Present Tense:Two weeks ago, I wrote about how the British papers have been engaged in a "wallchart war", throwing out free posters in the hope of grabbing a few readers before they left the room. What ever would be next?
This week we got an answer. The Guardian gave away free "designer wrapping paper" each day. Or at least, some newsprint with finely-judged splats of ink. A thoughtful offering. Just the kind of thing you need this Christmas when you want to say: "I care about you enough to wrap your gift in a bit of coloured newsprint that will dirty your fingers as you tear it open in a mix of surprise and hurt."
These commercial novelties are only a distraction to the journalist, who will always see himself as the centre of the paper. It is, he insists, not toys that sell papers, but words. He will toil for hours at the keyboard to produce the most memorable, incisive and moving couple of paragraphs you'll have ever read on the topic of, say, a tractor festival in Co Louth. He will cling to this notion, even as the wallcharts and wrapping paper pile on his desk. Journalists know they are the meat of the business. The bones too. The nervous system and the heartbeat. And occasionally, depending on the story, the leaky appendix or giant kidney stone.
Which is why it is increasingly unnerving to find that there are those out there performing an almost daily autopsy on our work. A few weeks ago, a group of bloggers got together in a Dublin hotel and agreed to spend one weekend reading every Irish newspaper, every story, every headline, every word. Then they posted their findings online. You can see them at tuppenceworth.ie/paperroundwiki. Collectively it amounts to not just a post-mortem, but a filleting.
Stories were dissected, then labelled: the "isn't it awful" genre; advertorial posing as journalism; stories picked up from the wires, but not credited as such; the heavy reliance on opinion where you might expect news; one Sunday newspaper's use of piecharts for every occasion. It employed the surgeon's black humour. Of that same Sunday paper's picture of a woman accompanied by the caption "most beautiful executive in the car business", it noted: "No source cited for quote." It credited "real journalism" where it found it, and made some effort not to be relentlessly cynical, even if it couldn't help but fail. It was idealistic, which is no bad thing. It was very often right, which is uncomfortable. But it was occasionally simplistic. It had the attitude of those who have been made a little too cocky through being armchair reporters. They accuse so much modern journalism of being press release-led, but they have little appreciation of the work some put into reaching those stories, especially when the fax machine might be all the way over on the other side of the office.
But it is a reminder to us traditional journalists, holding fast to our long deadlines and word counts, that the media world has reached the point at which we are the old guy in the office, 40 years in the job, with our Rolodex and old rules. And the bloggers are the young guys: ravenous, quick, savvy. They are the future. We're the past. And they increasingly want to assert that. Take the swagger of the brilliant and witty site Blogorrah.com. Aside from its caustic daily commentary on the more asinine corners of Irish culture, it relishes jousts with any newspaper willing to take it on. Which is why its home page proudly proclaims the Sunday Independent's view of it as "frankly disgusting".
On the internet, everyone can hear you scream. There are no deadlines. No word counts. Few editors. Fewer lawyers. A blogger can literally go line by line through a newspaper piece, nibble on every bit of flesh, whenever, wherever they want. It is posted immediately, added to, amended. It can be thought out, or spewn out. It can draw hundreds of reader comments. All within hours. As the editor of Slate.com (10 million readers) said this week: "Online you can't be scooped."
Which is why some of the best media comment is now found on the web. While back in the old world, we write something and it might take a day, two days or a week to appear. It will be trapped into a box. It will be unchangeable. Increasingly, taking on the blogger is like an ageing fighter getting into the ring, only to find out that not only is his opponent 30 years younger than him, but that he has six arms.
The Guardian, to be fair, has a pioneering and popular website to go alongside its wrapping paper. But even there, its very own bloggers can this week be found demolishing - line by line - a piece by an opinion writer on its sister paper, the Observer. They've started ganging up on their own. Turned on the weak in the pack. And they have the added bonus of knowing that, unlike their traditional counterparts, when they post a criticism online, it stays there. Pops up years afterwards any time a journalist Googles himself. No wonder the bloggers can be cocky. At some point soon, expect to open a newspaper and find it is offering "Free: tomorrow's chip paper". Then we'll know it's over.
