Hastings: Condemnation of multiskilling in journalism
October 9, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
“I cannot see how on these terms reporters can have time to acquire the information that enables them to have interesting things to say.”
A former Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard editor Max Hastings delivered a lecture at the City University in London that was reported by the Press Gazette.
He said he was concerned journalists were not being given time to do this job properly in modern newspaper set-ups:
“Many reporters are now required to deliver news to readers and viewers through multiple outlets – podcasts, blogging, TV soundbites. Yet their proper role is surely to gather information and translate it into publishable prose…
They should be trawling Britain, lunching and dining. One of the most important parts of doing our job is simply to hang around. Ignorant proprietors dismiss this as sloth…
Yet talking, listening, watching are our lifeblood…
If newspaper reporters and, worse still, specialist writers are instead chained to a 24-hour, seven-day treadmill, servicing their organisation’s customers by land sea and air, or rather by print and blog and broadcast, devoting hours of each day to technical delivery functions, it seems as if they were being required to cook dinner in a restaurant’s kitchens, then hasten out in waiter’s aprons to serve it at table.
Hastings who edited the Telegraph for 11 years from 1985 and then the Evening Standard for five, recalled:
“When I became an editor and set about interviewing job candidates, I was chiefly interested in discovering whether they possessed that fanatical craving for a career in print which is much more important than brains. Newspapers need a quota of normal, balanced human beings; but a larger number of definitely unbalanced people, who believe that getting the story is the most important thing in the world. At 23, my own prose was pretty dire. I sought to compensate with a manic commitment to producing splashes.”
Hastings condemned also many of the current crop of national newspaper owners for seeming to hate journalists.
“They want the power and influence which possession of a newspaper confers, the access to political leaders and sense of owning a private rifle range, while regarding their journalists as mere trained circus animals who should jump hoops to order…
They fail to understand that in the media, as everywhere else in life, mutual respect is indispensable between those who pay the bills and those who deliver the goods.”
Praising the Daily Mail-owning Rothermeres as the “most enlightened owners I have ever worked for”, he said: “They believe in journalism. They invest generously in their titles. They give editors extraordinary latitude.”
“The Rothermeres like journalists. Rather than make or break governments, or pursue self-aggrandisement, they simply want to own successful titles. As an industry, we would be in much better shape if there were more like them…
The proprietors and managements which lack regard for journalists and bound to fail. It is bewildering that so many people aspire to own newspapers, while despising those who produce them.”
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