Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  And on the way back to the car, past the giant Soviet-era memorial to the 30,000 dead, we walk past a small lake with girls swimming and laughing. I am not offended. Life goes on.

  How do you mourn a murdered grandmother whom you never knew? I tried hard to conjure up her presence as I stood on the edge of that killing field, but the enormity of what had happened there seemed to overwhelm me. I wished I could have found her name on a list, to link her directly to that terrible place. But there are no lists of names at the Ninth Fort.

  Her name does figure, however, on a list maintained by the German government in the federal archive: ‘Victims of the Persecution of Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933–1945’.

  Cohn, Ilse Gertrud, born 30 August 1897, Breslau

  Date of deportation: 25 November 1941

  Date of death: 29 November 1941. Kaunas, Fort IX

  From Kaunas, Stu and I took a bus to Warsaw, and from Warsaw we took a train to Wrocław, my mother’s hometown. Our guide and translator was Mateusz Kornacki, founder of a tour company called What’s Up Wrocław. He had arranged for me to visit the city archives, where they were easily able to trace my grandparents’ marriage certificate, my mother’s birth certificate and my grandfather’s death certificate. Mateusz also took me to the city’s two Jewish cemeteries, in the second of which, to my great surprise, I was shown my grandfather’s grave, totally hidden by ivy but uncovered by a cemetery worker who had worked out where it must be by consulting the cemetery record book. My grandfather had died of a heart attack, aged fifty, just two weeks before my mother’s seventeenth birthday, in April 1938.

  My mother had adored her father, but as far as I know she never once visited his grave before leaving her hometown for good just over a year after he died. So it was a special moment for me, having already paid my respects at the site of my grandmother’s death, to be able to do the same at my grandfather’s graveside.

  Once I had retraced my mother’s family’s footsteps, it was time to do the same for my father’s family, and given that he was still in excellent health in his mid-nineties, I decided to use him as my guide. So in Berlin, he showed me where he grew up and where he went to school, and we visited the Weissensee Jewish cemetery, more than a hundred acres containing well over 100,000 graves.

  Finding his grandparents’ graves there could not have been easier. All we had to do was provide their names and dates of death, and the cemetery computer did the rest. A map was printed out, the relevant spot on the grid was identified, and a dotted line was drawn to indicate the route we should take to the graveside. And of course, still wearing my reporter’s armour, I recorded an interview with my father while we were there.

  Our final stop was on the Isle of Man, where my father had been interned in the summer of 1940 as a ‘friendly enemy alien’. He had been arrested at the school in Derbyshire where he was working as a gardener and part-time cello teacher; with the Nazis having overrun northern Europe, Churchill had panicked and ordered that all men of German and Austrian origin living in the UK, refugees and non-refugees alike, should be rounded up. When Italy joined the war later, another 19,000 Italians were added to the list.

  My father was held in a government-requisitioned guesthouse on Marine Parade in Peel, on the western side of the island, facing out towards the ruins of Peel Castle and over the Irish Sea. At each end of the street was a high barbed-wire fence and armed guards. Our return visit, my father’s first time back on the island in seventy-four years, marked his first opportunity to look up the side street that leads away from the beach. ‘It was on the other side of the fence,’ he said. ‘So we had no idea what was up there.’

  What my journey to my family’s roots taught me was that I was still very much a reporter at heart. I wrote a series of dispatches for the Jewish Chronicle and produced a report from the Isle of Man for the BBC World Service. Over the months and years that followed, I reported from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, South Sudan and northern Nigeria. I also walked along the entire length of the river Thames (and produced a series of audio reports for The World at One along the way, as well as posting audio slideshows on YouTube)126 and then walked all the way round London.

  Twice.

  I also became a voluntary reading helper at a local primary school. Whatever else life after the BBC was, it was not boring.

  CHAPTER 17

  AND FINALLY…

  In newspapers, all see

  The doings of the world,

  Which lead nowhere:

  Better never written.

  EMPEROR MEIJI OF JAPAN, 1867–1912

  WHEN I STARTED WORKING for Reuters in 1970, the only people who could read what I wrote were the readers of publications who subscribed to the Reuters news service. When I wrote for The Observer, the only people who could read my articles were those who bought, or were otherwise able to gain sight of, a copy of the paper. And when I started at the BBC, if you wanted to be able to hear my dulcet tones, you had to be close to a radio and tuned to the right wavelength at the right time.

  Compared to the world of information in which we now live, it was like the Middle Ages before the invention of the printing press, when the only people with access to the written word were monks, scribes and courtiers. The digital revolution means that more people have more access to more information, wherever and whenever they want it. This is a Very Good Thing.

