Daily Archives: July 7, 2011

How to write

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So I decided to try to write the book I wanted to read. I wasn’t at all sure how to go about it. One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, Four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.

And, on avoiding the trap of the Whig Interpretation of history:

Thornton Wilder talked, in that Paris Review interview, about the difficulty of recreating the past: “It lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.” That’s the difficulty exactly—how do you write about something that happened long ago in a way so that it has the openness, the feeling of events happening in freedom? How to write solid history and, at the same time, give life to the past and see the world as it was to those vanished people, with an understanding of what they didn’t know. The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track—this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next. The Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that, it’s standing there today, but they didn’t know that at the start. No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.

From a marvellous Paris Review interview with David McCullough.

Phone-hacking: a thought experiment

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From Peter Oborne, writing in The Spectator.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that BP threw an extravagant party, with oysters and expensive champagne. Let’s imagine that Britain’s most senior politicians were there — including the Prime Minister and his chief spin doctor. And now let’s imagine that BP was the subject of two separate police investigations, that key BP executives had already been arrested, that further such arrests were likely, and that the chief executive was heavily implicated.

Let’s take this mental experiment a stage further: BP’s chief executive had refused to appear before a Commons enquiry, while MPs who sought to call the company to account were claiming to have been threatened. Meanwhile, BP was paying what looked like hush money to silence people it had wronged, thereby preventing embarrassing information entering the public domain.

And now let’s stretch probability way beyond breaking point. Imagine that the government was about to make a hugely controversial ruling on BP’s control over the domestic petroleum market. And that BP had a record of non-payment of British tax. The stench would be overwhelming. There would be outrage in the Sun and the Daily Mail — and rightly so — about Downing Street collusion with criminality. The Sunday Times would have conducted a fearless investigation, and the Times penned a pained leader. In parliament David Cameron would have been torn to shreds.

Instead, until this week there has been almost nothing, save for a lonely campaign by the Guardian. Because the company portrayed above is not BP, but News International, owner of the Times, the Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun, approximately one third of the domestic newspaper market. And last week, Jeremy Hunt ruled that Murdoch, who owns a 39 per cent stake in BSkyB, can now buy it outright (save for Sky’s news channel). This consolidates the Australian-born mogul as by far the most significant media magnate in this country, wielding vast political and commercial power.

Great stuff.

Why we need business models to support real journalism

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Here’s a cautionary question for those of us who are gung-ho about the possibilities of the online world: where would the UK phone-hacking story be without the Guardian?

Answer: nowhere. The Murdoch political and news-management machine would have been able to get away with it. It was the Guardian that kept the phone-hacking story alive, long after most other journalistic institutions, Parliament, the police and the Press Complaints Commission had given up on it. One of the many reasons Peter Oborne’s Telegraph essay on the affair was so remarkable is that he paid tribute to the Guardian for performing “such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch’s newspaper empire”. For one British newspaper to pay tribute to another in this way is almost unprecedented, but in this case Oborne is right.

The really important point is that there are some things that can only be done by a properly organised and funded news organisation. Investigating a scandal like this requires great skill (of the kind displayed by Nick Davies and his colleagues), plus determination, courage and resources — legal and logistical. These don’t come cheap and have to be funded, somehow. I yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for what Charlie Beckett calls networked journalism, and I’m a great believer in harnessing collective IQ by crowdsourcing and so on, but a scandal like the illegal behaviour of the Digger’s satraps and their accomplices in the Metropolitan Police is unlikely to be exposed just by the Net. Much of the posturing by print media about how important newspapers are for democracy is just cant, because it confuses a format (the printed paper) with function (journalism). What matters — what democracy needs — is great journalism of the kind practised by Nick Davies and his colleagues. And that needs organisations — and business models — that can support it.

(Full disclosure: I write for the Guardian‘s sister paper, the Observer, but am not — and never have been — an employee, and these views are very much my own.)