It seems like everywhere one turns these days, one is confronted by some or other criticism or outright attack on “the media”. In many cases the critique displays an appalling ignorance of who and what “the media” really is. As a professional journalist and editor, this ignorance offends me and this post is my attempt to do something about that ignorance. Feel free to tell everybody you know about it – particularly those who are in the habit of criticising “the media”.
There is a wonderful product started by a friend of mine many years ago called The Media List. It began as a book and then a series of books and is now available via the internet too. What it is is a complete listing of all the newspapers, magazines, radio shows, television shows and online media resources in the country. It is used mostly in the public relations industry because it provides the names, telephone numbers and email addresses of section editors and key journalists who work at each publication – along with lots of other useful info.
The media
But I digress, the reason I mention The Media List is because it allows me to quantify “the media”. For example, I have a three Media List books from about five years ago that list: daily & Sunday newspapers (including news services); consumer magazines; and trade & technical magazines. I haven’t counted the number of publications in them – the books I have are in an electronic document format – but I can tell you that they are 43, 65 and 64 pages long, respectively. Think about that for a second; there is probably about four publications per page on average, which by extrapolation means 172, 260 and 256 publications. That’s well over 600 newspapers and magazines.
Now, I have lately been hearing (and seeing on Twitter as well as in newspapers, in magazines and online) lots of criticism of “the media”. Sometimes that’s qualified by the word “mainstream”. Let’s look at that: mainstream covers all daily & Sunday newspapers as well as those magazines targeting a wide consumer audience. So, according to my five-year old numbers, that means more than 400 publications.
Typically, this is the group of publication people should be referring to when they say “the media”. In reality, however, they may have seen one negative article in one newspaper or magazine and yet “the media” is publishing negative reports, feeding the myth that “the media” is one amorphous mass.
This is nothing short of unadulterated cod’s wallop. Each of the 400+ mainstream publications has at the very least one editor and several journalists and the bigger ones have an editorial staff that comprises as many as 20, 30 or even 50 journalists and section editors. These are all fiercely independent and mostly principled people who represent a wide range of views, backgrounds and ideas.
One publication
I’ve also noticed that many of the comments about “the media” reflect a total ignorance about how the news gathering and production processes work. So, I’m going to explain it by using a hypothetical monthly magazine as an example.
The thing to understand about most magazines in the retail space is that they are funded by advertising. Any cover price is usually just an attempt by the publisher to recoup some of the printing and distribution costs. So, that being the case, the size of our hypothetical magazine is governed by the number of pages the advertising sales team has sold for it. Usually, we make an estimate based on the size of the previous issue and a conversation with the sales manager. In the case of our hypothetical magazine, we’re going to settle on an initial estimate of 64 pages.
Now magazines in this country usually run on a ratio of 60:40, editorial:advertising. In real terms, this means that our 64-page magazine will have about 38 editorial pages. I say “about” because I have yet to come across a publication that will refuse a last-minute advert unless the magazine has already gone to print. But usually, the 60:40 is a good approximation. This calculation is sometimes skewed a little by the covers: the front cover is typically classified as editorial while the inside front, inside back and outside back covers are all considered advertising space.
Next, we have to decide what editorial stories we are going to cover in the next issue. Most magazines have a broad plan based on the readership profile that guides the editor and journalists. This often only needs to be updated from issue to issue to cover current news events. Story ideas are then debated, articles commissioned and everybody gets to work. In a magazine, most articles take about two weeks to research and write. They are then delivered to the editor for vetting and submission to the production process.
Production process
Once the editor has vetted the articles for quality and to ensure that they cover their subjects in a manner consistent with the mission of the magazine, he will push them into sub-editing. A sub-editor, for those who don’t know, is a language specialist. He or she, is tasked with making sure that all articles are grammatically correct and conform to the magazine’s style guide for written language. This is often also where headlines created and pullquotes (sentences used to break up the text) identified.
Meanwhile, the art editor has been scouring image libraries for appropriate artwork to illustrate each article in the finished magazine. Once the articles are back from subbing, which usually takes a week for the whole magazine, they are bundled with the requisite artwork and sent to the layout artist(s) to be placed on editorial pages. Again, this process often takes about two weeks for a whole magazine.
Next is proofing. In the old days, editors would proof pages on physical printouts but these days it’s more common to use lowres PDFs. At this stage captions are inserted and visual problems are ironed out. Finally, about a week later, the magazine goes off to print, which again can take up to two weeks. If you have been paying attention, that has been some eight weeks of production for a monthly magazine. By necessity, one issue always overlaps the next one.
