Sitting in the Trinity SCR overlooking a snowy Oxford, speaking to a man who edited The Times for a decade and now edits the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), I wasn’t expecting to hear the phrase ‘Wham bam, thank you ma’am’. But hear it I did – it was one of the many animated phrases Peter Stothard used to describe his experience of online journalism. This delightful term (and I speak entirely without sarcasm) came up relating to Stothard’s worries that in recent years, websites have ‘taken a hammer to writing which could have been done more carefully than it was’, a trend about which he was ‘quite concerned’.
However, his perspective is changing; ‘old-line papers are getting to grips with this pretty well these days’, he argues, looking to improvements in technology as well as a familiarity with the medium as possible reasons.
‘In terms of speed, online will always win’
This enthusiasm is peppered by an apparent dubiousness. While conceding that, ‘in terms of speed, online will always win’, he stresses that the most important aspect of journalism remains, ‘crafting a story about how and why something happens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the editor of the TLS, this seems to be intensely important to him. A good journalist is someone ‘able to sift information – to work out who is telling the truth’ and to make a story out of it.
This view of journalism is part of why he believes that online journalism will not be the death of the kind of work that they do at the TLS. The internet only means that ‘the raw material of journalism is available to more people than just journalists’. However, that doesn’t mean that ‘understanding it, crafting the story, putting it in any kind of context or making it in any way explicable is any less of a duty and a task and trade’.
What about paying for online content? As Stothard loyally notes, the company he works for ‘has put a lot of effort into it happening for The Times and The Sunday Times’. Although he seems to recognise the controversy of the issue, he is fairly sure that it should be regarded as a ‘positive thought’ – and should be pursued.
And given that his boss is Rupert Murdoch, it’s perhaps surprising that this doesn’t seem to emerge out of company loyalty – his allegiance to this side of the debate seems to come more from his own experience than anything else. Despite his argument that, ‘journalist training is fantastic for considering the audience’, he looks at the whole argument from a journalist’s mind, and it’s a refreshing perspective.
‘People are prepared to pay for cups of coffee, and cocktails, and almost everything – except information’
He sees what he refers to as a ‘terrible disease’ in society at the moment; ‘people are prepared to pay for cups of coffee, and cocktails, and almost everything – except information’. This, he argues, is the central issue surrounding the future of journalism, and the impact of the internet; as he phrases it, ‘payment is the point’. ‘The work’ he points out, ‘will only be put in if there is some kind of reward for it’, and this trend will continue unless they establish a method of workable financial incentives.
Rather than seeing the internet as the death of professional journalism, he argues the opposite; ‘the more nonsense that is crashing around on the blogosphere, the greater the need for someone to give you some sort of order and tell you what’s true and what isn’t.’
However, a distinction must be made between the work of professional journalists and that of those less established, and thus less qualified to guarantee what he views as the cornerstones of the industry, ‘the ability to shape stories, to tell the difference between truth and lies, and to find things out that people don’t want to, or can’t, tell us’.
Stothard fears that if the situation continues as it is, ‘you’ll only get cheap journalism, which will change the calibre immeasurably’. The whole trend is dangerous, he argues, and it’s a particular shame ‘because it’s not that the nature of journalism is fundamentally changing, it’s just that these things do cost money’.
‘This is not a good time for people who say “we’re going to do it exactly as we’ve always done it”. That is really doomed.’
And it is not just the recession he’s worried about, the issue seems to go deeper than just the ever-cited credit crunch. It is ‘when the advertising comes back’, that Stothard is concerned about. The worry is that, ‘instead of being concentrated on a few institutions, it will be shared between lots of little sites’.
This is when his assessment of the current state of journalism gets a bit scary. This, he says – and I sense a little sympathy in his eyes – ‘could mean the little ones don’t want to hire you, and the big ones don’t have as much money as they used to’. However, he isn’t self satisfied or smug with his lot, he rather recognises the need for media to change its stripes. ‘This is not a good time for people who say “we’re going to do it exactly as we’ve always done it”. That is really doomed.’
He is enthusiastic about the future of the industry in which he has remains very prominent, but also seems to have fond memories of his impressive career, and especially what kicked it all off, Oxford. In fact, it seems to be university which lingers most prominently in his mind. ‘I can remember the years at Oxford – things I read here, people I met here – much more vividly than I could remember my first year as The Times editor.’
And there is an apparent circularity in his career; he has just published his latest work, in which he travels the route of the Spartacus Slave war. In doing so, he writes a book which seems to be an intertwining of history with memoir, and – he tells me excitedly – is full of ‘a whole bunch of characters who turned up along the road; real characters that are living now, and then people like Statius’. I’m not sure who Statius is, but it all sounds fascinating. He tells me that the book is full of ‘stuff that I learnt here in Oxford, often stuff that I hadn’t thought about for many years’ and the enthusiasm which writing the book seems to have ignited in him is similar to that which we have – or at least which we are supposed to have – as students.
‘Beware, what you’re doing now will affect you for the rest of your life’
He is so passionate about Oxford that it even starts to filter through my own cynicism. He later gives me a tour of his old college and it is wonder which seems to infect his tone. He seems keen that we make memories good enough to last. Oxford ‘is going to be driven more heavily into your head than a lot of things that will happen to you’.
Given the pessimism which seems to shroud the real world outside the dreaming spires, it is quite reassuring that he is encouraging us to make the most of our time here.‘Beware’ he says – with a definite seriousness couched in his jokey tone – ‘what you’re doing now will affect you for the rest of your life’.
Peter Stothard’s new novel ‘On the Spartacus Road’ is available now.
