Un-covering Development

Katherine Meenan*, 23/11/07

The role of Connect-World is to improve both the amount and the nature of coverage of development issues in the media. Why? Because we believe that it is important that Irish people be better informed and educated on the broader and more complex issues relating to the causes of poverty, and the social and structural reforms and supports that are needed to build a fairer and more just world.  We believe as the public understand the impact of Aid, the reasoning behind it, there will be more awareness, and we know that as understanding increases, support increases.

 

We also want development issues to be understood and dealt with in an informed way rather than the immediate, superficial manner we sometimes see. We want development issues to be treated the same way environment issues are treated– with passion, creativity and mainstreamed across all areas of the media from film to feature writing to news reporting. The result would be a more reflective approach and there would be more scrutiny of spending, as well as evaluation and monitoring of the impact.

 

I understand from the fact that this event is taking place that you, both as NUJ members and as members of the development sector share the same objective.

 

Since we started about 18 months ago, Connect-World has sought to position itself as a media organisation, with an understanding of the role of the media and of the pressures and challenges which journalism faces. We aim to be a resource for the media. We operate across a number of activities, interacting with journalists, with the development sector and with colleges and universities. What I have found extremely interesting is the dynamic which has been created by our being there – the very fact of our existence has created a meeting point for a lot of issues and activities. Where this part of our activity is going – I don’t know yet, but it is interesting the things which can be made to happen.

 

 What has been interesting also is the tension between the development sector and the media. We have undertaken research with editors and news editors and they have told us that they find the sector sometimes amateurish and that it suffers from an irritating sense of entitlement. The development sector will say that it is the journalists who are amateurish – they don’t know or understand development, and will not bother to rise above the stereotypes. The discussion this afternoon will be based on a piece of research which shows that coverage is not exactly searching of a government spend which is equal to about 70% of the spend on the National Roads Programme.

 

On the other hand we wouldn’t have bothered to turn up to day, if we didn’t all think that more and better coverage of the issues of global development was possible and desirable.

 

This is a time when the media considers itself to be in turmoil: traditional models (and when you think how old the model is – that is traditional) are coming under increasing pressure from commercial targets, from proliferation and from new media.

 

But how real a challenge is that to journalists and editors? The concept of public service/not for profit media has always been the exception rather than the rule. New media is a huge challenge – but is it any more of a challenge than the introduction of radio or television? I would argue that it is a challenge to the business model, rather than the reporting model.

 

I think it is interesting to reflect, particularly on the nature of programming or news gathering in broadcast media. There is no essential difference between the news gathering of a broadcast organisation and that of a newspaper. Yes, the technology is different, the time scale is different, the pressures are different: the “how” is different, but the “what” really is not all that different.

 

And before we decide that print has no future, I would refer you to Gavin O’Reilly’s talk to the Society of Editors in the UK the week before last. And he would support the future of print wouldn’t he, but his real argumentation is an absolute clincher: the amount of money that Rupert Murdoch is investing in print. Yes, he says, print has a real future but he says as part of a range of media sources.

 

Why must it always be a case of either or? Is it just possible, that the consumer is capable of multi-tasking; is capable of consuming a multitude of media and that it need necessarily not be just online?

 

To answer that question, one needs to objectively assess why and how consumers choose to consume their media... BUT ….Ask yourself; When did you last read a good think-piece on why people – all 1.4 billion of them – read a daily paper? What is it that makes them make that conscious decision? Is it because they seek breaking news? Is it to read the match report? Is it to read an analysis piece on the big news item of the day?...

 

Do any of us really know what people are actually doing online? ….

 

…… the newspaper of the future, [will be] built upon journalistic skills that are not simply a God-given right of someone with attitude sitting in a garage in front of a computer, but rather a skill that is learned and earned.[1]

 

Yes, the “how” has changed dramatically but I am afraid that in all our discussion of the “how” we could loose sight completely of the fact that the “what” being covered is not changing. For that reason, I am particularly appreciative of the role of the NUJ in working with us on this workshop. It was the proposal of the Dublin Publications and PR Branch to make this workshop its contribution to the “Standing up for Journalism” action. The fact that the organisation which is the primary representative of journalists and those working in the media feel that “Standing up for Journalism” is not just necessary, but desirable – and want to do that by working with the development sector – is a real tribute to the point I am making. There is a professional and ethical basis to the media, which is precious. Its format is changing, but its essence is not.

 

This is not to be dismissive of the implications of the change in the means of news gathering and programme making and this is a particular issue for development when things are far away, complicated and expensive to get to. But again I would come back to the original point – the real issue is about content and how audiences relate to the stories they are being told.

 

Being an editor is a craft, not a business. There are an infinite number of variables to be processed before any single item is allowed see the light of day on a page or a screen. I suspect that a great deal of this processing is actually subliminal: made up of a series of assumptions, many of which are unspoken. It is the matrix of decisions made in this subliminal way which put together the product, made up of the editors likes/dislikes; running budget calculation and a gut instinct as to what the audience wants or likes. Getting all these unspoken variables together to produce a page or screen which is desired by the audience is the difference between being a good editor and being a bad editor.

