The decline of journalism is the theme in two very different articles this week in the church press. The Church of England Newspaper carries a piece by Andrew Carey on the discovery that there are more people working in PR than there are journalists. The other, by Andrew Brown in the Church Times, highlights one specific and highly lamentable example of this – the sacking of Jonathan Petre as religious affairs correspondent on the Daily Telegraph. Andrew Brown, speaks passionately about the main reason for the sacking - the Telegraphs moves to a more ‘tabloid’ approach to newsgathering. The editors will decide on what the stories are and the journalists will provide the words to go with them. It saves money but the casualty – apart from gainful employment for some very good journalists – is truth. It’s sadly ironic that we were given an insight into this change in approach when diocesan communicators visited the swanky new Telegraph offices at Victoria last November. Jonathan was there, giving up his time to get to know us and to explain about his work, little knowing what was to befall him.
In his Church Times article, Andrew speaks about the hole it leaves in religious reporting on national newspapers. In his view Jonathan was the best informed specialist working on the dailies, he was trustworthy, authoritative and respected as an honest broker.
I've known Jonathan for several years and had a good professional relationship, having an odd drink together after a hectic day at General Synod. (See picture with JP just beyond Ruth Gledhill (on the left side of pic about half way up ) at work during a debate). My own experience of Jonathan was certainly that he was indeed “one of the good ones, the unsung professionals like ship’s engineers, who make all the pomp and ceremony possible in the first-class lounge.” After the 7/7 bombers were identified as coming from up here, he was the only religious correspondent to take the train to Leeds and find out what was really going on. During our difficulties at the Cathedral he would regularly call me for long chats to try and get the low-down.
That’s not to say that Jonathan didn’t have his own ‘Daily Telegraph shaped’ agenda. Clearly he wasn’t always interested in the good news stories we churn out – but then what national newspaper is? If he did follow up a press release it was usually to pose a sharp question I’d hoped might be overlooked (eg if the Bishop is moving house from Ripon to Leeds won’t that put the noses of those in the north of the diocese out of joint?) While up in Beeston he seemed keen to focus on whether the local mosques were hotbeds of radicalism, not only a rather dangerous question to be asking anywhere in earshot of LS11 at the time, but at odds with the emphasis we wanted to put on moderate Christians and Muslims working together.
But I am very sad too at the news, and I wish Jonathan and his wife well, hoping he very quickly gets snapped up by a more discerning ‘information centre’ as newspaper offices will soon be called.
There are now 47,800 people employed in public relations - verses 45,000 journalists, according to Andrew Carey (though thanks to the Daily Telegraph, the figure is now presumably 44,998). Andrew is astounded, and laments the effect this will have on the independence of the press and the “blurring of the impartiality of the media”. Do my eyes deceive me!? The words ‘impartiality’ and ‘media’ have never sat well together, and an ‘impartial newspaper’ is an oxymoron. Newspapers were never interested in reporting our good news or our press releases, unless we are talking about the local rag with one cub reporter on a job creation scheme. I can personally count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a TV crew from regional news has turned up at an event I’ve been involved in publicising in the last two years. That’s why organisations have always had to employ PR officers to play the media game, creating statistics, carrying out surveys, paying celebrities, engineering controversy, all to catch the eye of the editor.
Part of the reason for fewer journalists and more PR professionals is the decline of newspapers and the growth in new media. Newspapers themselves tacitly acknowledge this as they downsize their traditional journalism staff while employing more video and web specialists for newly created video departments, websites and ‘information hubs’. The spin off is that well meaning organisations and charities can begin to rely less on the vagaries and mood swings of journalists, newspaper editors and media bosses to transmit their news. After all, why does the audience need to go to a newspaper’s brand new all-singing all-dancing website when they can Google the topic and go direct to horses mouth on an equally well produced web page. The playing field is levelling out. Will there be any place for professional journalists at all in a future of citizen journalism and home grown internet tv?. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, we will laugh at the way we had to rely on BBC Look North to turn up before anyone heard about the new Bishop, chuckle ruefully at the way we had to try and catch the eye of a reporter to get a new campaign into the public eye. In the words of Bob Dylan, The Times (and the Telegraph) they are a changing.
With adverts in between every BBC programme it’s hardly gone unannounced, but the introduction by the BBC of the ‘iplayer’ really is one of those technical developments which could mark a sea-change (in PR speak) in the way we use the interweb. I’ve already caught up with several programmes I missed thanks to playing Charades, listening to new CDs, trying on new socks, going to church or otherwise enjoying Christmas in the real world.
Learning Italian last year, I marvelled at the way ‘'Rai Click’ , the website of Rai TV, meant I could keep track of the comings and goings in the Italian soap opera, ‘Capri’ or try get used to verbs by watch Italian kids TV (which is very scary, let me tell you.). ‘Why can’t the BBC do this’, I’d be heard to moan. Well now they have, and , fair play, it’s a lot better than those pixelly Italian images. Its also much better than YouTube which is just a series of grainy ‘You’ve been framed’ style home movies really, and Joost which is very good but doesn’t enough interesting stuff. Hence last night, as baby Eva was being fed and the family were vegging in front of a DVD, I was able to catch up on the complete ‘Extras’ Christmas Special, cringe at Ricky Gervais’s gaffs on my own (much better than cringing with your in-laws) and indeed move from one room to another – pushed out of the kitchen into the dining room (thank goodness for wifi!). I tell you, it’s the future. But is it also an own goal by the Beeb, and another step down the road to the end of conventional TV foretold by the man from Apple (see earlier blogs)? Only time will tell. TV apart, it’s been quite lively on the church front, it being Christmas ‘n all, and as always people say ‘you must be very busy at this time of the year’. Normally the answer would be no, but its turned out to be ‘more than I expected’. Boxing Day dawned mild and miserable but it didn’t deter hundreds of hardy walkers from taking part in the traditional Boxing Day Pilgrimage from Ripon Cathedral to Fountains Abbey. An interesting lesson in the use of press releases ensued. I had written in my earlier release that the new Dean, leading his first walk, would be accompanied by his wife and dog. Well, that’s what he told me – indeed he’d even told me that his dog was called ‘Sooty’ and was a cross Labrador/collie, and as that’s the kind of detail the papers like, I put it in.
