Two open letters from British journalism to its readers

In his column this week, Briefing Media co-founder Neil Thackray imagines a pair of alternative open letters from newspapers to their readers, both asking the same difficult question of whether there something systemically wrong with our approach to journalism. But which one is more honest?

Dear Readers,

Whoops! Sorry about all that. A handful of rotten apples in the barrel seem to have let us all down. All very unfortunate. You know that we know that there has to be a limit to this kind of thing, and now we have been caught out, even we realise that hacking the mobile phone voicemails of soldiers’ widows, dead children and bereaved parents is just not on. We’ll find out who did it – quite junior people or ex-journalists hopefully, and hang them out to dry.

You also know that most journalists would never dream of hacking phones. But the other stuff we do, we do it for you!

Just as you have always turned a blind eye to how chickens get slaughtered, you have also mostly avoided thinking about how all those important stories about Sienna Miller Loading... people sienna-miller ’s cellulite, Wayne Rooney Loading... people wayne-rooney ’s hair or Jordan’s mammories get made too. But we all know it goes on and we can’t afford to get all sentimental about it. And if you want to stay in the know then you know and we know that it has to be done.

Can you imagine how expensive your newspaper would be if we had to do proper journalism? Organic journalism is a great idea for the rich middle classes, but not realistic for most of us who just want value for money battery journalism. It’s not very nutritious but is does fill you up in these austere times. Did you know that some newspapers are down to their last 400 journalists?

We can all agree that this hacking thing is going too far, but as it is an isolated faux pas, you will want to be reassured that legitimate practices such as door-stepping, bin-rummaging, entrapment etc will still be used to bring you value-for-money stories about celebs and errant politicians.

We should grieve for the News of the World Loading... companies news-of-the-world , but tomorrow is another day. Any pictures of Wills and Kate in a naked embrace anyone?

Yours,
The Newspaper Loading... industries newspaper Industry

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Dear Readers,

When you found out that MPs had been routinely fiddling their expenses you were shocked. And rightly so. It turned out that far being the practice of a handful of bad apples, the practice was endemic and habitual. So much so that many of the offenders simply did not believe that they were doing anything wrong.

We are now very worried that you will take the same view about journalism – that you will see the phone hacking saga as emblematic of all that has become corrupt in British journalism. You condemn the hacking of private phone calls – now that you realise it could be your phone not just that of the Hugh Grants and John Prescotts of the world – and now you have thought about it you are questioning so much else about what you read.

For the first time many of you are beginning to notice that nothing in the papers is at it seems. You might remember the uncritical way we pursued the MMR vaccine Loading... issues mmr-vaccine story, preferring a good story to the facts. It might make you question the truth of other scare stories you read (inside tip – if the headline ends in a question mark the answer is always negative, e.g. “Do Carrots cause Cancer?” Answer: no).

You are now realising that most of us are not interested in the truth we are interested in selling papers by playing to your prejudices and prurience. We have justified this by saying to ourselves that this is what you want – so it’s your fault. This week we have realised that it might be ours.

You may have spotted that we are interested in whether we can sex up the story and how we can spin it to fit with our notion of we how we think you think and then if necessary hide or change some of the facts to make it that bit more juicy.

We won’t do this anymore. We have learned our lesson. What we do could be really important, but there is so much sleaze in how journalism is prepared that you can no longer discern the true journalism from the spun. We are going to put this right.

We know that many of our story collection processes are flawed and sometimes immoral. We now think that is not your inalienable right to know intimate details about someone’s private life, true or not. We no longer believe that the methodology of so-called investigative journalism should include tactics which if we caught one of victims doing similar, we would vilify them for.

If you steal, rummage through bins, spy on private emails or phone conversations, harass people in time of grief and stress, we will seek you out and publish a story about it. If you are important we will pursue the story with vigour. If we do the same things in pursuit of a story we should lose your trust.

This week has been a wake up call for us all. What we have been doing was not only wrong – it hasn’t worked. The News of the World has closed and every other newspaper has a falling paid circulation.

All this talk about new media strategies, paywall this, iPad that and it turns out the elephant in the room is that our journalism is corrupt. We promise to do better. Please give us another chance.

Yours,
The Newspaper Industry