 

But I would argue that editors sometimes make too many assumptions about their audiences, for instance that there is no interest in stories of global development - and, in particular, that there is nothing to be done about it.

 

What I would say is that if the technology has changed, the nature of audiences hasn’t changed. On the issue for today of global development, we know that those who show up in polls as caring most about global poverty are the ABC1s, more likely to be female, middle-aged and church going. Which is certainly true, and the profile of ngo donors and so on will confirm this. But to concentrate on that audience to the exclusion of others is to say that you have to be well-off and well-educated to have any ethical sense. Which is palpable nonsense.

 

There is research in this area done in other countries and they make a distinction between what they call the “engaged” and the “non-engaged.” The “non-engaged” may not be interested in current affairs or a world which they perhaps see as too wide for them to engage with. But that does not mean that there cannot be a real thirst for stories, told in a manner which is both rich and authentic. Some of the coverage “The Star” did on the group which went with Niall Mellon to South Africa is a case in point: yes there was coverage of the Irish people who went, but there were also careful, insightful interviews with the families who are waiting for houses from this process. All audience groups  can be reached, and will respond.

 

The development community has done a great deal of work to understand its supporters, and, for instance, I have heard MSF say recently that for them, the important relationship now is not with the wider world, but with their own supporters. But I think it is true to say that we all know remarkably little about what engages audiences. Connect-World will be undertaking research in this area, but it requires some fairly sophisticated methodology, which will take a little time.

 

And now is a good time one of the things which new media does give us are opportunities which were not available before – not in terms of reporting or news gathering, but in terms of the relationships which the media can have with its audiences.

 

I would like to talk about the relationship between audiences and the media and the extent to which it is mutually reinforcing.

 

Glenda Cooper, the Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in analysing how the media covers humanitarian disasters, says:

 

“There is a limit to the amount of information people can take in. People trust their favourite newspaper; there is a comfort in having these priorities made for you. Whether they always get it right is another matter.”[2]

 

And for those of you whose day is wasted without a Habermas Quote,

I refer you to a recent article in which he speaks of the

 

twin function that the quality press has fulfilled up to now: satisfying the demand for information and education while securing adequate profits.

 

At the base …. lies the controversial assumption that customers decide independently according to their preferences. ……..

 

Readers, listeners and viewers are certainly directed by various preferences in using the media. But as soon as they assent to cultural or political programmes, for example by reading a daily paper, Hegel's 'realistic morning prayer,' they expose themselves to what is in a manner of speaking an auto-paternalistic learning process with an undetermined outcome.

 

 In the course of reading, new preferences, convictions and value orientations may be formed.  …………….[3]

 

Peter Wright, editor of the Mail on Sunday says newspapers are a “cultural package” put together by a "remarkable collection of people with fingers on the pulse"

 

But what would seem to prove my point, about the possibility for a new and more intense relationship developing between the media outlet and its audiences, the recently appointed editor of Times Online said

 

Online demands a least an awareness of skills that were never part of the journalistic parameters.  Knowing who the audience is and working out how to get the news to them used to handled by marketing and distribution, and that that's a new kind of commercial awareness that journalists have never had to have before.

… Added to that, online gives publishers a real-time feed of information on exactly what readers are doing and that insight could feed back to the print paper too.[4]

………

So audiences can graze among an infinite variety of alternatives – piece-meal, but they make choices as to where they go. And they go to where they trust, and they learn from those they trust.

 

If the audiences are operating on an “auto-paternalistic” way with all its sources, it can only be because there is trust – as Glenda Cooper says. Media organisations create their audiences, just as much as audiences drive their consumption.

 

And that trust is important, and must be preserved. The success of something like Al-jazeera is a case in point. The Middle-easten audience had no faith in what they were hearing from the western media and voted with their remote controls.

 

My point – which I am finally getting to – is that I have a sense from the media “gatekeepers” that they do not believe that there is an audience for development. I would say there is. This is not a rant that the media “ought,” it is a statement that there is a market for articles or programmes which engage or entertain or educate audiences with a world beyond their own.

 

If all that is being peddled is disaster, famine and flood, of course it is a switch off but there are engaging stories of change and development.

 

Global development is

§        an issue of justice

§        government policy agreed – more or less - by all political parties

§        the expenditure of a great deal of money, both public and private

§        an international issue which impacts on us all, directly and indirectly, and affects our self interest

 

It also is capable of providing authentic and engaging stories. It strikes me as a topic the media should be all over.

 

*Katherine Meenan is the Director of Connect-World. This document is the text of a speech delivered at the Connect-World / NUJ joint workshop on the media coverage of development issues on Friday November 23, 2007.