Transcriber: Pilar Strange
Reviewer: Javi Garriz Everybody in this room
deserves better news journalism. I am here to tell you that the fundamental
nature of news journalism has changed for the worst
in the last 20 years. And many of the things that we looked
at journalist to provide us with accuracy, impartiality, context, depth
are all under threat. I would also like to try
to convince you that an antidote might come in the form
of a new slow journalism revolution. I'm going to make my case to you
with the aid of 7 headlines. Here is the first.
"Guilty Amanda Knox looks stunned as her appeal against
murder conviction is rejected." It's a headline from
the MailOnline from October 2011. The MailOnline is the world's single most
read English language newspaper website. It has just under a 190 million unique
visitors every month. The story refers to the court appeal
of Amanda Knox, who is found guilty of the murder of British student,
Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy in 2009. The court appeal generated
massive international news interest. But as many people in this room will know,
there is a problem with this headline. It is the complete opposite of the truth. Amanda Knox's appeal was successful. Her conviction was overturned
and she returned to Seattle, where she's been living
for the last 3 years. So, how did the MailOnline
get the story wrong? They had prepared
two versions of the story in advance. One for if the court appeal
was successful, one for if it was unsuccessful. Their representative, in the court,
heard the word guilty. Pushed the button,
and the story went up online. But it wasn't guilty
to the charge of murder, it was guilty
to the much lesser charge of slander. And for 2 or 3 minutes, the world's
single biggest English language news site had completely the wrong story on its site until somebody switched it
with the other story. But it wasn't just the headline. It was actually several hundred words
of description and invented quotes. So for example, we learned that
as Amanda Knox heard the dreadful news, she sank into her chair,
sobbing uncontrollably. That the Kercher Family
stared directly ahead, looking across only once
at the distraught Knox Family. We learned the prosecutors,
were delighted with the verdict but they said that on a human level, it was sad that a young person
would be spending so much time in jail. None of this happened. But in order to understand
why this sort of thing happens, why this sort of mistakes occur, we need to understand
one fundamental thing about a change in the news media recently. Which is that being first, has become
much more important than being right. Here is the second slide:
#Amydead. When Amy Winehouse, the famous singer,
died in Camden, London in 2011, news of her death started
trending on Twitter within an hour. 10% of tweets during that hour
concerned her death. That's 20 million people speaking
about an event, before a single news organization has published or broadcast
a word about it. It is the equivalent of the entire
population of Australia beating every journalist in the world
to the story. Obviously we all know about
the extreme speed of diffusion of news, and rumor online. But for journalists,
it is a major problem. For centuries, they have been the ones
who broke the news. They have been the funnel
through which the news passes. But what they are realizing now
is that if they want to keep up with the speed of which news break online,
then they need to jettison many of the things that they thought
were fundamental to their craft. Taking a bit of time. Speaking to some people.
Finding out some facts. Getting some proper quotes. And giving their first best approximation
of the truth. Sadly, the declining fortunes
of the news industry and the algorithms which govern
online news distribution, mean that things are unlikely
to get better anytime soon. Here's another headline:
"El País sacks 128 journalists." In 2012, El País sacked almost a 1/3
of its editorial staff. And it requested the remaining journalists
to accept a 15% pay decrease. But of course, they are not alone. In American newsrooms,
the number of reporters has fallen by 31% in 10 years
between 2002 and 2012. News organizations are sacking journalists
because they are losing money. My favorite newspaper, The Guardian,
lost 30.9 million pounds in 2013. That's 122,134 pounds
every single working day. But people haven't stopped reading
the news, they just stopped paying for it. Free online news organizations
are extremely popular, but as publishers move their attention
from print products, to online products, online advertising becomes
much more important. You are not selling somebody
a physical product you have to sell it
through the advertisers. Because of the low yields
of online advertising you have to be read by millions of people
in order to make money. The gateway to millions of people
is Google. 80% of us search
for news stories online using Google and 60% of us
will click on one of the top 3 hits. If you make it on one of those top 3,
then you make a lot of money. But Google doesn't really care if you
spend a month researching the story. If you've checked every fact.
If you have revisited every quote. It doesn't even really care if you've
made the whole thing up in advance. It does care if you are first. So if you are the MailOnline,
it makes perfect sense, if you have a story which is A or B:
Knox is innocent, Knox is guilty, to prepare two stories in advance
so you can be first to the story. Google also cares about volume. The more new stories that
your news organization puts out there the higher you will come in the rankings. Which means that journalists
around the world find themselves having to write
more and more stories with fewer and fewer resources
and less and less time. It's a recipe for disaster. There is less time for original reporting. Less time for research,
less time for both sides of the story. Less time for journalism. It doesn't make any sense at all
to commission a 4,000 word feature that takes someone 2 months to write. You might as well commission a 150 words
that took 10 minutes to write. You'll get the same amount of money
for a click on that page. Virality and clickability
make perfect commercial sense, but they don't build into a journalism
which informs and inspires. The other thing that happens, when you have a huge amount
of space to fill and not enough resources to fill it, is that public relations
gets involved. PR. Latest figures from
the Pew Research Center in the US show that there is 4.6 PR executives
for every single journalist in the States. That's an increase from 3.2 to 1
just 10 years ago. But as we all know,
PR is not a good news source. All PR has an agenda, and it's not
the impartial telling of the truth. Here is a great story: "Livr.
A social network only for drunk people." (Laughter) This is a story which was widely reported
in March of this year. It was about a new
social media experience: Livr. How it worked is this: You downloaded the app to your smartphone. You plugged in a portable breathalizer.
