In news we trust
ALMOST 10 years ago I sat in a workshop at the Daily Telegraph with creative talent from an advertising agency.
They asked a simple question which proved difficult to answer the longer we thought about it.
They asked: “What is the business that you are in?”
The answers came thick and fast, as if this was a speed test and we would get marked out of 10. “Journalism.” “News and information that informs and entertains.” “Community leadership.” “Advertising.” The agency dudes smiled knowingly and some of us wriggled uncomfortably. We were being challenged. The primacy of printed newspapers as the go-to place for basic information, the stuff you need to know to get by, has been a battlefield for the best part of 20 years.
“When the facts about anything are at your fingertips — and for free — why would people continue to pay for your journalism?” the agency guy said.
Indeed. Our industry’s response, for a good part of that 20 years, has been to attach ourselves like limpets to traditional news gathering rather than bold innovation.
Meanwhile, the world continued to wobble on its axis.
Back at the Telegraph, we had been asked to rethink the way we tell our stories because the internet had blown everything to hell. Disruption was a buzzword. I don’t recall any discussion of fake news or armies of bots engaging in social media and shaping public opinion.
I don’t recall discussing the Russians hacking elections and undermining democracy. WikiLeaks was a newborn. For the most part, people trusted the access they had to information on the internet, especially since news sites were freely sharing all their journalism.
The idea that people would pay for news was roundly dismissed by the experts.
Fast forward to today and our conversations are dominated by stories of mistrust.
Last month, Evan Williams (pictured) co-founder of Twitter and creator of Blogger, said the unthinkable.
“I think the internet is broken,” he said. “And it’s a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it’s broken.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. “I was wrong about that.” Two prescient things came out of that Tele workshop that have stuck in my head like limpets.
One — that the business we are in is trust.
News Corporation has thousands of journalists in Australia who spend most of their working lives checking facts.
That’s what we do better than Facebook. Better than anyone.
We ask questions and check what people tell us with other people.
We tell our stories as plainly as possible and as accurately as possible. The facts, after all, are the facts. But, to the second workshop lesson, these facts are shared too easily in a hyper-connected world and lose their value.
The Daily Mail will rewrite our stories rather than find its own.
It takes just a few minutes to pinch a big yarn and bank the revenue that should be paying for more journalism.
Banging more facts into more stories doesn’t fix the problem.
It just creates more content for others to monetise.
The second thing the workshop said we should do is covet mystery.
It is mystery that builds a following as audiences seek to understand what’s going on.
It is mystery that creates expectation, that has me wanting to know more.
The most valuable journalism of the future will not be commodity facts that we find.
It will be the rich vein of questions that each new fact raises.
The biggest story in the world right now, the one that has everyone talking, is also the biggest mystery.
Did the Russians hack the US election?
Did Donald Trump ask FBI director James Comey for his loyalty before sacking him?
I will pay to follow this story to the end, just like another season of Game of Thrones.
All our journalism has the potential to be told this way, where the outstanding questions are often far more intriguing, and valuable to society, than the essential facts.