Saving the skills of reporting

The Guardian, January 2000

Some of the best-known journalists in the country are joining forces to teach a 48-hour crash course in investigative reporting. We plan to turn our own stories inside out to expose the techniques we use. David Leigh is going to unpack the saga of Jonathan Aitken; Paul Foot is going to look back at notorious miscarriages of justice; John Ware will talk about his work on the secret state in Northern Ireland; and I am going to explain how I spent the best part of 18 months investigating a murderous paedophile ring and never got a word into print.

It will all make for good stories for the audience, but the aim is to achieve something more urgent. There are ominous signs that the skills of reporting are slowly choking to death. If journalism had its own Chris Woodhead, sweeping through newsrooms with a black cloak and the power of inquisition, he would find plenty of brilliant and dedicated reporters but he would also uncover a gathering sediment of incompetence.

We have to acknowledge at the outset that, on the face of it, there are monkeys peeling bananas who have more skills than any reporter needs. After all, what do reporters do? They ask one lot of people questions and tell another lot of people the answers. In theory, they might need shorthand and typing; in practice, newsrooms are littered with people who can’t do either.

And yet it is precisely because reporting involves such a simple and commonplace exchange that the skills which are involved in it are so peculiarly subtle and elusive. Take, for example, the simple business of persuading people to talk. Almost anyone who has a story worth telling has a reason to withold it, so when you turn up on the doorstep of the bent detective, or the parents whose child has just been murdered, or the MI5 officer whose colleagues are bending the law, or the red-neck racist who knows about a lynching, you are confronted with a most intricate problem and, if the door opens, you will have between five and ten seconds to start to solve it and you are going to have to use some very unusual human skills.

I had been blown off dozens of doorsteps like so much old litter, before I even began to realise that there were techniques to deploy here, let alone discovering what they were. And the closer you look at the reporter’s role, the more hidden skills you see.

There are technical skills involved in finding stories in the first place and all kinds of tricks to procuring the sources you need to pursue them. There are old skills in exploiting public records; new ones like using the internet as an investigative tool; grubby ones like playing office politics so that you get to work on the story you want and then get the space you need to run it. There are masses of ethical questions (the pure logic of reporting is completely ruthless); practical questions, like staying safe or avoiding arrest or dealing with a leaks inquiry; and, if you want to push it, even philosophical questions about truth and objectivity.

If you succeed in gathering your facts then, in this country, there is a whole set of devious skills required to negotiate the road to publication, which is blocked by legal obstacles – laws of libel and contempt and official secrecy – all of them preserved by governments and courts who profit from their protection. The good news is that, at least to some extent, there are ways round them.

We are going to explore all this in the course, and there are also a couple of specialist speakers. Annabel Colley from BBC Panorama is going to show how she has been using the internet to make stories (contradicting the widespread assumption that this can be done only in the United States); and Mark Hanna, from the department of journalism at Sheffield University, is going to talk about the use of old-fashioned public records to expose corruption.

The object is not simply to track down these skills but also to preserve them in the face of the threat of extinction. We have described these skills as those of ‘investigative reporting’. That ought to be a nonsense, like saying that some water is special because it is wet. All reporting is supposed to be investigative. At the most mundane level, that means simply that reporters should not print information just because someone claims it is true. At its most powerful, it means that news is what someone somewhere is deliberately concealing, and the reporter is consciously and rightly subversive. As currently practised, however, the investigative skills of reporting are withering.

There are now reporters in Fleet Street and the provincial press who have not spent a single day learning their trade, who will recycle political spin and PR fiction simply because they know no better; or who will repeatedly fail to write decent stories because all they can write is a first-person account of their research. They will tell you what the press officer said when they made their first call, what they felt like when they approached their interviewee’s door, what the waiter said when he brought the soup, but they couldn’t find an angle in a five-cornered room.

Worse than that, there are now middle-ranking executives who have had no training and who commission this stuff without realising that it is not journalism. There are Fleet Street editors now who seriously think that an investigation consists of a particularly heavy lunch with Max Clifford followed by a bout of creative writing in the company chequebook.

The symptoms of this decline go far beyond the puddles of dishonest pap which have soaked our tabloids for a generation. Look at the decline in the quality of the provincial press, or at the sudden spate of bogus documentaries in commercial television. Why would television journalists suddenly start fabricating phony stories? Part of the answer is that they don’t have the skills to put together real ones.

The roots of this change lie in the creeping commercialism of our profession. Accountants have cut the number of staff so they no longer have the time to investigate their stories; marketing experts have re-written news values so that where once it was outrageous, it is now commonplace for news editors to demand a particular story in order to appeal to some new target group in the marketplace. Real investigation is expensive and risky. Separately, the supply of investigative skill has declined. The old union-enforced rule that all new recruits must be trained has collapsed with the demise of the closed shop. Now, the internet presents the prospect of unlimited unskilled journalism; the Monica Lewinsky tale provided a glimpse into a future of untested rumour recycled as news.

But it is not over yet. We hope all kinds of journalists, from first-term students through to hardened veterans, will join us along with anyone else who ever thought that real reporting is worth defending.