Sustainable Journalism

Some days I panic, some days I don’t. Yesterday I had somewhat of a momentous wobble, fearing everything beyond the end of the week let alone what will happen when I finish this course. The profession myself and my colleagues are aiming for seems as if it’s in a perpetual state of flux, in all three disciplines. I take some confidence that we are at one of the best institutions in which to be learning the craft of journalism, but seemingly these days such a skillset is simply not enough.

In order to survive we are going to need thicken our respective skins and become resilient and tenacious freelancers. Never before have journalists had to market themselves as a singular product, or all need that ruthless entrepreneurial streak running through their veins. Gone is the day where you can expect to become a BBC lifer and look forward to getting a pension. Gone is the day of fortress journalism, where the bastions of print and broadcasting fought it out against one another for the best scoop with a stranglehold on audience or readerships of a tripartite medium- print, the wireless and the tellybox. The internet has destroyed these fortresses, gradually eroding them like a dry rot rather than a cataclysmic meltdown. However, as I’ve been banging on about since the birth of this blog – the ramifications have been huge. It’s a tale of espionage by the citizen journalist and blogological warfare.

I read yesterday about the Postgraduate Journalism students of Goldsmiths in South East London, who have been working on the EastLondonLines magazine. What a great idea, a website to serve the commuters of the soon to be reopened tube line. From this they’ve already had some of their stories go national and they are really immersing themselves in the community in which they are studying. Maybe studying broadcast is a bit different, but it’s a shame we’ve been slow off the mark on this one and not combined our work as a whole, to try and market our own journalistic product.

I’ve been giving it a go with a couple of my environmentally geared colleagues with Welsh Green Dragon, but not to the extent of EastLondonLines. It’s time to get my business head on. How can I make it pay?

The deeper we get ourselves in, the more it seems like we’re on a reality TV show. I’m thinking at the moment it’s like a mixture of The Apprentice and Dragons Den. Goldsmith’s are on course for an offer from the dragons. We need to make sure we keep Margaret and Nick from getting us fired.

I dunno who Suralan (or should I say Lord Sugar of Clapton) is going to be yet but when I find out they’ll be getting my CV.

So Johnstone press are today attempting pilot schemes on six of their regional newspapers to see how they can charge for online content in a bid to save flailing print journalism. Included in the six will be titles such as the Whitby Gazette and Ripley and Heanor news, whose websites will either charge £5 for a three month subscription providing unlimited access, or be massively stripped down to force its readership out to buy a traditional hard copy.

Whacking paywalls up around online content is causing much debate at the minute, with the Murdoch empire looking set to start charging for their online content sometime in 2010. The demise on the local press due to falling advertising revenues is nothing new, so a move to start charging for online local news is no real surprise. However, that content needs to be worth paying for, and it shouldn’t stifle the potential for online conversation.

We had a guest lecture from Joanna Geary who works as a Web Development Editor for The Times Online, and she spoke with a great deal of positivity about the future prospect of paywalls. If people choose to pay for content, that can only strengthen the quality of the debate and feedback on articles. If people are paying to be there, then the journalist can in essence serve them more effectively.

I think this is a fine and fair way to approach the daily nationals, but for the local press it may not be as successful. Joanna gave us rundown of what she has managed to achieve in a very short amount of time, and it was all thanks to her interest and enthusiasm of exploring the online medium ahead of her peers. She transformed the online presence of her previous paper, the Birmingham Post, through creating a specialist blog network including academics and professionals across the city. She managed to do this upon a free platform, with an encouraging editor without being hemmed in behind a paywall. Could all this have been achieved behind closed doors?

Unless these local papers have been progressive enough to fully exploit the opportunity of blogs and social networking sites such as twitter before the paywalls are erected then I reckon they’re going to struggle. Argument is that local news is niche enough to warrant paying for online, but to get people to pay that 40p per week fortheir local news they can get elsewhere for free is going to be a tough call if the titles are behind the times.

Aren’t friends great? Aren’t friends especially great when they pull you up on things? And aren’t friends really great when they make you feel bad because they are so well read. And aren’t friends just downright splendid when they also happen to be on your course.

I just don’t know what I do with my time but I certainly don’t seem to be stretching it as far as some people I know. Usually this doesn’t bother me but at times I do let myself slip into a mild state of panic – only mild though so don’t you worry. I say all this as I haven’t in all honesty picked up a newspaper in a good few weeks, not the best seeing as I’m doing a Journalism course. I’ve been too bloody busy, as I had anticipated, trying to nurture my bloody Twitter and this fricking blog, but I have, I suppose, been getting my news online.

Yet sometimes this just isn’t as thorough as battling your way through the paper, and had I done so I wouldn’t have missed out on the few stories that I have been sent links to in the last couple of days. Stories which bear some direct relevance to my actions of the last few weeks. And seemingly to someone else’s amusement!

Remember me being partially brainwashed by some activists that I blogged about on Monday? Well if I’d read the Guardian that very same day I would perhaps have refrained from posting it. Apparently Big Brother (it feels as Orwellian as this when you read it) sorry i mean the Police, have been covertly monitoring and gathering data on law-abiding protesters.  Or as they have now dubbed them/us (do I include myself in this?) ‘domestic extremists’.  So shot myself in the foot with that one, my card has potentially been marked.

Secondly, my friend Julia, who clearly has her head in the papers more frequently than I, has sent me a lovely little piece about Moleskine notebooks. Now, I have recently purchased two of these dinky little things as they’re a nice pocket sized way to try and bring some order to the chaos that is my life. Apparently though, according to Rosie Millard in the Times, it just demonstrates how utterly middle class and white I am. Does it still stand as I got them for about half the price on amazon?

Moleskine notebooks

Much like almost everything else that white people like, these notebooks provide no additional functionality over regular equivalents that cost almost nothing. Thankfully, since white people keep only their most original and creative ideas in the Moleskine, many of them will be required to purchase only one per lifetime.

Since all white people consider themselves to be “creative”, they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts. One of the more popular products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days. Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked: typewriters, journals, suicide and trains are just a few examples.

The only problem is she is bang on. Tragically I’ve been putting off writing in them so as not to tarnish their beauty, and the OCD has kicked in that I must only write in them with my blue ballpoint Parker pen.

I need to get out more. And educate myself with the newspaper.

And not open links in emails from my friends.