Tag Archives: Journalism

A print-only newspaper misses the point

County Highway is a new American newspaper with a retro-19th century look that is only available in paper copy and is determined to never go online. Like papers of times gone by, it’s a broadsheet with six tightly packed small-print columns across a page. Just the thought of it makes my eyes ache.

The editors describe their ethos:

‘Some of us fear the spectre of an incipient totalitarianism emerging from our laptops and iPhones. Some of us are simply allergic to conformity and brand-names. What we share in common is a revulsion at the smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics of the culture being forced upon us by monopoly tech platforms and corporate media, and a desire to make something better. We encourage you to think of our publication as a kind of hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic “content” that you scroll through every morning, most of which is produced by robots.’

This quote comes from their website, the same website where I found links to their Instagram and X/Twitter accounts.

Contradictions aside, I appreciate the spirit of this. It’s true that a lot of online content follows trends, is highly commercialised and is controlled by a handful of tech giants. But this is not a new phenomenon brought on by the internet or digital technology. Not too long ago, television was run by a few large companies and the government. These channels were and many still are beholden to advertisers or to the government of the day. Words like ‘smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics’ could easily apply to the box. Online news and social media are just another version of this with the added advantages of interactivity and citizens’ journalism – though some would say these are the worst features on online news. Discuss.

Most of my news comes from reading my phone or laptop. I tend to go directly to news outlets, and I particularly like the moving images from embedded video clips. I also listen to news on radio, podcasts and television. While I don’t have any hankering for thin inky pages, in the UK my Sunday mornings wouldn’t be right without the paper version of The Observer. In France, it’s the Saturday edition of Le Monde. These traditions today involve having the phone on at the same time – checking sources, looking up the odd word and adding reviewed books to my Amazon Wishlist. I accept that we live in a time where paper and screen co-exist.

Furthermore, County Highway, do you really think most digital news content is produced by robots? AI might be able to produce passable news copy, but only from texts written by humans through the conduits of human experience.

My final criticism – why harken back to the style of news from two centuries ago? Aside from being difficult on the eyes, it was colourless and rarely had photos. I suspect nostalgia is at work here. To quote Milan Kundera ‘The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So, nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’

Rosewater: another side of journalism

Based on the best-selling memoir Then They Came for Me, Jon Stewart’s film about journalist Maziar Bahari serves as a reminder of how fragile freedom of the press can be. Rosewater chronicles the capture and imprisonment of the Iran-born Canadian journalist, who was arrested for filming protests in Iran against Ahmadinejad’s dubious victory over Mousavi. Bahari was charged with espionage and for 118 days underwent Kafkaesque interrogations and torture along with being held in solitary confinement.

For fans of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, there isn’t much humour in Rosewater. It nonetheless is aware of an entertainment value, taking mise-en-scène and cinematography into artistry. The narrative is also for a more discerning audience. Instead of following the formula of scenes cutting back and forth between the prisoner and his distraught family, we see the imprisonment through the eyes of the prisoner. As he doesn’t know what his wife or his colleagues are doing to secure his release, we don’t see any of that until quite late in the story and only when Bahari learns that Secretary of State Clinton is trying to get him out. A brief flashback follows, filling us in on the parallel story of family, colleagues and news coverage, mixing Bahari’s imagination with the true happenings. The same drama in the hands of another director, say Ron Howard, would have followed the more traditional formula and milked the family story, especially as the wife was pregnant at the time.

Bahari is just one among many journalists who have been arrested, detained, even killed for reporting events that expose flaws in governments or protests against them. We see this in Erdogan’s Turkey, in Iran, Syria, Myanmar and Trump’s America, to name a few. These cases of attacking the messenger are even more disturbing at a time when so-called democracies are accusing the media of producing fake news. Of course, we are bombarded with fake news, politically bias news and what I call propagandist’s news (as in The Daily Mail in the UK and America’s Fox News). As odious as some of these can be, they do have a right to express themselves. It just puts more demands on the public to fact check stories and to support the more reputable news outlets. I make that sound easier than it is – which brings me back to Rosewater and the case of Maziar Bahari. Journalism has become a more complex endeavour, a multi-sided object, where one side risks obscuring the other.

I conclude this look at another side of journalism by purloining a campaign slogan from Amnesty International – Journalism is not a crime.