PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS

The Commission recognised that we are in a transitional period in which many employers are still undecided on the level of investment they are prepared to put into new media, and that in the long run staffing should stabilise with proper job allocation and training. Big national media websites already have dedicated staffs and there are signs that regional groups, particularly Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror, are beginning to plan seriously for betterresourced“web first”operations.There will, however, still be professional hazards for journalists in new media.

Good journalism needs to be ethical and original, and to be adequately resourced. To do that, publications must employ sufficient staff. However thorough and hard-working journalists might be, they cannot produce work that is properly checked and considered if there are not enough of them to do it and they are under pressure to produce too much.

In responses to the Commission’s survey, 34% said the quality of new media was professional, 52% said it was adequate, 14% said it was poor.

These figures were closely mirrored in responses to a question on the effect on the quality of traditional media: 14% said the effect was serious, 57% said it was not serious and 29% said there was no effect.

Around half the publishers detailed in the survey, both national and regional, appear to be taking advantage of commercial uncertainty in the industry to cut costs and jobs, with a consequent fall in editorial standards.

Some publishers, most notably the Telegraph Media Group, panicked and tried to transform their news operations overnight, imposing large-scale redundancies in the move to a 24/7 multimedia operation. The situation at the Telegraph is one of the worst picked up by the survey. The group has shed more than 100 journalists over the last three years at the same time as launching a full range of internet services – with the remaining journalists, reduced in number, writing web stories, blogging, podcasting and vidcasting. Telegraph journalists told us of numerous problems relating to quality:

“Many of us are overloaded with work and having to meet earlier deadlines because of the lack of subs to process the copy.”

THE STANDARD OF EDITING

Unsubbed copy being posted to website, which was reported by members at national, regional and magazine titles, is the most serious threat to standards, compounded by the pressure of time and volume of material.

Journalists on a daily group in eastern England told us:

Some titles at a business magazine group in London are operating a haphazard “open outcry”system to get stories checked:

At a Newsquest evening title in the north west of England journalists complained that:

“News stories are going up unsubbed. Reporters file to the newsdesk who edit the copy then upload it. Reporters have even been trained to upload copy directly to the internet themselves. There is a strong feeling that Newsquest nationally would be happy for reporters to upload their stories entirely untouched.”

Members in some offices, like the magazine group mentioned above, said there are no experienced journalists working on the websites and that copy is handled by web technicians. The quality and legal standard of work must be checked by journalists with a good grounding in media law before being posted online.

The same considerations apply to images as well as words. In its much-publicised first ruling on a newspaper website under its new policy of adjudicating on the internet as well as print, the Press Complaints Commission found against the Hamilton Advertiser over its use of a reader-supplied video showing school students behaving badly in class, which breached the PCC Code of Practice on the reporting of children. Other newspapers in the area had used images with the faces pixelated but no-one on the Hamilton Advertiser website had apparently thought to do so.

A further risk is the thoughtless posting of hoax material. In the “Dorset elk”case a member of the public hoodwinked Sky TV into broadcasting a dramatic image of a forest fire in the American rockies supposedly showing a small heath fire in Dorset; the image was used also by national papers before anyone spotted a pair of elk standing in the middle of the picture. There have been plenty of cases of journalists being duped by hoaxes, but it is now much easier to perpetrate them because of the prevalence of user-generated material. News publishers need to dedicate the necessary resources to make sure this material is checked and verified, something that already happens with the user-content hub at BBC News Online.

MULTI-MEDIA WORK

Editors will have to commission and edit material in different forms for different media. Telegraph journalists said:

There will be a demand for more visual material, potentially at the cost of serious reporting. At a daily title in the north west of England, we were told,

“Newsquest don’t really want interviews on their video reports – they are more keen to have strong visual elements like community events or fun runs. It makes no sense to do a video interview of the partner of a murder victim when a video of pig-racing will bring in ten times as much traffic.”

The commission recommends that chapels should strive to ensure that decision-making is in the hands of qualified and experienced editors with the time to devote to all media and that editorial considerations are given priority in setting news priorities.

