It’s actually a Twitter account, but I’m not planning to use it for, as they say, “ambient intimacy”. I just thought Twitter would be a handy platform for it. (You don’t have to be on Twitter to see it. You can even subscribe via RSS, if you wanted to have new posts brought to your attention but didn’t want to bother getting a Twitter account.)

You see I like to read. A lot. And sometimes I like to recommend books.

I was actually writing a books post for here only the other week. But it’s not finished, and I kept reading more books and thinking “Oh, I should mention this one too”!

And then I remembered I’d had this idea a while back of a microblog just for books I’d read. So this is what I set up the other day.

First I took a photo of some of my favourite books and made it into an icon, and seeded the blog by documenting the ones in the pic. And then I did the recent backlog, inc things to go back to the library which I’d hung onto thinking I’d write about them first. So there are already quite a few good things up there if you want to go and look. But it’ll be slower from now on, because the idea of it is to be more or less real-time - any time I finish a book that I think was worth mentioning/remembering, I’ll note it there.

This blog has a Books category too. And one of the first pages I set up on Uncharted Worlds was the old “bookshelf” page. I don’t plan to resurrect the Bookshelf page (which hasn’t been updated since 2004) - that’s probably going to stay as archive for now. But I’ll keep the blog category and the microblog in parallel. The Books category here will be for when I want to write or quote more than 140 characters, whereas the microblog will make it less likely that I never get around to mentioning something at all.

I did already deviate a tiny bit from the original idea, this evening, and used the microblog to mention an article I’d read, which wasn’t a book. If I start doing lots of those then maybe I’ll make another one, and have one for online articles and one for the books. Don’t know yet. I think the BookTrail ought to stay as mostly books, though.

At some point I might also get around to setting up a WordPress widget to have the BookTrail posts visible somewhere on the blog front page here. Or maybe on the Books category page. But that’s not a high priority for now.

So, anyway, you’re all invited! to follow my BookTrail if you’re interested.

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Lovely article from Havi this week, one of my favourites ever from her:

Some useful guiding principles for the Book of You.

People vary.

That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.

All the biggified people on the internet shouting about how you have to write in the morning and you can’t have more than three projects and how you always have to do X to get Y?

They’re not talking about you. They’re talking about themselves. They are sharing some of the information from that big Book of Them.

In fact, lots of things vary.

Just because something is true for you right now doesn’t mean it’s always going to be true for you.

The Book of You isn’t about absolutes. It’s about taking various factors into consideration, and figuring out what you can extrapolate from what you know. And then testing.

I was especially tickled at the “That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.” Hahahaha!

Received wisdom that isn’t very wise

This has been a major theme of my explorations for the last ten years or so: disentangling what actually works for me from what I once nicknamed “Received wisdom that isn’t very wise”.

It seems to me that a lot of people don’t realise what Havi so succinctly points out. They talk, and write articles and books, as though everyone is much more similar to them than is actually the case. Sometimes they get so evangelical about their wonderful methods, you could accidentally start to wonder if you’re wrong for not being able to succeed along that route.

So then as a listener/reader, you have to do your own filtering. Does this fit? Does that fit? Does this method help, or am I in fact hindering myself by trying to do things that way when I’m not wired like that person is?

Books

A few books which I’ve found useful on the quest:

All recommended by me :-)

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Big thanks to Ciaran for telling me about it, and making it sound so intriguing that I went straight online to see if the library had it :-)

First of all I must say: if any of this interests you, and certainly if you’re in the habit of following news via any mainstream media, then time spent reading this book will not be wasted. It’s readily available; I got a copy from the library. It’s pretty gripping in places, with lots of real life stories.

Nick Davies is a journalist himself: “a Guardian man”, he says. The book focuses primarily on print media in the UK, but includes enough on TV, radio and other countries to show that similar patterns repeat there.

I’m going to start by quoting some largish chunks from the book, to lay out some relevant territory. (Bold bits added by me.) And then after that, I’ll say a few things I’ve been thinking about after reading it.

Then and now

Historically, the clearest threats to press freedom (i.e. the freedom to tell the truth) have come from outside of newsrooms; and they have tended to bring pressure to bear at the point of publication. The state did this through formal censorship, reinforced by secrecy, legal restraint and physical intimidation. Media owners, as we have seen, did this through direct and sustained interference. Both threats remain, albeit in more subtle form than in the past.

