The snobbery against online journalism

When is a journalist not a journalist? When his/her work is published online. Or such seems to be the case on RTE's online news service.

Yes, this is one of the biggest news service in the country. Yes, it carries RTE's reputation with every piece published. But do the people who write the pieces get attributed? Nope. It's an absurd state of affairs.

"In Ireland, there has been resistance to viewing those working in online journalism as being journalists," says Michael Foley, a senior journalism lecturer in DIT.

"This has been encouraged by management who haven't had to pay them as much. The traditional journalist has been reluctant to debate what the impact of the internet is and what it might mean to journalism. Anything to do with this new tech world, they view it with suspicion and view it as a threat."

(I was talking to Foley for an upcoming piece this Sunday on the impact that Twitter has had on the media. However, we strayed onto this topic.)

"I think that one of the problems has been that the Irish media hasn’t adapted very much to the web, to be quite frank," says Foley. "When you look at the number of really good Irish media websites, it’s very few. We haven’t, as a country, been very quick to adapt. And those journalists who are are involved with websites have tended to be worse paid than traditional journalists."

Now, some might say: "but it's only breaking news. It doesn't take the same amount of work." This is rubbish.

Let's look again what an RTE online journalist does. In summary, he/she:

-- writes a news piece
-- ensures that is accurate, fair and balanced
-- sees it published and viewed by more Irish people than almost any other single newspaper piece

And they are not to be attributed as journalists? This is absolutely ridiculous.

(Note that I do not have any brief for anyone in RTE online, as I don't know anyone in there.)

Comments

[Adam]

The argument against attribution is that many people may work on a single story and so it is awkward - it's a pretty weak argument.

RTÉ is only starting to pay any heed to the internet full stop. It's clear that they don't care much about the online newsroom, otherwise they would not have devolved its responsibility to the Publishing (aka commercial) division of the organisation.

It's clear that the same standards demanded in the central RTÉ Newsroom are not expected in the online one and as such standards tend to slip.

Many of their stories have been written poorly, many mistakes have gotten through and probably worst of all a tabloid-like attitude has crept in over time.

The 'Craic' section is the best example of this and the site's worst offender for poor "news" stories.

While it would probably take a couple of decades of union negotiations RTÉ should be looking to merge its newsrooms asap.

[John Handelaar]

The real argument against attribution is that people will notice how few staff there are.

[Aaron]

Some of the work on the RTE website has been fairly poor, actually. That'd be my main beef with them - every time I read a story that's just badly written.

The BBC doesn't normally attribute their stories, though... It's "The BBC" and not an individual telling the story. But they have editorial controls and a reputation...

[Adrian]

Have to say I'm not as avid a watcher of RTE News as you guys seem to be. Would also say that I have no reason to think that the quality is poor.

Main point over the attribution.

I know the BBC has that policy too. And newspaper do not, generally, publish the names of the sub-editors (many of whom would argue that they are at *least* as responsible for the finished story as the original journalist).

But I think that they should publish these names. All of them. Somewhere on the site, anyhow.

[Cian]

When I asked about bylines, this the response I got from the news editor at RTE News online:

"RTE: Because of the changing nature of news, we update our stories throughout the day and night, so that our entire team of online journalists might contribute to any given story. As such, it would be impractical to use bylines for regular news stories. There are some cases where we use bylines, usually if it is an essay or feature piece written by someone specific (eg Shortt Take or the Coleman Diaries)."

http://blurredkeys.com/2007/07/rteie-editor-rejects-tabloidisation-claim/

[Emmet Ryan]

Well as someone who works for sites that both attribute and don't attribute I can honestly say that it never really bothered me in the case of the latter. This may be more to do with the types of story I was writing, which were very much of the breaking news variety.

The only nuisance I can associate with it, and it is one worth considering for the publisher, is that in many cases the go-to person in those sites changes from day to day due to rotas.

Those that attribute tend to not have issues with channels of communication between those outside the site (PRs etc) and those inside as they only need to take a look at the page to see who's posting that day while those that don't attribute might suffer some delays.

[Marie Boran]

I think it would work if they had each news post 'By the RTE.ie news team' with a link to the team list plus brief biogs.