Do read

 Yesterday a colleague shared a stupid Daily Mail article about teacher’s days off. Brilliantly, she corrected the facts, ie a non-pupil day isn’t a day off for teachers but I commented that she shouldn’t have shared the link. I think it came across as a bit blunt and judgemental and I’m sorry for that but I want to explain why I said it and how sad I am that I felt I had to say it.

Journalism has changed so much. I have been reading local newspapers from 1882 (Yes, I know, I’m obsessed) and the differences are amazing. Not just the content, which I’ll come to but punctuation. There were commas before and - always. Semicolons were more common than full stops. Road didn’t have a capital letter and was written High-road, which I think makes so much sense, as road isn’t a name but a descriptor. 

The content of newspapers in 1882 contained long, long articles that quoted every word said at a trial, including all the times that people repeated themselves. Occasionally, there was a story about nothing that might be interesting for history. There were lots of sports reports with flowery language and adverts for all sorts of cough potions. Coughing has always been a problem!

I show these to my daughter.

“You know why?” she says wistfully.

I do know. I’ve watched her work.

In 1882 and even in 1982 all a newspaper had to do you get enough revenue to continue was to sell a certain number of papers. It was the whole thing we bought. Also, they had no idea what we were reading.  They didn’t know that we spent 2 seconds looking at the sport report with flowery language and were actually only skimming it to find the result. In the 1980s sales of newspapers declined and newspapers had to be more creative to get people to buy. This is when they noticed the effectiveness of shock headline and Princess Diana. They noticed that inflammatory stories would get people to buy their paper and so they employed journalists (who are only writers looking for regular work) who were prepared to write rubbish that they knew would anger big sections of the population. Suggest the NHS is in danger, tell white people they are threatened by people of colour, suggest that powerful men are being superseded by women and imply that teachers are lazy. It’s all designed to get you to buy it. You aren’t necessarily meant to buy into it (so it can spectacularly backfire *whispers* Brexit) but you are meant to buy the paper to get cross about it.

Now, the newspapers make all of their money online. They don’t sell enough printed copies to justify printing them. In some instances,  printing actually makes a loss. 

I told you that I’ve watched my daughter work. This pandemic has completely opened my eyes to how it all works. As a content editor only a small fraction of her job is trying to catch the typos before they go out. Most of her time is spent looking at graphs. These are real time graphs that show exactly how many people look at each article and for how long. This is important for revenue. No advertiser wants their ad to pop up on a story about Doris from Bocking who tripped over a brussel sprout , while visiting the reindeer at the petting zoo because although it’s a cracking story that will be great to read in 100 years time, absolutely nobody is reading it now. We complain that we want to see more good news in the paper but we don’t read it. We engage with things that cause us conflict. Any writer will tell you that without conflict your story is boring. It’s why Cinderella never had a stepmother that loved her and treated her like her own daughter. It’s also why she had to lose her shoe and run away holding a pumpkin. As soon as there is no more conflict, the story stops. ‘And they lived happily ever after, the end.’

There is an online paper that only shares happy news but I think it’s struggling

You could get really angry with papers for using our own behaviour to give us more of what we are reading to keep their business alive or you could not read the articles that push your buttons and read more stories like this one.

https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/harlow-mums-fight-zebra-crossing-4651635

Spend a long time on it. Allow local news to do what it should be doing - campaigning for its community. It’s what the journalists want to do, rather than writing about which supermarket has the best deal on a Terry’s chocolate oranges, although they do love the day when they can taste all the Christmas sandwiches and mince pies and I know that they are missing being in the office because eating twelve Christmas sandwiches in your beds-sit bedroom with a laptop balance on your knee can’t be any fun for anybody.