I took lots of pictures, everyone set off, I returned home to send out a few pictures with an updated release, and as I was adding the story to the front page of the diocesan website I realised I’d seen no sign of the dog. So I left that bit out. Well, the dog was there, according to next day’s Yorkshire Post, based on the earlier press release, so I’m not arguing. If it says so in the paper then it must be true. Ooops.
In the Daily Telegraph an even more contentious claim was made by Jonathan Petre - that a fifth of all bishops are facing the axe. So that must be true too. Except that of course it isn’t. If they ever reduce the number of Bishops, and another scenario is to increase them, it would be done through a simple process of ‘natural wastage’. As it is, the article was probably based on some hearsay from the Church Commissioners and lacked the much more exciting possibility, implicit in the headline – that dioceses could be merged (or axed as JP himself wrote back in 2003). That was what Bishop John probably expected to be quizzed on when Radio 4 rang him up in the wake of the Telegraph article, and he was all for discussing the merits of a Diocese of West Yorkshire, but I was able to warn him that he didn’t need to go down that road unless he wanted to. Whether or not he did (and he seemed keen), we will only know on Sunday morning, Radio 4, some unearthly hour, when I’ll be on the road to the in-laws in Scotland for Hogmanay as I think it's still called. Happy New Year!
Happy Christmas, traditionally a time for giving, festive fun and the best seasonal/religious headline of Christmas competition. First prize in this year’s headline competition looks like going to the Yorkshire Evening Press for ‘Bus crash shame of ‘knicker vicar’’, the sorry story of a former vicar who lost his job, became a bus driver and then allegedly knocked a boy off a bicycle while swearing. Technically this is not a Christmas story, so may be disqualified, whereas this startling headline, ‘Jesus born in manger to Virgin Mary, affirms Archbishop of Canterbury’ is clearly seasonal - and wins the ‘dog bites man’ category.
Actually, I suspect it is also a contender for the ‘man bites dog’ prize because in the rest of the BBC Five Live interview, the Archbishop casts doubt on everything else including the wandering star, the date of Christmas, snow lying on the ground, donkeys and even oxen! Is nothing sacred!? It is this aspect of the interview on the Simon Mayo programme that is picked up in the Times headline, ‘It’s all a Christmas tall story’. However, winning the prize for the-most-oddly-written-final-sentence, Ruth Gledhill's piece concludes, “Dr Williams’s views are strictly in line with orthodox Christian teaching. The Archbishop is sticking to what the Bible actually says”.
News that the new Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg ‘does not believe in God’ made lots of headlines and vied for the prize of most-anti-Christian-headline-in-the-week-before-Christmas with news that Richard Dawkins is going to go on a speaking tour of the Bible belt. The Clegg story could I fear spell doom for Claire Kelly, the very nice (churchgoing) governor of St Aidan’s school in Harrogate who is also the Lib Dem candidate for Harrogate at the next General Election. Harrogate is, of course, a high churchgoing area and atheist politicians don’t go down well in these parts.
Midnight Mass, or Midnight Communion as we call it at St Mark’s Harrogate, was the subject of a Jonathan Petre piece in the Telegraph, 'Midnight mass at 8pm to fool drunks'. He rang up during the week to see if I could find any Anglican churches which were doing the same as some Catholic churches and making their midnight services earlier in the day to avoid drunken rowdy behaviour. I was about to say that we’d only had one or two cases of clergy who’d been drunk and disorderly during midnight mass, when I realised the gist of his question. Here, we have something called ‘Journey to Bethlehem’ earlier in the afternoon for families, but we also have the ubiquitous midnight service which caters for both party-goers and shy people. Both groups, for different reasons, want to avoid coming to church on Christmas morning, and as Christmas is a time for coming together and burying differences it seems an ideal mix. Being neither, I won’t be there at all.
Finally, the Churches Advertising Network is going all cyber this year with an island on second Life and the following little cartoon..So until 2008, Happy Christmas again.
Former BBC radio producer, one time vicar, now press and communications officer for the church. Hope you enjoy the blog - and hope to hear from you with your comments.
ing an odd drink together after a hectic day at General Synod. (See picture with JP just beyond Ruth Gledhill (on the left side of pic about half way up ) at work during a debate). My own experience of Jonathan was certainly that he was indeed “one of the good ones, the unsung professionals like ship’s engineers, who make all the pomp and ceremony possible in the first-class lounge.” After the 7/7 bombers were identified as coming from up here, he was the only religious correspondent to take the train to Leeds and find out what was really going on. During our difficulties at the Cathedral he would regularly call me for long chats to try and get the low-down.
