Without fear or favour: The Australian

Miriam Cosic writes in The Australian about journalist Nick Davis who says more than half the news in Britain’s top five newspapers was generated by public relations companies or taken from wire services.

Davis is in Australia to promote his book Flat Earth News.

While this is a great background piece, it makes you want to buy the book, it paints a depressing picture of the state of journalism. I’ve worked in the industry for almost thirty years and agree with Davis’ basic premise that today’s journalists are now expected to do a once-over-lightly job and rock the boat as little as possible.

I've been criticised by colleagues for questioning the influence of public relations practitioners on news coverage.

Blame the media corporations

Davis points the finger of blame at the media corporations. This analysis can’t be separated from the widely reported decline of traditional news media.

Conventional thinking says people are moving away from newspapers, magazines and broadcast news because of the Internet. I believe the audiences would be declining even without the arrival of online news because the news media is turning off audiences.

Graphs of reader numbers stretching back to the days before the internet show audiences started to decline in the 1980s. The arrival of the open internet in the mid-1990s saw the fall accelerate.

It did not start then.

One aspect of this  The Australian story overlooks is that public relations companies now massively out-gun newspapers in terms of staff numbers, expertise and experience.

This is particularly noticeable in New Zealand where the newspapers seem largely staffed by young reporters in their 20s and early 30s while many of the brightest and best ex-journalists of the older generation work for PR companies or in communications roles for government departments.