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THE HISTORY OF NEWS

If news, as a commodity purveyed by reporters, is coming to an end, when and how did it start? Brian Cathcart finds out ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

In 1844 the London Times despatched its great reporter W.H. Russell, then still making his name, to Dublin to report on the trial for sedition of the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell. It was a sensational case and the paper was eager to be first with the news, so Russell did his best.

By good fortune he was the only reporter on hand when the jury returned unexpectedly with its verdict. From the courthouse he rushed by carriage to the ferry harbour, where the Times had a steamship ready. This whisked him across the Irish Sea to north Wales, where, with his rivals still nowhere to be seen, he boarded the train to London. Arriving breathless at the Times offices, he was greeted by a man in shirtsleeves he took to be a printer, who exclaimed: “So glad to see you safe over, sir! So they’ve found him guilty?” Russell, flushed with pride in his scoop, replied: “Yes, guilty, my friend.”

Alas, he was addressing an artfully disguised representative of the rival Morning Herald, which merrily printed the verdict next day.

Journalists have long delighted in such stories. Often recounted, like the tales of Agincourt, with advantages, they present the reporter as a roguish knight-errant, a dashing adventurer with a streak of rat-like cunning. The stuff of countless Fleet Street memoirs, they are also the essence of the Watergate story and of newsroom dramas such as “The Front Page”. Today, however, such derring-do is rare, not just because telephones and live television make it unnecessary to rely on steamships and trains, but because the whole idea of news as a commodity owned and purveyed by journalists is slipping into history.

Consider Russell’s tale. As he rushed from carriage to ship to train he had that simple item of information to himself. When he reached London he was still the only man there to know it, and in his mind was the joyous prospect that the rest of the country would discover it only if they read his report in the next day’s Times.

Now consider the modern experience. Yes, for a brief moment reporters still own a big courtroom verdict, but it is very brief–no longer than it takes to rush out to the street and say the words to a tele­vision camera. Indeed, it can be even quicker: I have seen a reporter surreptitiously texting a verdict from a courtroom while the judge was still speaking. And this fleeting ownership is possible only because British courtrooms, unusually, are still un-televised.

Most modern news–in the sense of fresh facts–travels across the television airwaves and the inter­net with little intervention by journalists, so the reporter’s job is no longer about the breathless conveyance of such facts à la Russell, but about repackaging and interpreting information the audience has probably already heard. There are still scoops, but they tend to be either bought off the peg (like the Daily Telegraph’s series about MPs’ expenses) or the result of lengthy and expensive investigation. To own fresh facts today, you need to spend money.

Does this matter? It depends whom you trust. The change leaves the people who originate most news–governments, corporations, police, celebrity PRs–better placed to manage its release, to elbow aside the reporter and communicate with the public on their own terms. They get to write the first draft of history, and if anybody owns the news now, it is them.

There is another question: if news as Russell knew it, and as the last reporters in Fleet Street in the 1980s understood it, is now dying, when was it born? The answer is that it was a child of technology, achieving meaningful existence after the arrival of steam-powered printing presses about two centuries ago.

The hand-operated, Gutenberg-style machines in use before that didn’t have the power to reach large numbers of people quickly enough to be instruments of news. They carried some fresh facts, but editors knew that their technology was usually too slow to compete even with word of mouth, so they gave priority to commentary. The early Times, for example (it was launched in 1785), or William Cobbett’s famous Political Register, was primarily a vehicle of opinion: they tended to make just the same tacit assumption you now find in today’s daily papers–that the reader already knows the facts.

Another piece of historical symmetry here is that the first steam press was introduced at the Times in 1814 in an overnight coup designed to prevent sabotage by the old-style printers. It took a remarkably similar coup in 1986–when Rupert Murdoch suddenly moved the Times to new premises in Wapping–to introduce computer production to British national newspapers. This was one of the developments that would eventually kill old-style news. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.

Picture credit: jwyg, jot.punkt (both via Flickr)

(Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston and a former deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday. His last article for Intelligent Life asked whether Google is killing general knowledge.)