You blew into the breathalizer. (Laughter) If you were drunk enough, if you had a sufficiently high
blood alcohol level you gained access to the app. (Laughter)
(Applause) Once you were inside, you could geolocate and see where all the drunk
people near you were. (Laughter) There was a special function, so you could drunk dial a random
intoxicated stranger. And if you woke up the next morning
feeling dreadful about all the things you've done on Livr,
you could push the blackout button, and it would erase every digital memory
of what you had done. (Laughter) The news was widely reported. It was, I think almost everybody in this hall
has immediately spotted, a hoax. Two people had invented the idea just to see how permeable
the news media is. How easy it is to slip a story in
when you send a press release. But it is not just ideas for stories
that get slipped in. Sometimes it's whole stories themselves. The practice of copying and pasting
press releases, is called "churnalism". In 2011 the Media Standard Trust
set up a website: churnalism.com You can go there, you can paste in
a news story and you can see how much of it is taken directly
or in part from a press release. And when they ran the numbers on stories
produced in the UK, it was very scary. As much as 54% of all news content
generated in the UK comes either in whole or in part
from press releases. But it's not just PR that rushes in,
it's also speculation. If you've got a huge amount of space
to fill, limitless space to fill, and fewer and fewer resources to do it,
you just start speculating. We saw it most recently
with Malaysian airline flight MH370. 3 or 4 days of blanket coverage,
and no facts, and it didn't stop anybody. That story is now largely forgotten. And here is another story,
that is largely being forgotten: "Turkey coal mine disaster:
Desperate search at Soma pit". This refers to the explosion
that tore through a coal mine in Soma, Western Turkey,
in 13th of May this year. There was blanket coverage. The worlds media descended on this town. After 3-4 days,
minute by minute in real time, you could find out what was happening. And then the agenda moved on,
as it always does. To ISIS, to the Ukraine,
to a coup in Thailand. And the story was forgotten. And I don't know about you,
but I often find myself thinking: Whatever happened
to the miners of Soma? What happened to the survivors
of the MV Sewol in Korea? What happened
to the kidnapped schoolgirls of Nigeria? Here is a story,
which hasn't been forgotten: "Nixon Resigns". Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
spent 2 laborious years, pursuing the Watergate investigation. It was an iconic investigation,
which culminated in the indictment of 40 US Government Officials,
the resignation of a President, the shocking of a nation, and the setting of a high watermark
for investigative journalism. Woodward and Bernstein came up
against many objections and many obstacles along the way. But their newspaper, the Washington Post,
thought the investigation was important, and it supported them. In today's era
of super speedy news production, immediate reaction, limited budgets, who's going to back this sort
of investigation in the future? Which journalist
is going to be given the time, and the space to work on a story
so complex and so difficult? And if we are not going to get
stories like this anymore, what is the future for news journalism? Here is another headline,
and a little bit of text: "Earthquake: 3.7 quake strikes
near Piru, California. A shallow magnitude 3.7 earthquake was reported Sunday evening
7 miles from Piru, according to the US Geological Survey. The tremor occurred at 9:18 pm PST
at a depth of 8.7 miles." There's something very strange
about this story. I'll give you a clue. It was written in less than a second. It wasn't made
by an extremely efficient journalist. It was written by a robot,
or rather an algorithm. The LA Times uses a piece of software
called "Quakebot". As soon as the US Geological Survey
says there is some sort of activity, it feeds it directly into a template, and within 3 minutes
of an earthquake starting, there can be a full story about it online. This sort of thing is happening
more and more. Associated Press is going to start using
software called "Wordsmith" to automatically produce
4.000 quarterly financial reports. Now if you are an optimist, you might say: "Brilliant. Journalists will be freed
from the menial task of reporting. They'll be given time and space to go and find real stories
and get stuck into them". If you are pessimist, you might say: "When has automation
ever not lead to job losses"? Here is my view. 10 years from now there won't be a single printed newspaper
left in the developed world. Many major news organizations,
will have closed. Robot journalism and news scraped
from social media web sites will be delivered to you
according to your digital preferences, instantly and for free. News organizations which do survive will continue to write
preemptive news stories as with the Amanda Knox case, and 99 times out of a 100,
they will get away with it. There will be a constant unremitting
downward pressure on quality. Most people won't even notice. Most people will be happy enough. They won't think about
what was being lost. But some people will have an appetite
for a different sort of journalism. A journalism which values journalists. Which puts them at the heart of stories. Which gives them the time
to do what they do best. Which follows up on stories,
after everyone else has moved on. Which values perspective and hindsight
over immediate knee jerk reaction. Which doesn't see journalistic content as just something to fill in the spaces
between advertising pages, or to subtly sell you something
that you don't need. Which isn't filled
with re-written press releases. Which brings you stories
that you didn't know you wanted to read, but none the less changed your world view. And a journalism which,
most importantly of all, isn't trying to be Twitter, or whatever social media we have
in 10 years, to stories. Because it knows that being right, is much more important than being first. We call it Slow Journalism. Like the Slow Food
and Slow Travel movements, it's about taking your time
to do something of quality. Fast journalism goes into Soma for 4 days and tells us minute by minute exactly
what's happening and then it leaves. Slow Journalism returns
a few months later. It spends time with the community,
gets to know their stories. It finds out for example, that miners have been turned
against one another by politicians playing games
with compensation payments. It delivers something nourishing,
and of depth and of interest. If this sounds interesting to you, if you would like something with a bit more quality,
intelligence, inspiration, something that provides an antidote to the hyper, hyper speed of today's
digital news production, then I would urge you
to support Slow Journalism wherever you see it
and in its many different forms. Because that, my friends, that is
the news journalism that we all deserve. (Spanish) Thank you! (Applause)
