"Churnalism" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo credit: Cornelia Kraft]

I learnt a new word this week after reading an email from a journalist friend.

Churnalism is defined in the Collins online dictionary as: "a type of journalism that relies on reusing existing material such as press releases and wire service reports instead of original research, especially as a result of an increase in demand for news content. "

The verb 'to churn out' means “to produce large quantities of something very quickly.” Typically, it has been used to mean an industrial process and I want to give you just one example of why churnalism is produced in today's media.

Below is the email that my friend forwarded to me. It is apparently a leaked email sent to the subbing [editing] team at one of Australia's biggest commercial newspapers by the chief sub [editor], a British man. It was written after a strike by journalists over the sacking of yet another group of staff. He writes:

"I thought I would spell out expectations for the new gig, which has an open-ended contract (meaning there is no set time frame ... good news). The MINIMUM story output for a 4-hour shift is 16. Obviously we will give everyone a few weeks to...adjust to the new protocols. But if you fail to hit the numbers on a regular basis, we will have THE TALK! Copy flow is still appalling.... Many of you are still subbing normally...Forget it. I know it will come hard to those subs, like myself, who have been in this business for many years. You are now copy-fitting. When the story [gets to us], as far as [this company] is concerned, it is ready to print. We give it a (very) quick read, touch up any minor mistakes [then] get rid of it...We assume the story is perfect, not to be changed...and, please, do not change ANYTHING without first getting approval unless it is glaring obvious...because there will be no checking process. We will have neither the numbers nor the time to check. So make sure you get the magic zero fit...We WILL be reading pages throughout the night, but that’s the best I can do with the budget. It’s also what [this media company] is paying for...and all they want."

I now want to do a little analysis of what some of the words of this chief editor say, compared to what I believe they really mean to the journalists/sub-editors who have to read them and try to work using this email.

"new gig:" meaning you are working in the short-term contracts /freelance gig-economy now.

" open-ended contract: " conditions completely in favour of the employer.

" new protocols" changed rules that demand more production from the worker.

" hit the numbers on a regular basis:" you are on a factory production line and your output is being closely monitored and measured against your colleagues.

" Many of you" (repeated twice for emphasis) meaning: I don't know and don't care enough to communicate with you personally, giving the added benefit of confusing you about which category you might be in.

" copy-fitting:" meaning doing a lot of verbatim cutting and pasting directly from corporate and government press releases.

" we will have THE TALK! " meaning you will be warned that you will be fired unless you meet management's "expectations."

"Copy flow:" you don't write articles. You ensure a flow of content. You simply give order to the words that fill the spaces in the newspaper.

" I know it will come hard to those subs, like myself:” an attempt to convince the journalist that they have a shared past in common, pretending to care and understand how their work conditions are now worse.

" it is ready to print:" I am reinforcing that you will be doing my editing job for me.

I cannot begin to say how happy I am that I do not work for an organisation like the one above.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]

"Why not Australia?" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today

I spent the first thirty years of my life in Australia and the last twenty trying to stay out of it.

Plenty of local people in this part of the world regularly ask me why we are living so far from Australia. There are a number of reasons but visiting there always reminds me that it is landmass with a population that now badly lacks what I call ‘public intellectuals.’

I grew up in the Canberra suburbs seeing brainy egomaniacs like Richard Neville, Clive James, BA Santamaria (though he was also a genuine bigot) and inspirational Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating on television -- and here I mean free-to-air-TV.

But apart from someone like journalist, author and broadcaster Phillip Adams or a humorist like Andrew Denton there are now precious few deep thinkers in popular media.

The same claim could reasonably be made about the United States today where figures like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and perennial US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader have been replaced by a small number of quality satirists such as Jon Stewart.

Even someone like the brilliant (Canadian) writer/activist Naomi Klein has been sidelined from  being heard on a scale that her ideas deserve. The most popular networks and cable TV stations pull in large numbers of viewers who are instead fed a daily diet of polished lies and exaggerated fear-mongering.

Australia is a part of the world where talented, clever people in the creative arts industries have to leave if they genuinely desire to have a wide and mainstream audience.

Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Nicole Kidman, Jason Donovan,Toni Collette, Rod Taylor, Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Tim Minchin, Geoffrey Rush, Naomi Watts, Sia, Rebel Wilson and Barry Humphries simply could not have achieved the high quality of what they have done by remaining in Australia.

There, sport is number one and everything else cultural is a distant second.

