August 25, 2012
What defines the reporter? It used to be that reporters went out to look at events, and came back with answers to four or five questions: who, what, where, when, and, sometimes, why? They covered events by capturing basic information, writing it up in the form of a ‘story’. But the basics are now readily available – more easily and at lower cost to the reader than ever before. It does not take a reporter to answer the first four of these questions when we can gather as much from open access, user-generated platforms such as Twitter; and these platforms have all but dispensed with the form of the ‘story’. From the traditional list, that leaves only one question for the reporter to answer; and just the one answer to be formulated. True, the outstanding question – why? – is also the most difficult, but this still amounts to a reduction in the reporter’s role; especially since separating the fifth question from the other four Ws means that the last remaining answer often comes better from analysts, commentators and leader writers rather than reporters.
So what is the reporter for? Now that basic information is often provided not by reporters but by people-formerly-known-as-readers, it is surely time to reconsider what the people-formerly-known-as-reporters should be doing instead of supplying the basics. Consideration of this question is especially timely since, unless we make a point of addressing it directly, chances are that the Leveson Inquiry and its legacy will redefine the reporter in terms of how well he behaves and what codes of practice he has been seen to follow. Although this process may demonstrate who is and who is not considered fit to be a reporter, it cannot show what purpose reporting is fit for. British journalism will have wasted a good crisis if it checks in for moral rehab instead of seizing the opportunity to reformulate itself. Whereas Leveson et al pose the current situation as a moral crisis, what the reporter really faces is a fundamental question of purpose – what am I here to do?; and a supplementary question – if I am to fulfil a modified purpose, now that the basics are covered by non-reporters, what form should this fulfilment take? read more
Later pictures show only a brown hand peeping out from beneath the white sheet. But there is one fuzzy photo, taken before the police covered the body, which shows the victim of New York gunman Jeffrey Johnson. The shape of the body seems more womanly than male, although it’s hard to tell from the baggy pants and big shirt s/he’s wearing. Let’s just say it’s a she. Her head and torso lie flat on the pavement. But her legs are jumbled up against the wall (the wall of a shop and office building in Manhattan), as if her feet started walking at the very moment when her top half slumped to the floor. Death came untidily, then. Not a clean, cool, smart, wind-in-your-hair death, if there ever is such a thing. Meanwhile Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking at a press conference two hours later, was relieved to file this fatality neatly away under ‘not terrorism’. Ditto the fate of the gunman himself, shot dead by police a few minutes later. In the shadow of the Empire State Building, in the run up to the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, this might have been another iconic killing. If it had been a suicide shooter, the plump police chiefs and the onlooking crowd (dressed down in the late summer heat: 75 degrees at the time of the 9am slaying), would have been automatically recruited as extras in another Gotham City epic. But because Jeffrey Johnson came back to kill someone he used to work with, or for, at the women’s clothes firm which sacked him when it downsized a year ago, this whole episode was swiftly demoted to a B-movie. Of course he, and only he, was personally responsible. But in another sense both Johnson and his victim were casualties of recession; and unlike terrorism, everything to do with recession is banal, non-iconic. Even when it bleeds, it doesn’t lead. read more