Now, change the measure from pages to column centimetres and cram that whole process into seven days for a weekly paper or 24 hours for a daily. If, at this point, you’re wondering why the process is so lengthy and involved, I’d like to remind you of a little comment attributed to that famous writer and journalist, Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of everything is shit.”
Not surprisingly, he was right, which is why most journalists write and rewrite several times over until they are happy with the article. Then it goes through the process outlined above so as to catch the typos, spelling and grammatical errors and to make it stylistically consistent with the rest of the magazine.
Criticism
There is a lot of criticism these days, some of it warranted and some not. During a discussion the other day with some people I follow on Twitter, many of them surfaced. In no particular order, I deal with them here.
The discussion I referred to earlier all began when @JoziGoddess tweeted: “SA media is in the business of repeating sound bites; not reporting news.” What offended me most about this comment was the generalisation. What media? Radio? Television? Magazines? Web sites? Newspapers? And which ones?
If one looks at television and radio, there’s the ultimate sound bite mediums. There time is literally money so news is short, sharp and to the point. Occasionally, there’ll be a magazine show or discussion forum in which a topic is dissected but these invariably run out of time. Similarly in print: you only have as much editorial space as advertisers fund.
But when I raised this, @Mabine_Seabe told me that he didn’t want to hear about space. “Journalists and Editors, if well qualified should be able to report on both good and bad,” he added. Well, sorry for you Mabine but space is an issue whether you like it or not. There is only so much and there is a truism cited frequently in the publishing that “good news doesn’t sell newspapers”. And in the newspaper (or magazine) business, circulation is everything. The higher the circulation, the more advertisers will pay to advertise. Consequently, the balance will always be skewed towards “bad” or negative news. That’s a simple economic reality.
@Mabine_Seabe also noted that “Newspapers are selling news, not opinions. If journos want to write opinion pieces, they should look into a career change.”
In principle, he’s wrong; but in practice, sadly, he may have a point. Newspapers have always covered news and provided analysis of that news (by respected journalists) as well as opinion in the form of columns. In most respected publications this is all clearly marked. However, in other less respected publications, the line has begun to blur.
Still, I don’t believe that this is necessarily a deliberate ploy. Far from it. I believe that it is the inevitable result of hard financial times during which clueless administrators replace experienced senior journalists and editors with younger, inexperienced and less expensive, journalists and editors. The inevitable result is a decline in editorial standards. Having said that, South Africa still has many well-respected publications who continue to deserve that respect – whether or not what they publish pleases the government and other critics. Names that spring immediately to mind are: Business Day, City Press, Mail & Guardian, The Daily Maverick, to name but four.
I think it was @TOMolefe brought up the subject of how Julius Malema and Jimmy Manyi seem to dominate the headlines these days. Whoever it was intimated that “the media” has a love affair with these two gentlemen. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When I was being taught to write, my lecturer said something that has stayed with me for the past almost twenty years: “News isn’t news unless it hurts somebody.” Since both gentlemen have a habit of speaking out on contentious issues that have potential to hurt somebody, this is why Mr Malema and Mr Manyi are constantly in the headlines.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that there is no single entity called the media. It is an industry made up of hundreds – maybe thousands of publications from newspapers and magazines to web sites and blogs to radio shows and television programmes.
So, the next time somebody criticises “the media”, ask him (or her) to be more specific: which newspaper or magazine or web sites or blogs or radio station or television programme, and which editor or journalist or presenter he (or she) is talking about? And what, specifically, did they write or say?
If they can’t answer intelligently then the chances are they know less than you do about how “the media” works.
ambo 
Jun 26, 2011 @ 16:55:33
Is this not the same as when people blame the “goverment” for their problems or “big business” or the “west”. There are numerous examples where industries, whole continents have been boiled down into one amorphous mass ” the media” is not the only one affected and it will not be the last. The argument you raise is valid but I think generalisations are used in common speech for ease of understanding. It is also unfortunate that the very industry you are defending is the one that exploits this the most. How many articleshave been written about “the government” when what was meant was a specific ministry or even a particular minister? I think if the overall quality of journalism improves then the generalisation of “the media” will stop and people will begin to pick out the sub-standard publications to blame. At present there are only a few good quality publications thus the tainted broad brush stroke that “the media” is painted in covers these as well.
Jun 26, 2011 @ 18:01:29
Probably, yes. In fact, one of the people who instigated this post was debating the subject with me on Twitter again a little earlier. He complained that the media publishes too much bad news about government and not enough good news. I responded that the government delivering on its election promises is not news. However, non-delivery is news because then it’s not doing what it promised. Unfortunately, in SA today, government actually delivering is news because it does so so infrequently. Interesting irony there.