Self-styled Australian ‘feral futurist’ Richard Neville wrote a rare, honest assessment of Australia for Adbusters not long ago. He explained why “the lucky country” still tends to rely on superpowers such as the USA (and most recently, China) and how it’s leaders prefer being an international sycophant.

“Australians are easily distracted,” he argued. “The focus of mass media [in Australia] is shopping promotions and light entertainment: cooking, sport, gossip, stock shifts, celebrity trials, soft porn and big-ticket ‘must see’ events.”

The question then has to be why has this happened? 

I think it’s partly because there is no developed interest in real politics in Australia, as opposed to the personality/leader-rivals "slugging it out in a boxing match" type-journalism that Australians are served.

The internet should have been a factor in leading to discussion on politics being less mediocre but it does not appear to be in Australia, unlike the USA where Obama then Bernie Sanders were able to break new activist ground. Instead, the news cycle “downunder” is dominated by a merry-go-round of opinion polls about leadership -- both state and federal -- and that passes for proper political analysis.

Australians are generally not only politically apathetic.

As one anonymous (European) online poster who had lived in Australia for 12 years wrote: “Australians as a whole are quite conservative. Just look at the government they elected! I find it increasingly frustrating. It's all about family, building a house, having a garden, a big 4WD and a BBQ on the weekend with the other families talking footy, house prices and gardening/fishing... I think maybe more adventurous Aussies leave.”

Australia is a very isolated country, but not only geographically. It is rich with beautiful landscapes (particularly the underrated desert) and its people have a lot in their favour. I just don’t want to live there because it doesn’t suit me and we wanted our son to grow up in culturally-rich Europe .

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2018.]

"Eyes wide shut? Will the future of journalism mean we are better informed?"

"At 18:30 GMT on Wednesday the 22nd October 2014, Index on Censorship and the Frontline Club will host a debate on the future of journalism.

This debate will be in English and will take place at 13 Norfolk Place, London."

Click here to go directly to the live stream (between c.18:30 and 20:00 GMT on Wednesday)!

Some bad journalism on Spain

[This blog was also published at NewsTrust’s News Hunt for Bad Journalism.]

In Jennifer Varela’s piece on a recent anti-abortion march in Madrid, the most important words in this article are:

"The bussing in of representatives from more than 40 countries..."

So, not all of the supposed 1 million people who attended the protest are living in Spain. This means that it does not accurately reflect the opinions of Spaniards, who re-elected the progressive Zapatero a couple of years ago.

This figure of one million at the march is also questionable. Some commentators have estimated that the crowd was closer to 60,000, though judging by the photo’s of the event this seems to me to be on the lower side of the truth.

Equally important is the fact that the journalist who wrote the story (Jessica Varela) is not living in Spain, though I disagree with commenters on the Guardian’s CiF [Comment is Free] pages who have argued that it is also relevant whether Jennifer Varela was born in Spain or not. But if she is not living here [in Spain] which is the case, then this can surely affect how accurate her story is.

A statement in her article that is not correct is her claim that “Zapatero has…taken religion out of state schools.” In fact, his government has made compulsory religion class an option to ‘Ethics’ classes.

Another part of the article that deserves a reply is this section:

“the current uproar…reveals a darker truth about the collective Spanish psyche. In politics there will always be the power struggle between left and right, but in Spain, to push too far in either direction drives a sword into the national wound that was never allowed to heal.”

This is dramatic language but it is essentially an argument for a national government to do nothing. It also ignores the possibility that the government relaxing abortion laws could actually benefit women’s choices about reproduction.

This part of Varela’s piece is mystifying:

“To have a million people marching against a reform that effectively only removes the shame attached to abortion suggests that this has been deemed a push too far.”

Who is doing “the deeming?” The church? The opposition conservative party? The supposed million protesters? If this change is in fact “a push too far” then is that because one out of every fourty Spaniards is against it? If so, this is hardly a democratic moment that she is defining.

Varela also makes the odd statement that: “Clearly the dignity of Spanish women was never considered as valuable a commodity as their honour, as it was buried alongside the [Civil] war's more tangible victims.”

Spanish women’s dignity was somehow ‘buried’ in the war? This, I don’t get. To me, if we can say that Spanish women are anything at all, they are generally very dignified (certainly compared to your average Japanese woman who typically still takes an inferior social position relative to men.)

To her credit, Varela has provided many of her sources as links on the CiF pages but The Guardian newspaper publishing pieces of reportage from someone outside of Spain is pretty poor. It is bad editorial decision-making.

This article is mainly well-researched but should never have got to print because there are too many fuzzy statements in it.