One of the biggest dangers lies in the ease of copying and pasting text from websites and emails. Quite apart from questions of copyright, journalists under time pressure may be tempted to simply lump text across without proper consideration of its quality or reliability. Inaccurate material, especially of a sensational nature, can be easily perpetuated by being lifted from one site to another; in the event of a problem arising with it, the actual original source may be hard to trace. Reused material should always be identified and attributed to its source. The NUJ New Media Industrial Council said:

And the NUJ Ethics Council added, drawing on the European Federation of Journalists JET project guidelines of 1999:

The commission recommends that the importance of checking and attributing material must be emphasised in all training for internet work.

Further, when legal problems or serious questions about accuracy arise with copy, it must be routine to amend or remove it from website archives, and to announce the fact on the site.

OUTSIDE MATERIAL

Visual: There is a concern that user-contributed video, though valuable in reporting live events, is contributing to a lower standard of quality for professional footage.

The commission has been told of extremely poor quality video being produced by print journalists without proper training, and there is a risk that editors will find this acceptable.

Members flagged up special problems with video material from other organisations, whether actuality material such as police or CCTV video, or video news releases (VNRs). Journalists at one Newsquest title said:

The practice of running unedited press releases has been a feature of under-resourced local newspaper journalism for years, but at least it is not difficult to rewrite and even seek an alternative source of opinion to them, if there is time. Editing a VNR is difficult and time-consuming, particularly if it is tightly and professionally produced. Again it is important that when used they are attributed in linking and introductory material and by the imposition of a logo or caption (“POLICE VIDEO”for instance) indicating the source.

The NUJ has long warned of the dangers of the digital manipulation of images and until 2007 there was a clause in its Code of Professional Conduct forbidding the process unless the image is clearly labelled as such. Manipulating images may not be new but it is becoming progressively easier to do as the software becomes more accessible.

The commission recommends that the union revive its campaign to ensure that images manipulated to all but cosmetic effect must be marked with an agreed symbol.

Handling comments posted by users presents more management issues for publishers, who need to decide whether to pre, post or reactively moderate content. There are still few legal precedents, but approving content and then publishing it can make publishers liable for it, rather than letting content go live and then withdrawing it immediately if it is found to be problematic. Not surprisingly, there is a lack of confidence in this area, though online publishers, including the BBC and the Guardian, are increasingly recruiting dedicated staff to manage this area.

‘ONE-MAN BANDS’

Employing single journalists to produce video reports has a clear impact on quality, as well as implications for the safety of a lone reporter on location with valuable recording equipment. To have to research, interview, film or photograph, edit and script-write is very demanding, particularly where a reporter is expected to file for a print publication at the same time.

Some journalists, encouraged to take up video without being given adequate training or support, have produced very poor quality video. The commission has heard of numerous cases of newspapers and magazines having to ease up on their initial enthusiasm to get lone journalists out on the road in the expectation of their producing broadcast-quality video packages. Journalists at one magazine group said:

“One journalist was trained to edit video; he produced a 4-5 minute piece interviewing at a company event and the results were ‘absolute shite’and took a week to post. Video is felt to be too time consuming and no other journalists have experience or training.”

In centres where video training has been thoroughly done and the journalists are given proper support, work of high quality is being done, particularly on the websites of TV broadcasters. But the fact is that it takes even a trained and skilled broadcast video journalist, working under the agreements between the NUJ and the BBC, up to a day to produce a presentable two-minute package and it is uneconomical, as well as unprofessional, to demand it of a semi-trained print reporter or photographer.

Members on a daily paper in eastern England told us:

The commission recommends that NUJ agreements must ensure that all journalists producing website video should be fully trained to do it.

The practice of reporters taking photographs is becoming widespread, to the detriment of the quality of images in many cases. This effect was recognised when newspaper companies began asking reporters to take pictures in the early 1990, at the advent of digital cameras. The NUJ’s experience then was that the practice receded in the wake of reduced picture quality and reporters’ reluctance. There seems to be evidence that reporters now are more willing to work with the more user-friendly cameras – and that editors aren’t so bothered about the quality of images.

