Irish journalism's failings are becoming more obvious

Originally posted at tomfelle.com

A FEW days ago I happened to bump into a former colleague who had left journalism to enter the public relations industry.

Over a coffee, we discussed several issues - the good old days, the not so good old days, the latest insider gossip, how our respective career paths had diverged, and what the future held for both of us. We also, perhaps not surprisingly, discussed at length our own former industry, the newspaper industry, specifically Irish journalism, and shared our views on what we thought was wrong with it currently.

I climbed on to my soapbox and told him that I continue to believe that newspapers have no God given right to exist. Many have gone the way of the dodo, and some Irish papers may well soon follow unless they wake up to a number of realities, including changing reader habits, the need to be much more creative about the way news is covered and what constitutes news, the need to build a brand across platforms and carry audiences from the web to print and visa versa, all in all the explosive power of the Internet and new media. Journalists also need to face up to commercial realities.

In response he said he was shocked at how easy it was for him to get a press release into a newspaper, and how easy it was to massage news in a certain direction, to the benefit of his clients. The phrase “Apple A, Apple C, Apple V” may mean nothing to most ordinary readers, but in journalistic parlance it is shorthand for lazy journalism, copying and pasting from a press release into a news story. The practice, he said, was so widespread that very often only marginal changes are made to press releases, which are topped and tailed, a byline added, and placed straight on to news pages and passed off as verified fact. He wasn’t complaining, he makes a living from it, but even he sounded shocked at how little independent questioning by journalists there is of fairly obvious spin. 

The reasons are many: less journalists working longer hours, lower standards, little or no investment in investigative reporting, all caused, in the main, by the recession and the collapse of property advertising. Ironically, it was the newspaper industry which in part fuelled the house prise inflation fiasco, and its journalists are rightly accused of not investigating or independently reporting on the property industry. The counter argument is that the public weren’t interested and those who did were roundly shouted down (Sunday Business Post deputy editor Richard Curran, through his RTE investigation ‘Futureshock’ was one of the few journalists to question the sustainability of house price inflation and warned of an impending crash in 2007, but the program was subject to a barrage of attacks and criticism).

Gene Kerrigan, writing in today’s Sunday Independent, makes compelling arguments about the failure of journalists, and the profession, to call it like it is, and fight PR spin. I’m lucky enough to teach some of the brightest, hungriest and most enthusiastic young trainee reporters in the country at the University of Limerick. The former Irish Independent executive editor Philip Molloy once told them they were the “future of Irish Journalism”. As part of their course they are taught to hold power to account, to ask the tough questions, uncover the facts, and report them in the public interest. Because if they don’t, no one will. 

If Kerrigan is right, then it seems those basic ideals have been forgotten by most of the Irish news media.