The Daily Novel

When I was teaching journalism at City University one of my favourite sessions was when I took the students through all the morning papers to help them learn about what was considered to be news by the industry they were intending to work in. I must have done several hundred such sessions over the years. The students were supposed to do some thinking and come up with suggestions as to why some newspapers led on one subject and others led on another. Since the British national press is highly competitive, voices different political viewpoints and has editors who are mostly men who like to make the final decision about the splash (the lead story) I was surprised by how often the majority of the newspapers put the same stories on their front page.

Very rarely did all the nationals have different topics for the splash. Today, is such a day, with only one exception.

The Guardian led with arguably the most appropriate subject for a serious paper, ‘Republicans closing gap as US votes’, since the most powerful nation on earth is voting tomorrow in the mid-term elections. But most newspapers have been saying just this for the last two or three weeks. So it was not exactly news.

The Times had ‘”Dirty” bomber’s plot to hit stations and hotels’. This was hot news in the sense that it came out of the evidence in court yesterday at the trial of the would-be suicide bombers. And it does relate to the important subject of the war against terror. But the evidence does not add much to the serious side of this story, in that it is all derived from one man who did not actually do any bombing at all. Nothing came out yesterday which threw any light on the extent to which our suicide bombers are controlled by men like Bin Laden. So in my day this would have been considered a tabloid lead rather than a Times lead.

‘Scientists to mix cells of humans and cows’ was the headline which readers of The Daily Telegraph woke up to. This was hot news and also an important serious story based on research which is fusing human cells, with those of rabbit, cow and goat eggs. But the Telegraph, unlike the tabloid Times, has room for three stories on its front page. The second lead was ‘Fanatic who plotted to blow up Tube and hotels’ about the same man as The Times splashed on, and the third was ‘Give children hats to save on heating’. The first para was: ‘Families facing record heating bills are being told….to encourage their children to go to bed in wolly hats or clutching “microwaveable rice cloth bags”. Not quite the kind of story which Lord Deedes would have rated the third most important story of the day.

The now tabloid Independent not only has room for only one story on the front page but it has also been following for some months now a deliberate policy of coming up with a different splash from the other papers, in the hope of boosting its circulation, which is the smallest of the nationals. Their lead ‘Muslim officer sacked from guarding Blair’ is billed as an exclusive, which reveals that ‘an experienced Muslim firearms officer has begun race and religious discrimination proceedings against the Metropolitan police….’ . So one cannot fault them on choosing an important and news worthy subject.

The Daily Mail’s ‘Gambling with a generation’ had the strap line ‘Children will be turned into addicts, warns professor the Government employs to advise on casino plan’. Second paragraph has: ‘Professor Mark Griffiths hit out at Labour’s failure to use the controversial new Gambling Act to stop children using the machines’. This was based on a few paragraphs in a paper the professor wrote as part of the Culture Department’s consultation process. The Mail called him up and got some additional quotes, in measured academic language, which it carries inside. Needless to say Griffiths did not exactly say that the Government was ‘gambling with a generation’!

The Daily Express, which is the smallest of the popular papers in terms of circulation, takes an even more strident tone in its efforts to draw in the readers: ‘Christ is dumped from Christmas stamps’ with the strap: ‘Royal Mail under fire for using ‘faith-free’ designs’. The first paragraph reads ‘Bungling mail chiefs were yesterday accused of taking the Christ out of Christmas.’ They did get something for an anonymous Church of England spokesman and an MP which half backed them up. And if you followed the story through to Page 8 they did tell you the whole truth. The stamp controversy is nothing new. It is a result of the policy which Royal Mail has always followed, of alternating religious and non-religious designs each Christmas. Though the Daily Express does not say so, that policy reflects the reality that more Brits these days spend their Sundays in the supermarkets than in the churches or the mosques.

The Daily Mirror went for ‘Drowned in their bath’, a tabloid human interest story about a father who is being held on suspicion of murder after his two young children were found drowned in their bath. It is accompanied by a happy smiling picture of the children, aged five and three, with their full names.

The Sun went with the same story as The Times under the head ‘I’ll blow up Thames’.

When I did this with my students I used to tell them who owned the papers and urge them to see whether this explained any of the similarities and differences. As it happens on today’s sample the only common headline is in the only two papers which are in the same ownership. The Times and The Sun controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

For the record, The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, which is dominated by ex-Guardian journalists. The Telegraph is owned by the Barclay twins, who are rightish businessmen. The Independent is owned by the Irish businessman (and former international rugby player), Tony O’Reilly. The Daily Mail is owned by the Harmsworth family which founded it in 1896. The Express is owned by Felix Desmond, who is usually referred to as the ‘porn king’ by other newspapers, because he made much of his considerable fortune by magazines many of which were soft porn.