But now we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsrooms, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged. The problem now is not merely at the point of publication but also at the earlier and even more important stage of gathering and testing raw information. (p22-23.)

To put things in perspective, the author estimates a percentage of problems which nowadays come from owners’ and advertisers’ interference:

Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p22.)

So what’s the big problem nowadays, if not deliberate interference?

It’s time, and behind that, money.

More stories, less time

In preparing the book, the author commissioned some research from a team at Cardiff University. They estimate that since 1985, staffing levels on the national papers have slightly fallen, whereas the amount of editorial space they’re filling has trebled. (p63.)

At the same time, local papers and local news agencies were going out of business, depriving the national papers of the network of local journalists who in past times would have been feeding stories in.

… the Cardiff researchers surveyed national news reporters. Two-thirds of them said they were now producing more stories; and two-thirds of them said they were now doing less checking. … One told them: ‘Newspapers have turned into copy factories. This leaves less time for real investigations, or meeting and developing contacts. The arrival of online editions has also increased demand for quick copy, reducing the time available for checking facts.’

Another, from a different paper, said: ‘I think the time available to be thorough has decreased … The main consequence of that is that if things require lots of work, they are less likely to be embarked on.’ … And another: ‘I insist on making at least two check calls on every story, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, because of time constraints.’ (p64.)

The health editor of the Times, Nigel Hawkes, captured the view of many: ‘We are churning stories today, not writing them. Almost everything is recycled from another source … Actually knowing enough to identify the stories is no longer important. The work has been deskilled. (p59.)

The author asked a young graduate to write a diary of “one week in his working life on a regional daily tabloid”. At the end of the week, the young reporter counts up:

Number of stories: 48 (9.6 per day)
People spoken to: 26
People seen face to face: 4 out of 26
Total hours out of office: 3 out of 45.5 (p59.)

The author comments:

This is life in a news factory. No reporter who is turning out nearly ten stories every shift can possibly do his or her job properly. No reporter who spends only three hours out of the office in an entire working week can possibily develop enough good leads or build enough good contacts. No reporter who speaks to only twenty-six people in researching forty-eight stories can possibly be checking their truth. (p59.)

Recycled stories

The researchers also chose two random weeks and analysed all the stories in the Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, to find out how many were original.

At the end of this unique investigation, they came up with a striking finding - that the most respected media outlets in the country are routinely recycling unchecked second-hand material. … this tends to come from two primary sources; wire agencies like the Press Association, and public-relations activity which is promoting some commercial or political interest.

…

… only 1% of wire stories which were carried by Fleet Street papers admitted the source. Most carried misleading bylines, ‘by a staff reporter’ or even by a named reporter who had rewritten the agency copy. The denial of PR input is at least as thorough… ‘We found many stories apparently written by one of the newspaper’s own reporters that seem to have been cut and pasted from elsewhere.’ (p52-53.)

Many weren’t properly checked before being recycled:

The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70% of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12% of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked. (p53.)

And these percentages left out the tabloids and various other sources of even lower quality:

These were simply the stories that were being presented by the best daily newspapers in the UK as an account of the most important or interesting events in the country over the preceding twenty-four hours. (p53.)

Relying on agencies

One common practice is to use something “off the wire”, i.e. from an agency such as Reuters or the Press Association (PA).

As one national newspaper correspondent told the Cardiff researchers: ‘Checking information has decreased, and what is worse, it is not expected by the news desk. I cannot tell you the number of times I am told to “take it off the wires and knock it into shape“, which is just terrible.’ … A section editor on a national daily told them: ‘We’ve always been reliant on wire copy, but we use it a hell of a lot more these days. It’s quite common for us to cut and paste a story off PA, renose it a bit to mask where it’s come from and then put it out there as our own.’ (p75.)

But the agency may not have checked it, either:

PA reporters told me they routinely start the day by writing stories from press releases and other newspapers and, since they may do this at six or seven in the morning, they cannot possibly find anybody to check them with. One of their senior editors agreed that this happens. He had previously worked for a regional newspaper and told me ‘We used to take what we were given from PA and accept it as fact but once I went to work there, I realised that we couldn’t.’

…

Another agency man told [the Cardiff researchers]: ‘My father was a journalist for Reuters for twenty-five years, and the working conditions were completely different. Stories would take much longer to put together, but when they were, they were more likely to be accurate and close to the truth.’ (p82.)

The author sums up in a line:

Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system. (p51.)

