Why the gentrification of journalism matters

Newspapers are in trouble. That much is clear. The Guardian and the Observer lost £44.2 million last year as growth in online revenue failed to match Guardian News & Media’s (GNM) investment. Last week GNM was even forced to issue a denial after it was claimed that print editions of its papers would soon be scrapped altogether.

It isn’t just the nationals that are suffering. Research from Press Gazette found that at least 242 local papers had closed between 2005 and the end of 2011, compared to just 70 launches. The self-appointed king of news Rupert Murdoch may also wish to consider whether the influence a stable of newspapers gives a proprietor remains worth having. According to data collected by Bloomberg, income at News Corp’s publishing unit, which includes the Times, the Sun and the Wall Street Journal, dropped by almost a third from 2008 to 2011.

In recent years the cringeworthy claim has been doing the rounds that we are “all journalists now”. Once you strip away the fatuity of the statement there is some truth to it. Thanks to the internet we are all free to set up a blog and report or interpret the news as we see fit. That’s how I got started; and it is I suspect how many others made their first excruciating stab at writing for an audience. We’ve also in recent years seen the emergence and popularisation of Twitter, which allows anyone with a smartphone to play at journalism and “break” a news story as it happens.

Many have undoubtedly been attracted to the profession by the romantic aura that surrounds the news rooms of the 20th century, portrayed to comic effect in novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where the fiddling of expenses exists in stark contrast to the ascetic drive of today’s sharp-elbowed young upstarts:

“Mr. Salter saw he was not making his point clear. ‘Take a single example,’ he said. ‘Supposing you want to have a dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You’ve had a slap-up dinner, you’re three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied.’”

Not only are we saying goodbye to all of that, but there is general agreement that newspapers will, sooner or later, cease to exist at all in their current form - differences of opinion mainly concern how the industry will use the internet to return to profitability. In a piece for this paper in 2009, professor of journalism at the University of Kent Tim Luckhurst was forthright in his belief that professional journalism “can and must thrive in the era of the internet”. He went on to assure readers (or writers perhaps) that “an economic model to make that possible must emerge”.

What hasn’t been sufficiently discussed is the extent to which the business model newspapers have adopted during the lean years could change the face of newsrooms even when more favourable conditions return, assuming that they do. Increasingly newspapers rely on unpaid labour for their content, including interns and people who write simply for the satisfaction of a by-line. In times when revenue is scarce this is perhaps understandable. But as newspapers find a way to turn a profit from the internet there’s a good chance they won’t drop the business practices that have prevented them going under in the first place, and that means workers continuing not to get paid.

Now I’ll understand if this seems incredibly unimportant. I am a journalist after all – surely I am only bringing this issue to your attention out of self-preservation. And that’s partly true of course. But only partly. It’s not my job prospects that you be should worried about (thanks all the same). Of greater concern is the potential impact new business models could have on our daily news content. Any long-term reliance on free labour will certainly make newspaper balance sheets look better; but it will also give a labour market advantage to those from more privileged backgrounds who can afford to work six month unpaid internships or find free time to turn around articles for nothing – which in turn will mean an ever smaller section of society writing the news.

The local papers which once produced the working class hacks who made the step up to the nationals are also disappearing at an alarming rate, and with them the rung on the ladder which at one time ensured a degree of meritocracy in our newsrooms. British journalists already favour the rich, powerful and glamorous over the poor, weak and unfashionable, says journalist and author Peter Oborne; and one suspects the gulf between journalists and ordinary voters will increase as the number of working class journalists continues to fall. Having little invested in the services this government is so ruthlessly cutting, many journalists of the upper crust already slip effortlessly into narratives about the cuts being “inevitable” and austerity coming as a consequence of “runaway government spending”. As it becomes harder to break into journalism without solid financial backing, this sort of natural bias can only become more pronounced.

The collapse of print journalism is almost certainly inevitable. For a proprietor to fight against it would be the equivalent of setting fire to reams of bank notes, and they certainly aren’t going to do that. Do not, however, succumb to the delusion that the internet will bring with it a flowering of innovative citizen journalism. Most people don’t have time to be citizen journalists. Most people are too busy paying their bills, putting food on the table and going to work every day to become grassroots reporters. The people who have time to fool around for no money are the people who already have lots of it. And if they are the journalists of the future our media will probably resemble the establishment talking to itself, and if that’s the case we will all be worse off, not only us hacks.

