WHEN I was a Fleet Street sub-editor a long time ago, developing (or ‘running’) news stories were updated for each edition of the newspaper (usually three or four a night, very occasionally five). This involved a process we called ‘jigging’ in which a new intro (first paragraph) and headline might be written, numbers revised, material inserted and other material deleted, the order of paragraphs changed to reflect new priorities, and many other detailed changes made. It all had to fit into a defined space, so every word had to earn its place, and comment was kept to separate articles. This would all be done against the clock: edition times were strict in order that the papers were printed in time for the trains that took them round the country.
I note that the BBC news website has dispensed with this old-fashioned rigmarole. Now running stories are labelled ‘Live’ (which rather grates with me when it is about a death) and random incoming material is dumped on the top of a growing rag-bag of disparate interviews, opinions, facts and speculation, with a so-called ‘summary’ to one side. This is usually inadequate and out of date; hours after the result was announced at the recent Caerphilly by-election, the summary did not include the fact that Labour had come third with a miserable 11 per cent of the vote. To discover this important bit of information meant scrolling through a vast stack of irrelevance and repetition. The summaries have links to various portions of the whole caboodle, but what this means is that the reader has to put the story together DIY-style. In my day, we did that job. Now it’s Amateur Night, and who cares about the reader? There are no time constraints, as the BBC operative just has to press a button to publish, or space limits – the words run on and on and on, thousands of them. To top it all there is usually a list of two, three or four ‘editors’. Quite frankly a monkey – or a robot – could shovel the copy as efficiently.
I don’t know how much easier the BBC can make it for their lazy and undisciplined ‘journalists’, but I expect they will find a way. Perhaps they could get some of those hacks busy Verifying what everybody else says to do some real work.
When I think of the strenuous efforts we used to make to give the very best service to our readers, it makes me sad, but at least we could take pride in our work. There cannot be much pride to be had at the BBC’s drivel factory.
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