Roy Greenslade’s Speech at the IBP Awards Dinner 2009

I’m truly privileged to be speaking at these IBP Awards. I have to admit it’s a strange thing to find myself here because I’ve taken a pledge never to accept an award myself. I call it my “inoculation against failure.”

Similarly, since we’re here in this august building, I’ve also let it be known that I’ll never accept an honour – an OBE, a knighthood, a peerage – thus side-stepping the fact that no-one has asked and will now never ask.

I’ve also got to admit that I’ve become a little alarmed down the years at the number, and range, of awards available to journalists. Then again, on the plus side, I do think they always give a spring in the step to the recipients and to those who are short-listed.

Last month, I attended two awards ceremonies – for the Paul Foot awards for campaigning and investigative journalism and the Education Journalists of the Year (on Nov 5, here) – and I couldn’t help but note the genuine pride of those who stepped up to collect their prizes.

And I’m sure it’ll be the same here this evening.

The reason, as you all know, is that we hacks aren’t as cynical as some people – politicians particularly – tend to believe. And that also includes us. We journalists do have a habit of putting ourselves down too often.

And, of course, we seem to revel in doom and gloom. That’s never been more obvious than in these times of recession, an economic blight that has heaped pressures on publishers who must deal with declining revenue, due in the main, of course, to the flight of advertising.

The result, unsurprisingly, has been widespread cuts – cuts in editorial budgets, cuts in staff, cuts in the product, such as reduced pagination, and also cuts in the amount spent on training. Several publishing companies have suspended their graduate training schemes. You might think that I’d be delighted by that move. After all, I teach post-grad students at City University, and we are only too delighted to benefit from a larger intake.

But vocational training – more properly, the lack of vocational training – is too serious a matter to be the subject of academic self-interest. If we want journalism to thrive – by which I mean good journalism, journalism that serves the overall public interest, if we want that to thrive – then we need to make sure that journalists are properly trained.

Many of my older colleagues, those I first worked with in the 1960s, tend to scoff at the level of training now available, and the demands by employers for staff with good academic qualifications. We didn’t need that in our day, they say. We learned on the job. It was sink or swim. And the swimmers succeeded. The implication of that pragmatic viewpoint is that it produced high journalistic standards.

Well, I’m completely unconvinced by that argument, firstly because it doesn’t reflect the very different employment situation of that generation. In those days, newspaper staffs were huge. Most publishers were either making profits or making losses they were prepared to accept. They hired hundreds of journalists and then it was a case of survival of the fittest.

The result? Many writers were never called on to write. Many reporters did, at the most, mundane work. Many subs never subbed much more than a short. Mind you, all of them – the good and the bad – did drink heroically.

Needless to say, that kind of employment policy never did make economic sense, and newer, more modern, more sensible, owners have not been prepared to go on supporting a thirsty, but unproductive, staff. They’ve had to cope with unsustainable falls in profit levels, and have therefore sought to create smaller, leaner, fitter, and less alcoholic editorial staffs.

But there’s a second fallacy in that veteran journalist argument about learning on the job: it was tough on the weakest. They ended up doing menial tasks and were aware of being unloved rejects. I knew several in my early Fleet Street days.

There’s a wonderful story about one of them, Percy Sutton, who I worked with on The Sun. He drank copious amounts in El Vino’s every day. One afternoon, in his cups, he shouted incoherently down the bar to no-one in particular: “Where in this street of a thousand dreams can you find sympathy?”

A wag at the other end of the bar shouted back: “Try the dictionary, it’s somewhere between shit and syphilis.”

Anyway, the point I want to make is that we must insure that we maintain a good standard of journalism intake, whether we do it at universities, through the courses run by National Council for the Training of Journalists, or through some form of publisher-funded training courses.

I noted the other day that the annual meeting of the National Union of Journalists was covered by 25 students – doing it for free. I also noted that Sky News is planning to cover next year’s general election results by recruiting students. They’ll be paid a fee, which will be doubled if they get the results back to Sky before opposition broadcasters.

Strictly speaking, neither instance can be called training, but they do offer students the opportunity to catch the eye of a news editor. And that’s very important because – despite the downturn – there remains an unsurpassed eagerness by young people to become journalists. And by journalists, I don’t mean bloggers. I mean full-time professional journalists working in the mainstream, traditional media. I have been lecturing this term to 256 post-grads, all of whom see their future in journalism.

I haven’t seen any written work from them yet, but going on my experiences marking assignments over the past six years, I’m expecting the majority to turn in good essays, properly spelled, with good grammar and full of intelligent insights. The standard of intake for City’s MA journalism course is high.

And I know from remarks by editors and executives who have hired our students in the past couple of years that they are very pleased with them. I ought also to add that I hear the same uplifting remarks about students from Cardiff, Sheffield, Lincoln and Stirling and elsewhere too. In my view, standards are high.

Problem – they’re affluent, middle class and southern. Not enough working class northerners coming through.

I ought also to mention worthwhile training initiatives by the PPA. Its establishment of the Britain’s first qualification in digital publishing was a welcome development. It ran into problems last year but I understand it’s to be relaunched in the new year. And, as you know, the PPA runs several courses for people already working in the industry. These are careers courses for people working in the industry and are, therefore, part of lifelong learning. Now that’s a concept, and a practice, that the Fleet Street veterans also despise. They like lifelong drinking.

