A Visit to Wartorn Caerwent…

Before this week, the idea of war reporting seemed so alien and inaccessible to me.

A 24-hour excersise with the Royal Marines may not have completely changed my mind, but it certainly opened my eyes to the role of journalism in a warzone.

I spent Wednesday and much of Thursday at the MOD training area at Caerwent, in South Wales; living in a derelict warehouse, eating military stodge and spending seven hours embedded with 38 non-commisioned officers as they planned and executed an ambush.

While the excersise was a lot of fun and gave me a taste of the life of an embedded reporter, it most importantly gave me an insight into the view of the media from a military perspective.

Firstly, the Marines are much more politically minded than I ever imagined. Perhaps naivly, I assumed your average commando lived in such an enclosed world that politics, world affairs and Gordon Brown meant little to them.

But, as was explained to me by a Sargeant Major, the military have an active interest in Westminster:

“We see ourselves as an extention of government policies. So, if the media, and particularly the Sun, have such an influence on the electorate, and the government need to keep the electorate happy, we have a clear interest in what is being reported in newspapers.”

The military are now more keen than ever to involve the press in their day-to-day acrivities, thus giving them more control over content of war reports.

They are also serious about keeping journalists safe in the battleground. Though only a training excersise, I never once felt in any danger while out on patrol and had opportunities to get closer to the action than any freelancer ever could.

While the day didn’t exactly have me rushing for the flak jacket, it certainly made me more acutely aware of the role the media, particularly the printed press, has to play in foreign policy and the lives of Britain’s marines and soldiers.

Fear Not, Friends, We Will Be OK

Technology is changing the way people consume news.
I mean, why go to through the terrible upheaval of actually going to a shop to buy a paper? They are way too big as well. Why not just read the miniscule font on an iphone or Blackberry instead. No-one on a train will hate you for carrying an iphone.
In all seriousness, people are using new and innovative ways of reading the news and it is important for journalists – worried as we may be – to put the changes into context.
This is not the first technological advance journalism has seen. Nor is journalism the only trade to have been affected by advances in machinery and tools. Did the teacher moan when they introduced digitized class registers and interactive whiteboards? Of course they did, but they got over it and their jobs are safe.
The core skills of a journalist are still needed to produce copy people want to read. Just because news is online, or on a phone, or on a Sony Reader, the stories still need to be written. Someone has to source the story, get the interview, write it up, sub it and put the (web) pages together.
So fear not, fellow trainees, there will be jobs out there, our skills will be required. But we may not get the daily ego massage of seeing people in the street, or the cafe, or the pub, reading our work in the newspaper.

Feel the Power with Careful Choices

The internet is a magnificent toolbag, filled with a plethora of gadgets and gizmos that can bring a piece of writing or a blog post or a story to life. But journalists and photographers and bloggers and editors have to be careful with how and when they use them.

The image below, for example, requires no audio, no interactive map and no words to aid its impact.

Captured in Iraq and depicting children showing their disapproval at the war, it draws such power as a still image.

Equally, this image, of a suspected Viet Cong member being assasinated in Saigon, in 1968, truly tugs at the emotions.

However, the use of such tools as interactive maps or audio can dramatically enhance a story – particularly where a journalist has less powerful images to hand.

Maps depicting murders across a region or country, or disaster maps can make a story really hit home for a reader.

Take this map from the BBC website. It shows every murder or manslaughter of youngsters over the last 18 months. The map enhances the experience for the reader by illustrating the severity of the problem and enhancing the home-photographs which make less impact as sole images.

The technology we now have at our disposal can provide an invaluable tool, but they have to be used in the right way and at the right time.

A Recipe For The Future: Four Parts Past, A Careful Sprinkling Of Present

A quick browse of the recently published Internet Manifesto, a 17-point summary of the changing world of journalism – and also the related musings of web journalist Alison Gow – can leave a trainee print journalist such as myself feeling a little dismayed.

Yet more propaganda telling us that newspapers are dying, internet news is the future…. blah blah blah.

Now, the eagle-eyed among you will have already noticed the irony of a blog post questioning the importance of internet journalism. However, it is not the existence of news on the web which I question, but the role it has to play.

It seems fashionable at the moment to paint the picture of resistance to internet journalism as the old hack in the corner – miserable, unwilling to learn and ultimately falling by the wayside. But I, myself, understand the internet and am hungry for news, enthusiastic to learn and young. Yet I still find myself harbouring a scepticism about online journalism.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that anybody can put anything on the internet, well-written or not. Perhaps it is a fear of transparency/accountability/the threat to my chosen profession.

Either way, websites and online news should be tools which supplement a newspaper/magazine/TV show. It should be the warm-up act, not the main event.

Gow says in her article: “Text is the least creative part of any news story; ultimately, no matter how well-written your colleagues tell you it is, it’s simply 350-plus words to fill a space in a news page.”

Least creative? Really? The crafting of language from a collection of thoughts and notes into a coherent and accessible news story is a skill, an art form, a core journalistic practice, not a space-filling distraction from an interactive map.

The Manifesto itself jumps onto the bandwagon of thinking everyone who reads a news story has an immediate desire to comment on it. This is surely a myth. People seem to have coped for centuries without their heads exploding from a build up of personal news commentary.

Don’t misunderstand me, the internet has a definite, if unclear, role in the future of journalism. And a video, interactive timeline or slideshow can certainly enhance a news story. But the balance between traditional news sources and added web content must be carefully managed.