Truth and truth

And when you’re using agency sources, there’s another vital missing link: Reporting accurately what someone says is not the same as reporting the truth.

PA is a news agency, not a newspaper. It is not attempting, nor does it claim to be attempting, to tell people the truth about the world. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, put it to us: ‘What we do is report what people say and accurately.’ The PA reporter goes to the press conference with the intention of captruring an accurate record of what is said. Whether what is said is itself a truthful account of the world is simply not their business. … Sleuthing, Grun told us, is not PA’s role. ‘Our role is attributable journalism - what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the Prime Minister says there are chemical weapons in Iraq, that is what the good news agency will report. (p83.)

No-one was watching

Moreover, the agencies don’t have enough journalists any more to properly cover the whole country, so important stories get missed entirely - e.g. from local governments, courts and even Parliament. No-one’s watching!

When I looked into this in the late 1990s, I found a criminal trial which had been running for three months at Leicester Crown Court, without a word of national coverage, even though it had unearthed Scotland Yard’s involvement in unlawfully importing Yardie gangsters from Jamaica who were used as informants and effectively given a licence to commint crime in London. (p78.)

As to Government:

Chris Moncrieff, who has covered Parliament for PA since 1962, told us … that PA now covers far fewer political meetings and speeches than it used to and relies far more on government press releases. ‘They’ve won’, he said. ‘If they put out in advance a copy of the speech, then we will not go. We now print what they want us to print. We go to far fewer meetings or not at all.’ (p80.)

And more…

I must say I finished the book thinking “What’s the point of reading a newspaper ever again? Most of what’s in it can’t be trusted anyway”.

There’s a lot more to it, which I haven’t cited here: the dynamics of which stories are likely to be chosen for print and which ignored; the money poured into public relations companies nowadays, and what they do; the success of organisations like Greenpeace in shaping stories; and a series of fascinating “case study”-type chapters, looking at different newspapers, different stories etc.

(Some of the stories are covered in even more depth at the web site connected with the book, www.flatearthnews.net.)

But what I found particularly illuminating was that whole scenario I’ve been describing via the quotes above: less and less time to research, understand or check the facts.

My own little case study

As I was reading, I kept thinking of that story in the Guardian back in October, reproducing some of the dodgy stats from Graham Badman’s work.

Now doesn’t that look like a perfect case study of the kind of thing Nick Davies talks about in the book?

So, given all that…

To sum up: the story shows no sign of having been written for the purpose of telling the truth.

It did forward the Government’s agenda and fill up some space in the paper, though. :-/

I wonder… if Jessica Shepherd even worked on the story at all - or if someone else stuck her name on it.

I wonder… who put which words of the article together at which points. Maybe it was based on a Govt press release, plus an Education Otherwise press release for Fiona’s quote? Maybe it was cobbled together at the Guardian, or maybe before that at the Press Association or Reuters?

Implications and possibly opportunities

I think this territory is important for activists to know and understand.

For one thing, it’ll give us a more realistic perspective on what we can expect from the Press.

Nick Davies again:

Most of the time, most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don’t know. … They [now] work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. (p28.)

But also, there are opportunities here.

It’s not that I want journalism to be compromised like it is. In the case of the Children, Schools & Families Bill, and the plan to interfere with non-school education, I think we’d be infinitely better off with a Press which had time to find out and understand what was really happening.

(Or, failing that, at least we could do with something like the Center for Public Integrity, an independently funded organisation for investigative journalism in the States - also mentioned in the book.)

And the same is true for the world in general: truth is just generally helpful in doing good in the world, and lies generally are not.

But as long as the media does work that way, we should be learning how to take advantage of it like the other “players” do. Why shouldn’t it be our press releases that find their way in?

(Well, OK, one answer to that is it’s more risky for the Press to print things which go against current “received wisdom” - that’s another thing that the author talks about - but still, there are things we could say that wouldn’t hit that filter.)

Here’s another quote from that young journalist’s diary, from the book. Remember, this is about working on a regional daily paper:

Come in at eight to find the desk asking for a lead story, two 60-line basements [for the foot of a page] and 100 lines of nibs [news in briefs]. And they have no leads. I usually find some stories on my weekend off, but I’ve had a horrible cold. They tell me to check progress with a building being knocked down in the centre of town. They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space. I phone the developer and the council and turn it into a story. I take my first ever lunch break, wander the streets, copying down details of posters advertising car-boot sales, meditation evenings, whatever. Back in the office, I start turning them into stories. The desk panic because they still have no front-page lead. They steal an old story off the sports desk …

…

Then they tell me to do the Smilies: every day, on page seven, we run three happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics. No leads. I call my mum, who lives nearby, and she reads out bits from another local paper. I turn them into Smilies.