Jun 26, 2011 @ 18:07:51
Also, perhaps I didn’t cover the economics in enough detail. The reality is that few publications can afford to employ senior journalists in a full-time capacity. And fewer still are comfortable with contracted part-time editors like myself. Furthermore, when the bean-counters have to cut people, it’s typically production or editorial staff that get the chop because they are perceived as non-revenue generating. They don’t seem to understand that readers are not stupid: they can see when the articles are sub-standard and will stop reading. And when you lose readers, your advertising rate has to come down, which puts further fiscal pressure on the edifice. Slippery slope.
Jun 27, 2011 @ 17:32:26
It was actually Max du Preez who brought up “the media” obsession with Manyi and Malema, and I RTed it as I believe it to be true. He isn’t the first to voice that view. Mandy de Waal also said a similar thing suggesting that the focus of the ink spilled on these two is on their personality and not what they say, thus making a lot of reporting on news more like reporting on celebrities.
And we can get into hairsplitting detail about generalisation and who the media is or isn’t…but that, I believe, is an irrelevant discussion. While I and many others appreciate the distinction, generally, when people bitch about this amorphous thing, the media, they are referring to news media…the press..the papers.
The press, due to its significant political and societal influence, is often referred to as the fourth estate. And, recognising that influence, the SA press code says: “The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgements on the issues of the time.”
This one paragraph goes to the heart of the acrimony toward the press that Manyi and others have latched onto, and may give perspective to Mabine’s comments about reporting on good and bad news [in short, how are citizens to make informed decisions when the press isn’t providing complete information? is this press code wrong about what the primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion?].
The press in South Africa sees itself as primarily doing this, as serving society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgements on the issues of the time, however, the reality is more blurred. Many other factors influence editorial decisions other this supposed primary purpose. Some of these other factors are what’s steered journalism for many years and led to, frankly, shocking statements like: “News isn’t news unless it hurts somebody”.
There is clearly a larger debate to be had here on the role of the news and, as one who dabbles in “the media”, instead of being defensive or annoyed or irritated, we’d be better served by attempting to hear through all the noise and responding to the core issues.
Also, like I was trying to emphasise on Twitter, there are few things in life as clear-cut or black-and-white as we believe them to be. In an argument, we are frequently the blind men gathered around different sides of an elephant and describing to the others what an elephant is. With me at the ear, you at the leg and another at the tail, the elephant and what it really is becomes something limited by our perspectives.
Jun 27, 2011 @ 17:50:48
Thanks for the clarification on who mentioned Malema and Manyi. I don’t disagree with your comments but my point was that working journalists and editors face huge challenges, all of which have capacity to undermine their adherence to the SA press code, as you quoted: “The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgements on the issues of the time.”
Which is not to say I’m making excuses. Not at all. I’m merely trying to remind the critics on Twitter and elsewhere that journalists are people too, doing a job to the best of their ability against all sorts of opposition – some of it internal, as indicated in my post. Strangely enough, this translates into far more successes that failures when it comes to reporting the news, good and bad. Yes, we, the media, do occasionally make slip-ups but the harshest critics are often our own peers, pointing out where we went wrong in the hope that we learn from those mistakes. And it is very often these critiques that both alert and form the basis of the flack “the media” takes from the politicians.
Jun 28, 2011 @ 00:36:42
Interesting insights Brian. Couple of remarks though:
You offer two quotes (statements?) in order to define a concept of “the nature of news”;
1.”…there is a truism cited frequently in the publishing that “good news doesn’t sell newspapers””
and,
2. “…stayed with me for the past almost twenty years: “News isn’t news unless it hurts somebody.””
You then seem to accede that, “The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgements on the issues of the time.”
It seems to me that these two positions are, in practice, mutually exclusive – or, at least, incongruent. Are we to understand that you a) regard the former position as descriptive, and b) the latter as normative ?
…or, is the Press Code just naively altruistic in its formulation ?
Jun 28, 2011 @ 09:56:18
Hi Etienne
It is true, yes, that the “The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve society by informing citizens and enabling them to make informed judgements on the issues of the time.” In an ideal world, all magazines and newspapers would religiously live up to the SA press code. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a commercial one where economic reality takes a hand in the game.
As I tried to explain in my post, the volume of advertising support governs how much space is available for editorial content. This means most newspapers (and many magazines) are faced with far more articles than will comfortably fit into the available space. That often means that editors have to make a call on which ones to run and in those circumstances it is often the good news pieces that fall by the wayside, if only because hard news sells more papers. Just ask yourself how many times you’ve walked into a convenience store and walked out with a newspaper or magazine you hadn’t intended to buy, but did on the strength of the front page headline or cover story. It’s certainly happened to me more than a few times.
Hope that answers the question.
b