This is the August issue in the Last Post of the Month series, commenting on my blog and what it is trying to achieve.

What did Martin Luther King Jnr achieve when he gave his I Have a Dream speech 50 years ago this week? The speech contained no new demands. It was not strong on analysis. Instead, for thousands of civil rights marchers in Washington on the 28^th August 1963, and on behalf of millions of people who have watched and listened to it since that day, his speech gave them back their own experience and the aspirations arising from their own experience, now in a heightened form.

You could say that the speech distilled this experience – except that the listener’s experience has been mobilised rather than stilled. You could say that it captured this experience – except that the speech emancipates its listeners, releasing them from their particulars (‘free at last’) and entering them into a wider communion of autonomous human beings.

With Dr King as their mediator, e pluribus unum.

In the rhythms of his carefully chosen words and in the cadences of his sing song voice, Dr King provided the point of entry into a world which already exceeded the particular status quo, as it also transcended thestatus quo of particulars. Thus he found the form of expression most suited to the democratic content of the civil rights movement.

In its own small way, Singing The News similarly seeks to release particular experiences from the confines of what we are supposed to be and how we are meant to react in order to hold down our allotted role in the status quo. Instead, this is news for and about people in the fullness of their human being.

To this end, the heightened form of Singing The News is intended to heighten us – to give us more stature as human beings, to give more stature to being human. But whereas the heightened form of Dr King’s speech came about in response to a substantial political movement, today there is no such movement for me to respond to. Heightened form is all I have with which to call our common humanity into existence. read more

This is the first in an ongoing series of last-posts-of-the-month. Each of these monthly occasions will be used (A) to reflect on recent entries, and (B) to say something about Take 2 in relation to contemporary developments in journalism.

(A) Why aren’t there any hyperlinks from my posts back to the source material which I have drawn on in order to compose them? Because the aim of the exercise is to use digitisation as the opportunity to address a problem which also arises along with it, namely, the lightness of being prompted by an unending sequence of associated media packages in which one leads to another, and another and another (the ‘computer game’ war in Iraq in 1991 was an early example of this ontology-lite). The sequence is so indefinitely long that both origination and finalisation are all but defined out of existence. However, I am using freely available, online media content produced as part of this sequence, not to extend it but rather in the attempt to bring it to an end or at least slow it down. I am well aware of the widespread assumption that the people-formerly-known-as-readers are emancipated by opening up the media concertina so that each little packet of content, and the user who generated it, act together as mediators between the last person to have done this and the next person who will go on to do it. But in current conditions such a mediating sequence (one mediator leading to another), can only have the effect of containing our existence: it projects its own characteristics onto its subject matter, tending to prescribe all human activity as mediating activity, thus effectively proscribing activity of any other kind (just as fictitious capital broadcasts its serial character and militates against social production). In contrast, in my work the associations are not part of a series but contained within each, single post, so that, being all-of-apiece, each piece is the formal, literary equivalent of an associated world. Moreover, my formulation of these associations constitutes an effort to close the concertina; to make the mediated, immediate – not in the naïve sense of simply being there, nor in accordance with the faux naïve goal of authenticity. Instead I am seeking to arrive at the concrete, where ‘concrete’ is a return journey from the abstract. On this basis, January’s pieces are meant to take the people featured in them out of the mediating sequence which thins out their existence, making them fully human again in a thick description which gets the measure of their humanity. read more

They can hardly be called ‘aims and objectives’, having only emerged during the course of writing these entries; rather, these observations have come to the fore while proceeding with the writing. Even so, they may provide some insight into what this writing is for.

(1) How lyrical is the language of advertising, especially compared to matter-of-fact journalism in its long established forms. Advertising handles its characters with humour, affection, even tenderness. Whereas journalism has tended to dismiss the people featured in it: its peremptory tone has often served as their dismissal notice. Perhaps lyricism is permissible in advertising because the characters who appear in the adverts come with the authority of the commodities they are there to represent. This would mean that the discrepancy between peremptory journalism and lyrical advertising is a further example of the fetishism of commodities; yet another example of things taking precedence over people, with the latter only recognised as such insofar as they are also recognisably bearers of the former. High time, then, for journalists to write lyrics about the people in their stories, i.e. to write about them in a lyrical way; and, by this means, to address the absurdity of things-before-people, which is also how things really are.

(2) The New Journalism of the 1960s was just such an attempt – the lyrical austerity of In Cold Blood; the poetic violence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It arose in reaction to the reification inherent in mainstream journalism, and took its place in the contemporary counter-culture. Subsequently re-titled ‘the journalism of attachment’, the same kind of long form journalism became part of the advocacy culture of the 1990s, calling for more intervention by Western elites rather than less. Aside from its political trajectory, however, the length of this long form journalism has always been problematic. Given the length of time it takes to write, it cannot keep up with the new: it can’t do the news. What’s needed is something which reaches similar levels of descriptive power, but in short form. read more

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