…

A real story walks in the front door: a young woman who has had her children taken into care because they say she has learning disabilities so can’t make a decent mum. She is desperate, been standing in the rain waiting for the doors to open. I tell her I’ll call her. I know I won’t; the desk aren’t interested. … No leads at all. I recycle some old stuff from my notebook and download a few upcoming events off the council website. (p56-57.)

Papers like that probably aren’t going to be interested in the politics we’d like them to report. But a couple of phrases stick in my mind.

They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space.

happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics.

Does anyone else see an opportunity here for some awareness-raising of non-school education? I can’t help wondering whether we could be in our local papers almost as often as we like, with very little effort, just by making a point of taking a few good-quality pix whenever we do anything interesting.

OK, not every child will want to have their photo in the paper, and not every family is prepared to risk bringing the attention of the Local Authority upon them in these times of prejudice and ultra vires practice. But still… remember the picnics with the bubble-blowing?

As for queer activism, I imagine local papers may not be quite as open to that, what with homophobia/biphobia and all; but still I’m pondering the use of photos in helping to get more bi news into Gay Times, Diva or the Pink, or any queer activism into the mainstream papers. Remember BiCon 2002 and the pix in Diva? or BiCon 2003 and the pix in the Big Issue?

And a last word

yeah, so I recommend reading this book :-)

Linky index…
Top of document
Then and now
More stories, less time
Recycled stories
Relying on agencies
Truth and truth
No-one was watching
And more…
My own little case study
Implications and possibly opportunities
And a last word

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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I thought I’d celebrate it by telling you about a favourite book and a favourite blog.

Time to Think

The book is Nancy Kline’s Time to Think. It’s been hugely influential in my life ever since I discovered it in December 1998. (Funnily enough, the copyright year inside it is actually 1999, but it got into at least one bookshop just before the turn of the year, and that’s where I found it. I’d already read and liked a previous book of hers.)

NK’s writing immediately rang true to me. I recognised the Thinking Environment as a description of a listening space that was missing in my life, which I’d been intuitively trying for a long time to elicit from friends without having a clear idea of exactly what to ask for. So the book was doubly useful: one, it clarified for me what I was looking for; and two, in future, all I needed to do to explain the idea was to give people the book!

Then, early in 1999, I started rather experimentally having Thinking Sessions with a friend. I remember in one of the earliest ones where it was my turn (maybe the very first), my theme was about how doing my business accounts could be less of a nightmare every year.

One new idea I had in that session was getting my computer to open an accounts spreadsheet on start-up, so I could input right then whatever had happened that day or the previous day, while it was still fresh in memory. Another was designating a container for receipts near where I took my coat off, so I could empty my pockets into it when I got in, and not have to search the house for bus tickets every year. It took several years after that for the doing-the-accounts nightmare to diminish to a reasonable size, but that Thinking Session was the start.

I’ve kept on with Thinking Sessions ever since - not with the same friend all that time, but with different people over the years. A lot of mine are about how I’m using my time and energy, including a sort of “Review of what’s currently happening”. But sometimes I’ll zoom in on some particular area.

Here’s an article I wrote back in 2000, with a bit more about how the process works. Currently I have three regular Thinking Partners, and we take turns to do an hour every couple of weeks. We call them Thinks - “Your turn to Think” is a familiar phrase in my life :-)

The Fluent Self

The blog I want to celebrate is Havi Brooks’ The Fluent Self. I think it must have been some time in 2008 that I discovered this, and it quickly became a favourite of mine - it’s now at the top of the list in my feed reader.

Havi writes with a lovely mix of compassion, humour and creativity. The blog subtitle is “When you need some destuckification.”

Some of the running jokes I can sort of “take or leave”, but the central core of what she writes is right up my street: metaphors, internal conversations, working “with yourself” rather than trying to turn yourself into someone you’re not.

Havi identifies as an introvert, and she has an interesting perspective on balancing (a) a strong need for time alone with (b) a purpose which involves being “out in the world”. I don’t think I’ve seen that written about anywhere else, and I find it really useful.

By way of further intro, some ideas/posts I liked:

Happy reading!

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