Something I did for Roy Greenslade

The business of selling newspapers dictates that editors must create a product that appeals to the marketplace. With the near instantaneous transmission of news and the Internet providing a means of accessing information from a variety of sources, news providers have had to think up new ways of distinguishing their product. Yet the notion newspapers have increasingly focused on ‘infotainment’ does not necessarily mean quality journalism has suffered as a result.

In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer demonstrates through empirical evidence how accuracy, trust and credibility are the primary drivers of audience creation and retention. He says: “The way to achieve societal influence is to obtain public trust by becoming a reliable and high quality news provider, which frequently involves investment in news resources and editorial output.” According to Meyer, the market model provides sufficient incentive for newspapers to strive for accuracy and truth because this is what the public, and as a consequence advertisers, desire. If Meyer is right, newspapers should be varying the nature of their content without sacrificing the bedrock journalistic values of truth and accuracy.

Anna McKane, career journalist and director of the BA Journalism and Contemporary History programme at City University, has recently undertaken research on accuracy standards across Britain’s newspaper industry. Although she is keen to stress she has not yet completed the survey, her preliminary findings offer an insight into the nature of the debate in the UK.

“I think that what’s being shown is that the news stories are nothing like as inaccurate as people believe. The problem lies with the increase in the number of columnists. There’s certainly more fiction in the columns,” says McKane. “Overall the tabloids aren’t terribly accurate but that’s because they are filled with a lot of stuff that’s not news. We just can’t check the gossip stuff.”

So while newspapers appear to have retained a commitment to accuracy and truth when it comes to hard news, the rest of the content has changed in order to serve a public demand for gossip and opinion that is largely unverifiable and loosely sourced.

Yet Jay Rosen, author of influential new media blog PressThink, believes standards have decreased. He says: “I think the ‘bad habits’ of the traditional press have been magnified, underlined and analyzed more starkly than ever, in part because of the rise of new media. Maybe some of them - a weakness for celebrity news, a tendency to pack journalism, and casual attitudinizing - are even worse.”

Rosen’s view holds a lot of currency in the United States and his criticisms could be levelled at the British tabloids. But it’s not just the tabloids that are changing the nature of their content and how it is presented. John Mair, International Editor of the Times, concedes that the ‘quality papers’ have also had to adapt to changes in the marketplace.

He says: “One aspect is the way the Guardian and the Times have increasingly turned to giving side-panels to stories. It’s another point of entry into a story – info bites that would feed into the category of infotainment by providing an extra presentational dimension.”

He also believes that standards of accuracy are still high when it comes to the delivery of hard news yet concedes that the level of opinion and comment has also increased.

“Hard news is still there but there’s been a change in the extent to which we want a mediator. With blogs and people posting information on the web, we are now in competition with alternative news sources. It’s the extent to which people trust mediation and the extent to which that mediation has gone.”

Mediation is the way in which newspaper columnists and commentators interpret the news. It could also be called the spin that opinion makers put on events. Mair is suggesting that, far from decry the loss of objectivity inherent in mediation, audiences are actively seeking a certain level of mediation from news sources they believe they can trust.

Mair points to competition from the Internet as a key driver of this change: “In a multilayered society newspapers must demonstrate that they are in touch with [developments on the web] but also that they offer more. This has led to an increase in the number of columnists – they sell newspapers. All of that feeds into the argument about how newspapers are responding.”

So what seems to be happening is that newspapers are changing the way news is delivered, with the emphasis placed on interpretation.

Rosen contends this kind of interpretation is exactly why some people trust blogs to a larger extent than mainstream media: “Successful blogs with regular users in the thousands or more develop trust in a different way. For example: by being transparent about their interests and perspectives rather than claiming ‘no interest, no perspective.’”

It seems that an increasingly media savvy public can accept that their news is delivered with motives other than pure objectivity in mind. What the modern media audience is looking for is the ability to interact with that news and correct opinion should they deem it to be wrong, all changes ushered in by the rise of news media.

Mair agrees that the web has led to changes in the way the mainstream media operates: “What the web has done to newspapers is to make everything more transparent. They have been sharpened up. You are less likely to get away with inaccuracy as people can challenge things very easily.”

Rosen supports this, saying: “The first instinct when challenged used to be, ‘we stand by our story.’ Today that's breaking down a little because it's a lot easier for the people who think you got it wrong to get together and prove it.”

So while newspapers are increasing the amount of mediation and interpretation they are also being forced to maintain standards of accuracy because journalism is becoming less of a lecture and more of a dialogue - a change fostered by developments in new media. Newspapers retain a large degree of what Mair refers to as “residual trust.” Despite the rise of new media, it will take some time for newspapers to lose the position of most trusted medium because of their historic roles in the communities they serve. However, what newspapers must beware of, as competition form the Internet increases, is a temptation to sacrifice the very standards that earned them that trust in the first place, in order to be first to the news.

Mair sums up the predicament with these words of warning: “Now there’s not time to get a real perspective, to make the distinction between what’s news and what’s new. Legislation prevents newspapers printing certain things and this applies less to the web. It’s pushing newspapers into taking greater risks. We have been overstepping the mark now all the time. There’s been a relaxation in accuracy, a kind of response to things elsewhere and this is what we have to watch out for.”