Even where reporters, either by agreement or otherwise, take pictures, they must not, except in the absence of any alternative, be required to take important news or feature pictures, nor to take pictures which would adversely impact on their ability to devote the appropriate time/effort to reporting an event.

‘PRODUCTION JOURNALISTS’

This relatively new designation has been applied in big offices to sub-editors now required to work in all media. Pressure on journalists to multi-skill can be as great inside the office as out on the road. They may have to undertake audio and video recording and editing as well as reporting, text editing and blogging. If there are staff shortages, or particular needs in one department, they can find themselves switched around, which can lead to scrappy work even if they have had training. One PJ at the PA told us:

“I have been given the title in readiness for being flung into any department – teletext, digital, page ready, main wire, foreign wire, city – at a moment’s notice. Several people are experiencing this – one being required to cover shifts in three or four different departments in the same week – and they find it very difficult to keep switching and changing between departments, accurately remembering, and adjusting to, the demands of the different roles.”

Chapels should seek to ensure that production desks are adequately staffed so that journalists can spend more time properly developing their skills in all these new areas.

ADVERTISING PRESSURE

As publishers seek desperately to secure advertising on their websites to replace that lost from their traditional media, there is evidence of greater pressure to make editorial concessions to advertisers. At the Telegraph, we were told:

The NUJ Code of Conduct is clear about such practices. It says a journalist should resist “threats or any other inducements to influence, distort or suppress information … and does not by way of statement, voice or appearance endorse by advertisement any commercial product or service.”

Archant journalists told us:

It goes without saying that chapels and members must always resist such pressures, but they should be aware of increasing dangers and be prepared to take a stand when necessary in defence of professional and independent reporting.

Such pressures can be internal too, as publishers marketing strategies require cross-promotion of their various media or the prioritising of one above another. Archant journalists said:

“Sometimes it feels like the web and paper are meant to co-operate and at other times they are in competition.”

In other offices members reported either that websites were being used to generate interest and advertising in the paper, or vice versa, with the result that stories were inadequate in one medium. Even at the practical level, inserting promotional material is time-consuming: at the Telegraph members said

“The newspaper production process is slowed down by constant insertion in their pages of cross-reference, ‘lozenges’ and ‘page talkers’ for website and audiovisual spin-offs.”

CONCLUSION: THE BRAND

It is commonly pointed out that with the vast number of information sources online, readers will need professional editors and trusted news organisations to act as gatekeepers, filtering and interpreting that information. The publishers’solution has been to establish themselves as brands to which readers will turn for the news they want, and those that have been doing so for a decade now, such as the Guardian and the BBC, have achieved some success.

But more publishers are now following this strategy and the picture is becoming increasingly complicated. Readers are going to non-journalistic commercial sites for consumer information they would previously have taken from newspapers and magazines. And as Jane Singer, the Johnston Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), Preston, says,

“Increasingly, the dominant websites will point people to non-journalistic sources of news (such as blogs). Google is of most concern here at the moment because of its aggressive acquisitions and development strategy. The fact that users are also seeing disaggregated information increasingly from organisations like Yahoo! must be of concern to conventional news publishers.”

In this context journalists must also establish themselves as a “brand”. Providing they are well trained and resourced, they must be relied on to continue to serve the public interest of providing fair and independent information, in whatever medium and for whatever employer. With publishers wracked with uncertainty, driven by the imperative to maintain profits in a confused and unregulated market, the NUJ will have an important role in maintaining professional standards. The union’s Code of Conduct , newly revised, provides the basis for this.

The commission recommends that chapels should seek to ensure that

• All reporters’ copy must be subbed and checked by qualified journalists before posting onto websites

• There is a web editor and sufficient trained staff for every site: experienced journalists employed to check content

• Further the commission recommends that the NUJ should

• Launch a public campaign on the importance of its Code of Conduct and in particular its relevance in a changing media environment.

• Campaign to ensure that the self-regulation regime now being extended to parts of the web is strengthened to ensure the public have an adequate means of redress against inaccurate reporting and that the union continue its campaign for a conscience clause for journalists.

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