Former journalist reflects on the news
Former journalist at The Age and La Trobe media studies lecturer Rachel Buchanan.
Newspaper articles are getting shorter, media organisations are laying off staff and on-line news services are increasing their coverage.
Do these developments add up to a new form of journalism that is heading towards the dot point?
Rachel Buchanan, former journalist at The Age and a media studies lecturer at La Trobe, sees an increasing role for commentators in the new media environment as reporting by mainstream services becomes more truncated.
As a feature writer in the ’90s, Dr Buchanan regularly wrote 4,000 word articles for The Age. Today features rarely reach 1,500 words.
The best ‘long reads’, she says, are done by novelists for independent magazines like The Monthly and The Griffith Review, by journalists in books or by academics who have the time and resources to reflect more deeply. She calls this style of reporting ‘slow journalism’.
‘Academics have a depth of background knowledge journalists don’t have. They can bring a broader perspective to stories,’ she says. Academics are funded to reflect on the issues of the day whereas journalists are under constant pressure to file their stories.
News reports are also plummeting in length, she says, from 2,000 words in the ’50s to 400 today and on-line news reports have found a way of becoming even leaner. Breaking news online sometimes contains just a lead paragraph followed by dot points – the ultimate in ‘fast journalism’.
In this environment is there a need for thoughtful writers like Dr Buchanan who once used to relish swamping themselves with material on an issue then finding a pathway into it?
New writing opportunities are opening up instead, she says. First person narratives are becoming more popular. These draw some of their infl uences from fiction.
‘If you want to write in first-person, you have to create a character, a version of the self that interrogates the piece and lightly steps in and out.’
These changes reflect those of society. Media students coming through the University have grown up on blogs and social networking. Their tastes are more subjective.
‘They are pretty sceptical about the notion of objectivity. News on blogs feeds on gossip. Eventually that will change what is seen as news.’
The tradition of gathering still lives on, however, and is based on nineteenth century wire skills. Reporters do classic inverted pyramid stories for on-line reports with quotes taken over the phone in shorthand.
Dr Buchanan, whose PhD is in history, also sees the past repeating itself in the way some newspaper stories have become more like narratives. Journalists play more engaged roles in these pieces. They remind her of newspaper reports by journalists at Gallipoli ‘who used vigorous ways of describing the world they were part of ’.
‘This is a pivotal time in journalism and I feel very lucky to be reflecting on twenty-two years in the profession,’ she says.
‘If you want to be a journalist you have to be curious and listen to find the gem. You have to like people to do it.’