The dark side of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

 When things are grim at home it can be easier to seek comfort in developments abroad. And boy, are things grim at home right now. Stagnant levels of pay, an economically incompetent government determined to erode hard-fought workers’ rights and a lacklustre opposition. And worst of all, a public that remains largely apathetic.

How tempting it is to allow one’s optimism to feed on events occurring further afield.

During the course of the last week or so nowhere has this been more apparent than in the case of Venezuela. Otherwise sober journalists and politicians have been queuing up to heap praise on newly elected President Hugo Chavez - keen to emphasise his democratic legitimacy and even keener to tell of their own favourable impression of the Latin American petro-crat.

Owen Jones described the newly-elected Chavez in these pages as someone who leads a “progressive, populist government that says no to neo-liberalism”. Praise was equally forthcoming from the Labour MP for Easington Grahame Morris, who said that anyone protesting against abuses in the Venezuelan electoral system was doing so, “not because they are a democrat, but because they do not like the result”. Ex-US President Jimmy Carter even went as far as to describe Venezuela’s electoral system as “the best in the world”.

Some of the rhetoric is understandable of course. In an age of airbrushed politicians whose every word resonates with insincerity, the personality of Hugo Chavez is superficially attractive. When I first saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - a 2003 documentary detailing the attempt to overthrow Chavez during his first term in office - I too was a convert.

For the first time Venezuela had a president that was spending the country’s vast oil wealth on generous social programmes to ensure there was a financial floor below which the poor would no longer fall. It was arguably this, rather than any real concern for political liberty, which prompted the military coup that tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002 – Venezuela’s Harvard-educated elite saw that their privileges were under threat and sought to act. Chavez had also threatened the profits of American oil companies; and as anyone versed in Latin American politics will attest, those that are brave enough to do such things are rarely left in power for long. If nothing else you had to admire the chutzpah of the man.

But it’s a funny sort of democracy (and certainly not one which can accurately be described as the best in the world) that attracts such harsh criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - organisations which can hardly be dismissed as agents of neo-liberalism.

In its 2011 annual report, Amnesty described Venezuela as a country where “those critical of the government were prosecuted on politically motivated charges in what appeared to be an attempt to silence them”.

Human Rights Watch went further, and said the “accumulation of power in Venezuela” had allowed the government “to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society”. As any good democrat knows, the strength of a democratic system is not defined solely by what happens on polling day.

Another sign of a healthy civil society is a strong trade union movement. Listening to those singing the praises of Chavez it’s easy to skirt over the fact that Venezuela is a country where, according to the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2012 annual survey, “anti-union discrimination, violations of collective bargaining rights and the non-respect of collective agreements were frequent and persistent in both the public and private sector”.

Last year prominent Venezuelan trade unionist Rubén González, a former supporter of Chavez, went to jail for having the temerity to test the fraternal claims of Bolivarian socialism.

After leading a 15-day strike at the state iron mining company in 2009, he was jailed for seven years for “crimes” that included unlawful assembly, incitement, and violating a government security zone. According to The Human Rights Foundation (HRF), González’s imprisonment had more to do with the fact that he took workers out on strike than with the trumped up official charges. “The on-going trial against González is yet another instance of the continuing criminalization of legitimate union activities in Venezuela,” said HRF general counsel Javier El-Hage.

Some like to view Venezuela as part of a larger progressive Latin American movement that’s turning away from the North American economic model towards something fairer. “Venezuela’s main allies are fellow Latin American democracies, themselves ruled by progressive governments,” wrote Owen Jones.

And yet Chavez’s main ally in the region is Cuba, a country ruled by a crew of Stalinist gargoyles who, amongst other things, prevent Cubans from travelling freely overseas. By providing Cuba with subsidised oil at a rate of roughly 105,000 cut-rate barrels a day - about half of Cuba's energy needs for petroleum - Chavez ensures that the Castro dictatorship retains its iron grip on power.

As the Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez made clear last week, the Bolivarian Revolution looks quite different from the dilapidated streets of Havana. “It was precisely the rise to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 that was the key element to the walking back of reforms,” Ms Sanchez wrote.

