Layer Cake Journalism 4: hellogoodeveningandwelcome

David Frost: Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?
Richard Nixon: I'm saying that when the President does it, that means it's 'not' illegal!
David Frost: ...I'm sorry?

Representing Journalism: the Layer Cake Theory 2

That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you - to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you're doing 'me' a favor?... The day I can't get along without a press agents' handouts, I'll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.

J.J. Hunsecker, The Sweet Smell of Success. (1957)

Who Will Play Robert Peston in the Movie?

Members of the public, LSE staff and alumni can request one ticket via the online ticket request form which will be live on this weblisting from 10.00am on Friday 7 November.

Above: the instructions for getting (one, and one only) ticket for Robert Peston's "Who runs Britain?" lecture on Monday 17th of November at the LSE.

Representing journalism: the Layer Cake theory 1

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

Howard Beale (Network, 1976).

Lionel Barber, FT editor, on journalism

This piece is behind the registration wall of the FT now, and I cut and paste my extract a while ago.

Most damaging, the mainstream press lost touch with its audience at the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically lowering the barriers to entry. Whether this was an unhappy coincidence or complacency is unclear. What is undeniable is that public trust in newspapers started to slip, to the point where a recent study by Sacred Heart University shows barely one in five say they can believe “all or most” media reporting (well below comparable British figures).

A google search finds the piece as someone's email here and I strongly recommend reading it, particularly as it addresses those "Practice of Everyday Life" issues such as celebrity journalists, and the robustly Hogarthian nature of British journalism (and the free DVDs). The piece also added richly to a very loose metaphor I'm developing of the layer cake when it comes to mapping journalist's motivations and their age. It is not surprisingly, for example, to find the 53 year old Lionel Barber writing about his time as a Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post.

Entering the Post newsroom was like walking on to the set of All the President’s Men , the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Post’s own Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with its row upon row of reporters, each with their desk-top computers. (At the FT, we still bashed away on typewriters.) Bradlee’s glass office stood in the centre of the newsroom. Woodward’s investigative team was tucked away at the back. There was a swagger about the place that was irresistible.

I wonder how many journalists were inspired by All the President's Men? And what more recent inspirations are? At this weekend's "End of Journalism" conference I spoke to many practitioners and educators, and there was a sense that much of the inspiration today to enter the business was as much about the celebrity of being a journalist, as the form's ability to change, or right, things. More Redford than Woodward, as it were. Should the inspirations in the layer cake now include Jon Stewart? Jon Ronson or Ali G? Jeremy Paxman or Katie Couric? Arianna Huffington or Stephen Colbert? And who was the last great popular journalist in cinema?

There is a lot more in Barber's piece than this.