Editorial: British Journalism Review Trivia pursuit

Abstract

'One of Nick Davies's informants for his book, Flat Earth News, is a trainee reporter on a regional daily tabloid, and he or she provides a diary of one 45½-hour working week. During it the reporter produced 48 stories of varying lengths and importance on the basis of only 26 conversations with informants, only four of whom were met face-to-face. Indeed, the reporter spent only three hours away from his desk, telephone and computer terminal, and most of the time was occupied in answering demands from the news desk to fill specific holes in the typical 24 pages of local news scheduled in each day's paper. The account suggests that much of this material is trivial and formulaic, to use no stronger terms... What does the future hold if newspapers and broadcasters do not encourage young journalists by allowing them to exercise their skills by using their minds to ask questions and assess the answers sceptically, intelligently and knowledgeably? Poorly trained and with little news judgement, the executives of tomorrow will produce anodyne newspapers and bulletins because that is all they know. And as the paying public wake up to the realisation that the traditional media are turning into mere processors of pseudo-news, they will surely abandon them, happy to find the truth by weighing up for themselves the mixture of fact, opinion and craziness that compete with each other in the free-for-all of cyberspace. If Davies's trainee is a harbinger of the end of news journalism as we know it, the coroner's verdict can be nothing other than suicide.'