Wozu noch Journalismus? Die Ethik der Medienmacher ist in Gefahr: Journalisten werden zu Handlangern der Politiker, bloggen im Netz und werden durch Laien ersetzt. Wie ist der Journalismus zu retten - und wieso sollten wir das überhaupt tun? In dieser Serie - herausgegeben von Stephan Weichert und Leif Kramp - setzen sich angesehene Publizisten auf sueddeutsche.de mit dieser Frage auseinander. In dieser Folge schreibt Roger Boyes über neue journalistische Herausforderungen aus Sicht eines Auslandskorrespondenten.
What worries me is not so much the death of journalism as the death of lunch. When the Bundestagskantine moved form Bonn to Berlin, something changed in the way that information passed from the decision-making to the writing classes. Now we have sandwich crumbs in our computer keyboard and, though we get to see our politicians, even play football or chess against them, we don't really have much to say to each other; the old conspiratorial friendships have withered and so, for foreign correspondents at least, has the idea of insider journalism.
Once upon a time a correspondent stationed abroad enjoyed a kind of oracular authority: it was up to us to analyse what was inside the Chancellor's brain, or in Helmut Kohl's case, his stomach, and warn our readers at home of an impending change of policy. Even more precariously we also advised our readers of the national mood. How many times in the 1990s was I asked to answer the question: what are the Germans thinking?
That pleasant vanity-feeding social position - we were pale shadows of the ambassador - encouraged politicians to seek our company. Well do I remember Karsten Voigt and Klaus Bölling diving into the New York Times bureau of the much-feared reporter John Vinocur in the 1970s. The Chancellor (Schmidt) viewed the paper (and my own at the time, the Financial Times) as a direct conduit to elites in the US and Anglophone Europe. Later, this steering of information to the press became known as public diplomacy because it sounded less corrupt.
What has changed? Newspaper correspondents are no longer viewed as the main channel of daily information from foreign countries. Neither by the host government, nor by the readers at home. Even before the arrival of the internet we were facing competition from 24 hour news television. The Washington correspondent, once a hugely respected figure in the European newspaper world, found himself awoken at 6 a.m. and told by news editors in London and Paris exactly what was the news of the day: it was late morning at home and the editors had been watching CNN for five hours.
Then came the online version of the NY Times, the Washington Post - once routinely copied by British correspondents, strapped for time. And the myriad American blogs. Nowadays the life of a Washington reporter resembles that of a hamster on a wheel, a constant attempt to satisfy, at high speed, the wishes of his editor. Correspondents in other capitals have it easier, but the fundamental shift applies to us all: digital news has robbed us of our monopoly of interpretation of a government, its society and culture.
Our authority has crumpled. We were once responsible for introducing nuance to the British (I could equally well say, Dutch, Italian, French) perception of our host countries. Nuance is yesterday. Online news- services to remain competitive have, like Alsatian geese, to be stuffed before they can be consumed. Slow news-gathering has become a luxury. Irony has been all but banned since nothing travels worse for an online audience, with English as a second or third language, than verbal humour.
nuance is yesterday
In short, the job of correspondent has been downgraded: by the competition from bloggers (who do not have to embark on the time consuming business of reporting facts), by falling levels of curiosity about serious foreign policy processes (the internet has ... expanded the conscious world, but seems, paradoxically, to have shrunk it too), by the end of any meaningful exchange between foreign-based reporters and the political class. And by the end of the three-hour gossip driven lunch with frustrated politicians.
None of this means that foreign reporting is going to die. But it will have to adapt. Two models of paywall are currently being considered for online news: One offers a certain amount of free articles before the reader is obliged to sign up for a subscription (the Financial Times practice that is to be taken over next year by the New York Times). Critics say this punishes the most loyal readers. The second model, loosely based on the Wall Street Journal, will have a two-tier pricing structure. Committed users will be given unrestricted access for a monthly subscription; or you will be able to pay a modest sum for a 24 hour access pass.
The Times (of London) will probably follow the second model. The problem, naturally, is that taking news out of the free domain has only been seriously tested for financial information. Many businessmen charge their subscriptions to expenses; it is therefore no real test of whether readers of general news are willing to pay out of their own pocket for what was once free. The Guardian, as outlined in a recent speech by its editor Alan Rusbridger, seems to be calculating that it can somehow profit by staying free after others disappear behind their paywall.
The Guardian which in terms of its printed circulation is only the ninth or tenth largest newspaper in Britain has developed a global position through its online presence. It calculates that it is the second best-read English newspaper in the world on the web. (37 million people - one third in Britain, one third in the US and one third in the rest of the world). "If the New York Times really does start charging for access," says Rusbridger, "the Guardian may become the newspaper with the largest web English-speaking readership in the world."
The thrill of foreign countries
Well, that is fine, but at some stage the readership figures have to be converted into solid global advertising or it will no longer be able to afford to produce quality journalism. The mood in the British media world is that a critical moment has arrived: readers are ready to pay. As Donald Trelford, a former editor of the Observer puts it: "Will people pay for sex when they are used to getting it for free? Yes, probably, if they want it desperately enough."
The question than is how desperate are readers for foreign news? What are they willing to pay for? The latest revelations about CSU party findings from the K-H. Schreiber trial? Probably not. The latest testimony from the John Demjanjuk trial? Perhaps. A great deal depends on intuition, on anticipation of reader interest. But reader interest can also be shaped. Readers can be led, can be excited, be persuaded.
