Fundamental Questions About News Making

Ever since banker Paul Julius Reuter cabled a speech by Napoleon III in 1858 to England within an hour of its delivery, information has emerged as one of the world's biggest businesses. From the second world war onward, the competition centred on getting information "" or news "" to consumers first.

In the eighties and nineties, the emergence of a new breed of proprietors like Rupert Murdoch and Tony O'Reilly has changed the rules of business. The new competition lies in the art of controlling information and packaging it. Or, as the introduction to this issue of Granta puts it, ...a shorter definition is: man bites dog. A new definition would be: men bite dogs, dogs sell story.

 

The great thing about this issue of Granta is the approach. It would have been easy for the editors to commission pieces on media barons like Murdoch or lofty discussions on such tired subjects as the power of the media. Instead the essays are written by leading journalists and they talk about the real, hard business of news making, breaking and packaging. There is none of the hype and tawdry glamour that American TV serials like to attach to journalism.

There is, for instance, Philip Knightley's hugely enjoyable opening essay Interesting If True. Anybody who has worked on the so-called unglamorous side of the business, in backrooms and on small-city beats, will identify with Knightley's early experiences in the newspaper industry. It is nice to know, for instance, that this award-winning journalist from the Sunday Times cut his teeth writing fortunes for a New South Wales daily, and this is the advice he was given to put it together: Go down to the file room and dig out a copy of the paper from ten years ago. Copy out its stars column then mix it around a bit... One other thing. Don't give the same people bad stars two days running. It was the first inkling, Knightley writes, that not everything the reader learned from his paper was necessarily true.

Among his other jobs was the writing of a scurrilous gossip column in Fiji called Round the Town with Suzanne which posed such arch questions as, Who was the lady in the red polka-dot dress seen emerging from bushes near the Cable and Wireless station in the early hours last Thursday accompanied by Mr R?

In a similar vein is Eric Jacobs' piece Writing for Nobody, which is a hilarious recollection of his years as a leader writer. Jacobs started out as a leader writer in a Glaswegian broadsheet, and it proved an unpropitious beginning. A dip-stick survey of the paper's reader showed that no one read the leaders. This is the slenderest if anecdotal evidence, writes Jacobs, but I suspect reflects the real state of affairs. Politicians and other self-publicists may like to gaze at their musings in print, but ordinary readers, people who pay for their newspapers, hardly care what those papers' opinions are. Even I don't read leaders now that I no longer write them.

Jacobs' leader-writing career ended when he was sacked from Today as part of a cost-cutting exercise after Rupert Murdoch acquired the struggling tabloid from Eddie Shah. He subsequently wrote a biography of the writer Kingsley Amis, which was published last year.

On the issue of news packaging the best piece is undoubtedly Zoe Heller's gently ironical Full Disclosure. This was the name given to an abortive current events programme that was co-anchored by former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil for Murdoch's Fox Television.

The essay is interesting because it traces the struggles all news producers face in giving programmes brand identity, making them rise above the clutter. A social story on the growing incidence of young Americans who suffer from depression was scrapped because Neil said, Well, I don't think it's worth doing unless you take the piss out of it. I mean, it says in this memo, 'We're going to relate youth depression to the current economic climate.' What about the thirties? Why wasn't everyone depressed then?

When Heller pointed to the low level of journalism in the pilot, the programmes producer tells her, ...news has to make money now and inevitably journalism has suffered.

Equally thought-provoking is Fintan O'Toole's Brand Leader, on Tony O'Reilly, the high-profile chief executive of global food major Heinz and owner of the Independent group of papers. O'Toole's essay brings out the complex relationship between politics, money and the newspaper business. He shows how O'Reilly has used his position in Heinz and his newspapers to create his own legend as the quintessential new-age global manager. O'Toole has dug into O'Reilly's Irish past for facts that contradict this carefully-built brand equity. He traces, for instance, how O'Reilly engineered the takeover of Erin Foods, an Irish food company that he headed, by Heinz. When Erin Foods finally closed after Heinz absorbed all its marketing functions, O'Toole writes, O'Reilly was unavailable for comment, even to his own newspapers.

One of the finest pieces in the book is by Lynda Schuster in Two Dead in Car Blast. This is Schuster's account of the death of her husband of ten months Dial Torgerson, veteran correspondent for the Los Angeles Times , when his car hit a landmine in Nicaragua. Since it involved two American journalists, the incident blew up into a diplomatic crisis. Schuster was reporting on central America for the Wall Street Journal and this is a moving and unsentimental account of her experience of being, for once, on the other side of the news-making machine.

This issue of Granta is worth reading because it raises fundamental questions about the future of the information industry in the 21st Century. As the editors say, News. Who makes it? Who owns it? Should we believe it?