While I was writing this story looking at the papers I noticed something quite different. Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express also carried same picture of the murdered children on its front page. The Sun had it on the front page entitled ‘Drowned in the bath by Daddy’, and also at twice the size on a double page spread on Pages 6 and 7. The Times had the same picture on Page 17 nearly as large as the story which reports it. Likewise The Daily Telegraph on Page 11. The Independent had it on Page 12 and the picture was twice the size of the admittedly short story. Only The Guardian did not cover the story.

I found this picture upsetting on grounds of taste. The children died on Sunday morning and they must have had friends and relations for whom this treasured family snapshot was how they heard the news that they had been brutally murdered.

But it is not only taste. Surely such sensational treatment affects the chance of the arrested man getting a fair tria?. Apart from ‘Drowned in the bath by Daddy’ on the front page, consider the Sun’s treatment inside the paper. Huge headline, ‘Why?’ with the strap ‘”Killer” father was left to babysit soon after spell in a mental clinic’. The clear implication is that since he had had a spell in a mental clinic he probably did it. And the further implication is that whoever left him in charge was acting unwisely. Playing on the public’s fears, rather than the reality; of the millions of people who have spent time in mental clinics, only a tiny minority have exhibited serious violent behaviour. And some of them have actually been cured!

I realise that it is becoming increasingly common for pictures of murdered children to be published. But that does not make it right? Is it only me, who finds it shocking that only one British national did not use the picture? Is it not about time bodies like the Press Complaints Commission and government department,s like the Culture ministry, took a view on such practises?

The already over-crowded world of blogging has yet another entrant: Professor Adrian Monck, the head of journalism at City University. He started it on 25 October but I only came across it accidentally a few days ago. I was so angry that I dashed off an email to three of my colleagues at City berating them for not keeping me in touch with what was happening in the department. They have now all replied telling me I was quite wrong in assuming that they knew what their boss was doing. My email was the first they had heard of Adrian Monck Online.

When I emailed my colleagues in early September telling them about my own blog Monck tore me off a strip. He told me that I no longer had any role at the university though I was welcome to visit as a ‘friend’. He told me that my blog was my own ‘personal playground’ and I must make it plain that my blog had nothing to do with City University. I told him that I did not agree that I had no role because, although I not currently being paid, I remain an Emeritus Fellow. However, I agreed that I would do what he said, so I inserted the disclaimer under ‘What this blog is about’. I also changed the name to www.xcitybob.com, making it plain to everyone in the journalism training business that Bob Jones is now EX-City University,

Now he has started his own ‘personal playground’. Nowhere on the front page does he say that he is full time head of City University’s Department of Journalism. Mostly he has blogged about things that he knows about in the world of television journalism. But at 10.44 last night he posted on ‘Educating journalists’ with a link to an article Peter Preston wrote in Sunday’s Observer on the National Council for Training in Journalism. This is actually something I know about myself since when I was running journalism at City the NCTJ ruled the roost.

The NCTJ was a pioneer in journalism training in the 1950s and fostered 20 week training courses at technical colleges around the country, notably at Harlow. When the first university journalism course was set up by Tom Hopkinson at Cardiff University in 1970 it was accredited by the NCTJ and the students were taught its curriculum with an extra course in History of Journalism. City followed this pattern in 1976 with a curriculum which was the NCTJ course with History and Structure of the Press, taught by Professor Jeremy Tunstall, who was Professor of Sociology at City University. The first Director of City Journalism was Tom Welsh, who had been a teacher on the Harlow journalism course.

Tom left in December 1978 to edit the Barrow Evening Mail. By the time I arrived in April 1979 there were several problems, mostly to do with the NCTJ. The students wanted to debate values in journalism, as well as do the basics which had been originally designed for school leavers. They also wanted to do television and radio and were irked by the NCTJ insistence that they had to learn regional journalism and take jobs in the regions.

That was why I started the radio and international journalism courses in 1982. This was all very sensible but I made one serious mistake. I spent so much time talking to people in journalism (including the NCTJ) that I neglected to keep my three full-time colleagues fully informed about what I was doing and carry them along with me. This became a real problem when one of them left and the university decided to set up a working party on the future of journalism, which some of my colleagues (and the NCTJ) saw as a committee of inquiry into my own behaviour.

In the event it led to the university creating the first chair in British journalism teaching. The first incumbent was John Dodge, who was a former Director of the NCTJ. He realised very soon after he arrived at City that his old friends at the NCTJ had lost touch with the realities of journalism training. And he started the moves which took City and Cardiff out of strangling grasp of the NCTJ. John Dodge died after only two years in the driving seat and the process of freeing City from the NCTJ was completed during the ten year headship of Hugh Stephenson (now an emeritus professor).