Reporting today's wars is expensive
Seen from my own perspective as a foreign correspondent for 35 years - rather than as a spokesmen for the Times or the Murdoch empire - there are three core areas of foreign reporting for which readers are willing to pay. The first is the coverage of wars. Reporting today's wars is expensive -the Times bureau has been costing us 1.5 million Euros a year, the Kabul office costs four times more than my Berlin operation - and only major news organisations can hope to do it. Independent blogging does not really work from the front unless of course one is in the local civilian population - a handful of Iraqi, English-language bloggers enriched the understanding of the war, its daily stresses.
But they were rare and open to manipulation. Wars are catalysts of change at home, not some distant abstraction. When your own nation's soldiers die, the political class comes under pressure to talk to its citizens, to explain and persuade. In Britain we are waiting to see if German war reporting will now change too, become more accepting of physical risk, as the country engages more thoroughly in Afghanistan. War reporters have always made an impact on British politics, from the days of William Russell, the Times correspondent in the Crimean war whose reporting forced a radical overhaul of the hospital and nursing systems.
Wars, at least in their early phases, now attract huge online audiences. More than that, there is a duty to uncover the methods of war fighting and to hold governments to account: the Gaza war, for example, which the Israelis would clearly have liked to keep quiet, quick and surgically clean. Like all wars, it was a mess and needed to be witnessed. American online readers accessed British newspaper sites because they believed the US press to be too biased in favour of George W. Bush. Would they have paid for this access? I think so: it was regarded not as a luxury but as essential information.
Intellectually-grounded, politically aware and observant war reporting has always been one of the qualities that separate the serious press from the boulevard. This sense that there is a moral obligation to witness and analyze, rather than just comment on human conflict is also what distinguishes the old printed press from the web. Where is the moral spine of the blogosphere? It is easy and cost-efficient to criticise bungling generals. But these views only gain weight if they are backed by the authoritative (and expensive) reporter on the ground. Just as readers are willing to pay for articles about women's health, so too are they ready to fork out for information about a fast-moving war.
The second area of privilege for traditional foreign reporters is covering humanitarian disaster. With almost military logistics, the US networks managed to dispatch camera teams to Haiti even before the first rescuers arrived. Foreign correspondents from the printed press were competing against images that were already being transmitted into living rooms. But the reports I have read - not least in the German press - have been far deeper than anything on television. Simple reason: television cameras cannot smell the dead. That has to be the work of a writer.
Haiti is being hailed as the first online catastrophe. Neither the Asian tsunami five years ago, nor Hurricane Katrina had the cross-platform impact on society: the cash raised by twitter; the mobile phone information communities. Yet it is the witnessing that counts. When the TV teams have gone (and they are already packing their bags) it will be the printed press that stays, that addresses and keeps alive the curiosity of readers. Will readers pay for that? I think they will.
Where is the moral spine of the blogosphere?
Finally, foreign correspondents have to be embedded in closed societies. When Iran restricted access to foreign reporting of anti-regime demonstrations, hundreds of students twittered, e-mailed and took revealing pictures with their Handys. It was hailed as a modern revolution. Except that it wasn't, was it? Had the foreign reporters been allowed to stay, given muscle and context to the diffuse reports from the street, then the regime could well have cracked by now. There is a reason that the Mullahs expel foreign correspondents: they are rightly seen as dangerous to a police state. And the web recognises the fact.
No amount of blo gging out of the apartment of a Tehran student can substitute for a reporter asking embarrassing questions on the spot and making trouble. The only time that I ever increased the circulation of the Times was in the winter of 1981 - 82 when I smuggled my articles out of martial law Poland. I used to hang around Warsaw railway station like a pimp accosting passengers and asking them to post my articles to the Times as soon as they reached West Berlin. Readers saw this as privileged information - and worth paying for. Will people pay for this kind of information nowadays from Zimbabwe, from Burma, from the Chinese provinces? Again: I think so.
The traditional staff of foreign correspondents in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome will disappear; the money saved will be devoted to wars, revolutions and disasters. They will be replaced by freelancers, earning peanuts and writing about Knut. Only the business press will be spared.
Foreign correspondents - and we all have to convince our editor of this - are not luxuries; they are the beating heart of a newspaper's commitment to an open society. The fact that readers will have to pay fort he reporting is not a way of excluding the poor form access to information, rather it is a gesture of trust, a compact between a reader who understands the value, and the price, of eyewitness reporting, and a newspaper that guarantees quality and fairness.
When The Times first came out in 1785 it cost 2 1/2 pennies. In those days they used to say you could get "drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pennies". By that measure, newspapers have become relatively cheap (the Times now costs less then a glass of lukewarm beer). Charging for internet access to the paper should not be seen as an infringement of freedom but rather a rational consequence of the debate about the value of information.
Foreign news may seem to be increasingly marginal to the under 25 s, but it has never been so vital to the shaping of personal identity. What do we believe in - and is it worth fighting for? Where do our global responsibilities begin and end? How can we make informed choices about our national future without understanding the worries of other nations? How do we get this information? Who do we trust to deliver it? And what is it worth?
Im Herbst 2010 erscheint das Buch Wozu noch Journalismus? Wie das Internet einen Beruf verändert im Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.