“With a powerful and nearby partner lavishly giving us oil, why continue to deepen the process of relaxations that resulted in a loss of power?”

In his memoirs the young Russian revolutionary Victor Serge noticed how easy it was for populist charlatans to offer easy solutions to the young and idealistic in search of a cause. “When there’s no worthwhile banner,” Serge said, “you start to march behind worthless ones”.

Those keen to defend President Hugo Chavez would do well to remember Serge’s words, for history is rarely kind to those who make excuses for autocrats because they’ve not yet found a revolution worth fighting for.

Is class politics still relevant? Well yes and no

A new think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, which also goes by the appropriate acronym CLASS, was recently set-up as a left-wing alternative to the Blairite think-tank Progress, and will be holding a fringe meeting on equality at this week’s Labour Party conference. The brainchild of Unite leader Len McCluskey and GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny, the think tank’s central aim is to present a coherent alternative to the leadership of the Labour Party from a decidedly left-wing perspective.

As any lefty will recognise, an initiative like this is sorely needed. In terms of economic policy, despite what many would consider a fertile economic backdrop, there is currently no credible left-wing alternative to the free-market on the table - neither in the Labour Party nor outside it. There hasn’t been for some time either. Critiques of the excesses of capitalism continue to impress of course – the late Tony Judt’s book Ill Fares the Land was an excellent example - but applying the socialism and social democracy of the 20th century to today’s economy would make about as much sense as riding a penny farthing to work. Things have moved on; and it is probably time the left did too.

As the acronym suggests, the think tank places a heavy emphasis on class - class politics to be precise - or in the media-savvy language all think tanks like to use, “making politics more relevant to working class lives”. This is certainly on the right track. The idea that inequality no longer matters – that what is really important is meritocracy, and that policy should do little more than smooth the path for a clutch of talented individuals to rise above their background – is often a convenient excuse for the status quo. It is no accident that life expectancy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, criminality and infant mortality indexes are worse in the UK and the US than in mainland Europe. The more unequal a society is the more widespread are its social problems. And importantly for the meritocrats, the harder it is for gifted individuals to escape the circumstances into which they were born.

However the stumbling blocks for those looking to put social class back on the political agenda are many, most notably the reluctance of the working class to recognise itself for what it is. Only a quarter (24 per cent) of the British population now identifies as working class, according to a survey carried out last year by BritainThinks. This compares to 67 per cent in the late 1980s. The survey also found a breakdown in traditional forms of working class solidarity, with those identifying as middle class more likely to feel themselves part of a wider community than their working class counterparts.

Now while I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone that they must accept Tony Blair’s 1999 assertion that “the class war is over” – every time a person is sacked in order to bring about a fraction of a penny increase in a company’s share price it is clear that the class war is not over – in forging an effective message it is necessary for the left to recognise that class occupies a much smaller chunk of a working person’s identity than it did a generation ago.

And in many ways this is a positive development. The idea that a person can only find fulfilment through the participation in the communal life of an organised group can be as constricting as it can be emancipating. In much the same way that the breakdown of the traditional family has brought with it a number of social problems, it has allowed others to break free from sexual hypocrisy in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Sexual and racial identities have also become more fluid than in the past, and today people are free to reject automatic categorisation based on only one facet of their personality. For better or worse the same holds true for workers. Working people today often identify more closely with the music they listen to, the people they socialise with, what they spend their money on, and the way they look more than they do with the picket line. This is reflected in the trade union movement, where membership levels fell by a further 2.7 per cent last year to 6.5 million – down from a historic high-point of 13.2 million in 1979.

I imagine the initial reaction of any ardent socialist to this sort of thing will be to scoff and claim that it is all a distraction from the class struggle. They would have a point too. Class is as important as ever in terms of whom in our society gets rich and who flounders around at the bottom. But in order to make political inroads the left needs to figure out a way to connect with people for whom social class is only one fragment of a much more fluid social identity. As well as getting to grips with a global economy that is seemingly incompatible with the realisation of social justice, anyone looking for some kind of redistributive change, whether in the form of a more cuddly kind of capitalism or democratic Socialism, needs to start talking in a language that people understand, and unfortunately class politics just isn’t one of them.

Originally published at The Independent.