  It also means that journalists equally have more access to more information, and this is also a Very Good Thing. In the days when we had to rely on reference books – Whitaker’s Almanac was a favourite – we knew less and were able to check less. At the BBC, we made a phone call to the news information library, told them what we needed to know, and an hour or so later, a messenger would arrive with a large brown envelope full of photocopied newspaper cuttings. We got more wrong and corrected fewer mistakes. Now, the wisdom of crowds means that any journalistic error is spotted within minutes. And, more than ever before, newspapers know that their readers expect them to own up to their mistakes.

  Like the one the New York Times had to correct in October 2000:

  An article in The Times Magazine last Sunday about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each.

  Or the even more embarrassing one that The (London) Times had to publish in 2015, a mistake that ought to have been checkable even before the days of Google:

  Karol Wojtyla was referred to in Saturday’s Credo column as ‘the first non-Catholic pope for 450 years’. This should, of course, have read ‘non-Italian’.

  The eminent American journalist David Broder of the Washington Post defined a newspaper as

  [a] partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past twenty-four hours – distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour.

  All of which is another way of saying that, even if journalists now know more – and have access to more information – than they ever did before, they still know only a tiny fraction of the truth. They work under pressure, sometimes in great danger and usually at great speed: what always surprises me is not how much they get wrong, but how much they get right.

  In the new media environment, however – an environment in which everyone has access to social media sites that enable them to share their thoughts instantly with the world – a journalist’s reason for living (‘I know more than you do’) is being challenged as never before. If you and I both observe the same event, and I then broadcast a report about it on BBC radio while you do the same via Twitter or Facebook, are we both journalists?

  Not according to the American Press Institute:

  Merely engaging in journalistic-like activity – snapping a cell-phone picture at
the scene of a fire or creating a blog site for news and comment – does not by itself produce a journalistic product. Though it can and sometimes does, there is a distinction between the act of journalism and the end result.

  The journalist places the public good above all else and uses certain methods – the foundation of which is a discipline of verification – to gather and assess what he or she finds.127

  Ah. The public good. If only we could agree on what that is. The National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden thought leaking information about clandestine surveillance activities was a public good; the US disagreed and charged him, in his absence, under the Espionage Act. I might argue that publishing information about a government minister’s extramarital affairs was a public good (‘We deserve to know what kind of people are governing us’); the minister himself, or herself, might disagree.

  I worry about the future of journalism, and I worry about the future of the BBC. I do not believe that journalism is threatened because more people have access to both information and the means of communication that used to be the exclusive preserve of the professional journalist. It is threatened because not enough people are prepared to pay for access to that information, and if fewer people pay for information, there will be less money with which to pay the information providers.

  In the UK, newspaper sales have dropped by more than 40 per cent over the past fifteen years; in 2015, the communications regulator Ofcom reported that newspapers had become the least popular medium that people use to keep up to date with news.128 Thirty-one per cent of people said they got their news from newspapers (down from 41 per cent in 2014); radio came next on 32 per cent; then the internet (41 per cent), and top was television on 67 per cent (down from 75 per cent in 2014).

  But TV viewing figures are decreasing year by year by 3 to 4 per cent on average, while online video watching is rising. In mid-2016, around five million people watched BBC television’s News at Ten, but more than twenty-three million followed @BBCBreaking on Twitter. Like many journalists, I now get nearly all of my news via Twitter, obsessively checking for the latest developments and following links to stories recommended by friends and former colleagues. It is the best way I know to keep abreast of what is happening.

  But here is the paradox: the people who are tweeting the news that I am interested in are, almost exclusively, professional journalists working for, and being paid by, established news organisations. And as those organisations’ business models come under increasing strain, something will have to give. Will it be their Twitter teams, or will it be their investigative teams? Their online video creators, or their overseas bureaus?

  When I was a Fleet Street news editor, we would occasionally commission what were called page traffic surveys, in which a sample of readers would be asked which items of the paper they had read and which they remembered. Health stories always did well, as did photographs of attractive women. Stories about famines overseas inevitably did badly.

  These days, editors can track exactly how many people are clicking on each story online, how long they spend reading it, what they were reading before, and what they read afterwards. They also know where their readers shop, what they buy and where they go on holiday. This is all useful information – and it is dangerous.

  The pressure to prioritise what generates most reader traffic has always been there, but online it is more intense than ever. More clicks mean higher ad rates, and if advertisers want to be able to embed video advertisements on your news site, then you need to be able to offer them video content to go with their ads. ‘In the world being born, video content trumps text, and more mere scribes, of all ages and of all digital skill levels, are finding themselves unwanted. The ad tail is wagging the new digital news dog, at a quickening pace.’129 We live in the age of clickbait.

  In June 2016, News UK, which publishes The Times, the Sunday Times, The Sun and the Sun on Sunday, announced that it was to invest millions of pounds on producing a hundred hours of video each month for its websites. The company called it ‘a significant moment in the UK news industry – marking the point where video becomes one of our major output formats’. And then came the real reason: ‘This is a huge opportunity for brands [in other words, advertisers] to reach our engaged audiences in the context of fantastic, original video content.’