And, once again, that attitude is a mixture of ostrich-like behaviour and Luddism, a failure to appreciate progress and its benefits. That has never been truer than in recent years in the era of what I call “the digital revolution”. It is the publishing industry’s biggest issue – about how we deliver content and how we extract value from that content. The results have been patchy. But even the ostriches have been forced to lift their heads from the sand and many Luddites, albeit reluctantly, have had to come to terms with the new media platforms because that’s where the audiences are going.

I love newspapers. I love their feel, their texture, their smell, their portability. I have loved working for them, and I still do. I also loved those old newspaper offices and print works, the smell of the ink, the sound of the thundering presses. So I’m not anti-newspaper, nor anti-newsprint. Then again, I loved steam trains and trams. I loved the horse that drew the milk-cart that delivered to the house in south London where I was born.

But my lifetime has been marked by immense technological change and I’m pleased about that. For journalism and journalists, the most obvious effect is the gradual erosion of our own form of Berlin Wall, the barrier that has previously existed between the journalist and the public, the reporter and the reader, the them-and-us is being eroded all the time.

I also believe the rate of change is having an effect on us too because we seem to accept change more readily. We are less conservative than we used to be. I recall how my late father – an insurance clerk who witnessed the early use of computer processing in his company – was fond of saying that computers would never catch on. It’s easy to laugh at that now, but we are wise after the event. People living through the earliest stages of technological change rarely grasp its implications.

It seems hardly any time ago that I was sitting in front of an Atex keyboard in Wapping and learning the rudiments of working on a fabulous invention called a computer terminal.

Not all of my colleagues – I was on The Sun in those days – were as au fait with the system as others. The paper’s ageing racing editor, John Kendrick, was an obvious case in point. Because he had been badly beaten by the pickets, an Australian TV crew decided that John should be the man to interview. Sitting back at his desk, he was fine when talking about his racing and fighting-picket experiences. But the interviewer decided to finish off his piece by asking John about the differences in working in Fleet Street, in a hot metal environment, and working at Wapping with a the computer keyboard.

John’s response took them entirely by surprise. Pointing at the blinking cursor on the screen, he said: “Oh it’s much better here, that little fucker does everything.”

I think it’s fair to say that drink might have been taken. Lucky it wasn’t a live interview.

Of course, we’ve come a long way since that incident in 1986, when we were still some years away from the regular use of email and even further away from full page design on screen. Freed from all sorts of restrictions, newspaper publishers and editors now grasp at every new invention to see what might be helpful, whether in terms of cutting costs or improving the service to readers.
There’s no doubt in my mind – nor, I’m sure, in the minds of most people here – that journalism has been changing too. The technology is allowing the public to take an active role in news-gathering, in analysis and in providing essential advice. In other words, the top-down journalism is gradually being replaced by the bottom-up.

Everyone is a sort of journalist now. They can blog, they can make podcasts, they can shoot video, all of which can be uploaded to enable others to read, hear and see. Moreover – and this is a key point – these people don’t need us, the traditional media, to mediate, to get in between, to act as a forum.

The old relationship between centralised media and the people was vertical. From on high, down to the many below. Now, as people take the opportunity to communicate directly with other people, the relationship is horizontal. People are cutting out the middle man – that’s us, the traditional media.

They can speak directly to each other without the need for our centralised platforms, our papers or our studios. In journalistic terms, the us-and-them is increasingly becoming the us-with-them, what The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, has referred to as “the mutualisation of news.”

Now, I’m very aware that I’m talking here to journalists with specialist knowledge. I’m sure you all know a great deal about building and architecture and property and engineering and business, and you’re more knowledgeable about the subject than many, many thousands of people. But, on the other hand, you can’t possibly know absolutely everything, however wide your knowledge, however broad the range of sources and contacts.

Not only that, when writing articles, it’s always the case that someone, somewhere knows just a little more, more facts, more context. They are now able to share that knowledge with you faster and more effectively than ever before. They can comment, they can criticise, they can offer practical help.

However, I’d be the first to agree that we’re a long way from the kind of collaboration that idealists, such as me, imagine will one day happen. But there’s no doubt that we are moving in that direction.

Then again, I’d be remiss is saying everything is just fine and will work out well, because there are threats too – as I see every day in the threads under my blog and, especially, in The Guardian’s Comment Is Free section. Most often, these are threats to our language – text spellings and jargon and so on.

But there is another threat we need to confront too – because journalists are trained to write well, to understand the law, to grasp the need for accuracy, to respect sources and to respect the public we serve. One way we do that is by transparency and accountability. We have bylines. We are open to checks.

Too many commenters on websites and bloggers – and, most especially, the people on social network sites, whether it be Facebook or Bebo or Twitter – are outside this system. I don’t mind them murdering the language as much as I dislike them murdering journalism itself.

Accuracy is our watchword. And we must never lose sight of the fact that there’s no substitute for good professional journalism, for trying to tell the truth, for presenting the facts we do have in as interesting, a way as possible in order to inform the reader.

All about trust and credibility – EXPLAIN…

Anyway, it’s amazing that I got to this point without using the awful phrase “user generated content” or even “citizen journalists”. Then again, I’m amazed I got here at all.

Whenever I speak in public, I tend to hear the voice of my late, unlamented Daily Mirror employer, Robert Maxwell, booming out:

“Mister Greenslade, you know nothing.”

How do you mean, Bob?

I see your front page tomorrow says that President Gorbachev is engaged in some sort of re-invasion of Lithuania.

Well, we’re quoting someone who says that.

Don’t be foolish. Mikhail would never invade anywhere without calling me first.

Sorry Bob.

There’s no better note to end on.

If you have been listening, thank you.