should never get anywhere near the pages of any newspaper; its only destination is back with the journalist that wrote it with a note attached saying: 'confirm sources and details'. Unfortunately, we will meet the 70% story on these pages time and again.
Friday 9 July 2010
why not get it wrong
Of course there will be mistakes, journalists will say, because that is an inevitable part of the process of getting to the story fast and first. And the mistakes are usually small, and in the details. Overall, they are telling the story right, or so the claim goes.
Another strand of defence takes the view that journalists have to write for a paying audience, so the first priority is not strictest standards of truth. Journalism is always partly an entertainment business - it is not science or law - people have to want to read it.
Few journalists go into the business to set the record straight, and whatever they
might say, few readers ignore a big or entertaining story just because it might not be true. At present the media is full of stories about 'Paul the Psychic Octopus', able to pick the results of World Cup football matches. Is Paul really psychic? I suspect not, and that's not the point. The story is too much fun to talk about truth.
Moreover, every journalist has their own take on what is and what is not important. Filtering the mass of information flowing into the modern newsroom and then picking the handful of stories to follow up that day is as much art as science, and every journalist will have a different set of priorities.
Another strand of defence takes the view that journalists have to write for a paying audience, so the first priority is not strictest standards of truth. Journalism is always partly an entertainment business - it is not science or law - people have to want to read it.
Few journalists go into the business to set the record straight, and whatever they
might say, few readers ignore a big or entertaining story just because it might not be true. At present the media is full of stories about 'Paul the Psychic Octopus', able to pick the results of World Cup football matches. Is Paul really psychic? I suspect not, and that's not the point. The story is too much fun to talk about truth.
Moreover, every journalist has their own take on what is and what is not important. Filtering the mass of information flowing into the modern newsroom and then picking the handful of stories to follow up that day is as much art as science, and every journalist will have a different set of priorities.
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