  Even more significantly, just a few weeks later, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, a man who not only knows what is going to happen next in the world of digital media but has the power and the money to make it happen, announced that Facebook was moving ‘towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services’. It was the clearest possible signal that the Future is Video.

  For a wordsmith like me, these developments represent a huge challenge. Storytelling now means using all the available media together – words alone, or with just a couple of tasteful photographs, are no longer enough, and even in radio, words and sounds will need to be accompanied online by videos to help grab and retain the attention of listeners and readers.

  In 2011, on a reporting trip to Brazil, producer Beth McLeod, sound engineer/camera operator Phil Zentner and I were among the first BBC teams to dip our toes into this new multimedia world. When we met a woman whose home had been demolished to make way for an Olympics-related highway, we recorded her in sound for my radio reports, took photographs of her for an illustrated story online and recorded a video of her to run alongside my words.130 It seemed ground-breaking at the time; now it is regarded as standard practice.

  According to a survey of 50,000 people in twenty-six different countries in 2016, just over half those questioned said they used social media as a source of news, and more than a quarter of under-25s said social media were their main news source.131 It is not surprising, therefore, that digital advertisers are flocking to the social media sites rather than to the sites of traditional media organisations to find their target customers. In the words of Emily Bell of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, one of the undisputed gurus of this digital world: ‘Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything … The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world.’132

  More accurately, perhaps, social media sites are a portal to a meticulously curated world in which their algorithms decide what we see and which websites we visit. The content that we see, including the ads that appear on the screens of our phones or our tablets, is skewed to what we are thought to want to see, based on an analysis of our click history. Our online world is a world created in our own image, an echo chamber in which we communicate overwhelmingly with likeminded people. It is not the world as it is, nor is it the world as reflected on the pages of the newspapers.

  When I was writing this book, the Twitter account with the most followers in the world was an account in the name of the singer-songwriter Katy Perry, which had more than ninety-one million followers. I was not one of them and, as far as I know, I have never once seen a tweet from Ms Perry. Also among the world’s top ten Twitterati were Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Taylor Swift – I did not follow them either, nor, for some reason, did they follow me. It was as if, in the digital world, we were totally blind to each other’s existence.

  Everything that appears online is targeted – in other words, if an advertiser wants to sell a new line of overpriced trainers, the ads will appear only on sites that are known to attract a high number of users who are likely to be interested in buying new trainers. When political parties want to influence a specific group of voters, the rest of us may well be oblivious to what they are doing, so that if you are a lifelong supporter of the Green Party, you are unlikely to see online ads aimed at persuading you to vote for UKIP. Journalists whose job is to monitor such things will find it increasingly difficult to keep an eye on who is spending how much on what.

  The money that in the past advertisers spent to buy space in newspapers is now being spent to embed videos on sites like Facebook, which attracts users – in part – by offering
news that has been written by journalists employed by the newspapers in which the advertisers no longer advertise. The unfortunate consequence is that while Facebook’s profits have been soaring ever further into the stratosphere – in the second quarter of 2016, advertising revenue was up by two-thirds to $6.24 million and its income from operations more than doubled – many newspapers have been plunging ever further into debt. The New York Times, for example, lost half a million dollars in the second quarter of 2016; its revenue from print advertising was down by 14 per cent compared to the previous year, and revenue from digital ads was down by 7 per cent.

  So how about this as a parable for our times? The Oscar-winning film Spotlight was a paean of praise to investigative journalism and in particular to the Boston Globe, which uncovered systemic child abuse by Roman Catholic priests and a cover-up by the Church. A decade before it published the results of its investigation, the paper had been bought for more than $1 billion by the New York Times. Two decades later, it was sold for $70 million. A newspaper that had contributed immeasurably to the ‘public good’ had, in twenty years, lost more than 90 per cent of its value. It is a chilling thought for anyone who values the work that journalists do.

  Imagine a world in which no one had uncovered the corruption at the heart of international football, or the sexual abuse of young English footballers by their coaches, or of drug-taking in sport, or of MPs’ expenses-fiddling, or of police corruption, or of corporate tax-dodging, or offshore banking malpractice. Not one of these was uncovered by regulators or parliamentary inquiries: they were all uncovered by journalists doing what journalists do – shining some light into dark places and reporting on what they found.

  But this kind of journalism is expensive, time-consuming and risky. According to the columnist Simon Jenkins, The Guardian spent £500,000 on its investigation into international money-laundering by HSBC, and £2 million on its Wikileaks and Snowden surveillance stories.133 The Guardian’s pre-tax losses in 2015/16 were an eye-watering £68.7 million. Its former editor Alan Rusbridger insisted that The Guardian’s online journalism should be free and that revenues could be found from online advertising. The Facebook phenomenon seems to have blown a gaping hole in his strategy.