That’s the ancient history. Now for the present.

The essence of Peter Preston’s story is:

‘The National Council for the Training of Journalists is the industry benchmark trainer, with 38 accredited courses around Britain. But, gradually, most of the top universities are pulling out. First, the City in London; now, prospectively, Cardiff and Preston as well. What’s wrong?

It’s basically a question of exemptions, from the public admin and legal bits of the courses. Why should long-suffering students be required to sit exams twice over, with a pile of shorthand thrown in? And why should the finest academic essayists have to play tick boxes and short, sharp answers to start on a local weekly at £13,000 a year? If Cardiff, say, were to go it alone, would any of their students really suffer? City’s haven’t.’

I agree with this. But what Peter Preston does not know is the current reality at City, where Adrian Monck is making exactly the same mistake as I made over twenty years ago. Steaming ahead and doing his own thing. Not listening to his full-time colleagues who have infinitely more experience than he does of journalism training. He has forgotten that he is the leader of a team. If wants to run a blog it should be City Journalism Online and it should refect the talents and views of all the teachers in the department, not just one man.

Monck probably won’t thank me for writing this. But he has taught me one lesson via the quote he uses on Adrian Monck Online.

It is from Cyril Connolly:

‘Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.’

Simons Jenkins, in his column in The Guardian today entitled, ‘A million fingers are tapping out a challenge to the tyranny of spelling’, launches a fierce attack on British English, which he says is ‘immured’ in bigotry. He writes: ‘Across the globe, students of English are driven to distraction by its spelling’. He contrasts us with the Americans, who, he says see spelling reform as the sovereignty of common sense. ‘For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.’ As someone who has taught some hundreds of foreign students I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this issue. European students, particularly take the trouble to learn our language, whereas the British are still extremely reluctant to learn any language but their own.

Paradoxically the only reason the Brits can get away with saying it loud in English in every capital on the globe is because of American power. The world has to learn American, so they can understand English, even in its weird written form. Jenkins argues the case for the British to adopt the American spelling forms. That would not only make it easier for foreign students it would make things less confusing for English children and university students, who have to read, at all ages, many books (and blogs) written in American English.

There is, however, one paragraph, which Simon gets entirely wrong. He compares the British failure to reform its spelling with the failure to reform the QWERTY keyboard layout. He rightly says that the QWERTY layout was designed to minimise the problem on the old-fashioned typewriters of keys jamming when adjacent keys were tapped in rapid succession. His next sentence is quite wrong. He writes: ‘Yet even when the electronic keyboards ended the jamming problem nobody thought to reform the QWERTY layout…’

That is wrong on two counts. The jamming problem was cured long before the electronic keyboard. The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1876. Improvements in manual typewriter design gradually reduced the jamming problem and it was totally eliminated by the invention of the electric typewriter in the late 1920s.

A much better keyboard layout was invented in 1934 by August Dvorak, Professor of Management at Washington State University after extensive research on word usage in the English language. Dvorak’s layout was specifically designed for touch typing, which was not invented until four years after Scholes invented his layout. The huge advantage of the Dvorak layout is that it can be learnt in one third of the time that it takes to learn QWERTY. It also makes it possible to type 15 per cent faster and about 20 per cent more accurately.

And the amazing thing is that it is available as an alternative layout on nearly all the computers currently being manufactured by two clicks with the mouse. Only a few thousand people know that it is there. The reason it is in Windows is not because Bill Gates wanted to advocate a switch to a more sensible keyboard layout. It is there because, as Microsoft told me when Windows first arrived here in 1995, Dvorak is the only keyboard layout that has variations for people who have only one hand. So if you go into the Windows Control Panel you will find layouts for left handed Dvorak and right handed Dvorak as well as the two handed version. Microsoft told me that they had put in the Dvorak option as part of their policy of developing features which make it easier for people with disabilities to use computers.

As I suggested in my blog, Time to Retire QWERTY, here on 30 August 2006 one further step is necessary if the millions using computers are going to make the change to Dvorak. That is for keyboard manufacturers to produce keyboards which have the QWERTY and the Dvorak letters on each key. The full story about how QWERTY and Dvorak developed is on my other site at www.typingbytouch.com. Where you can also download a typing tutorial to teach yourself Dvorak.

The lesson for Simon, in his efforts to get common sense changes to British spelling, is that even the pragmatic Americans are hugely resistant to change.

Persuading the people in power to make changes in British spelling is going to be even more difficult to achieve than getting them to switch from Dvorak to QWERTY. It is unlikely that either of us will live long enough to see these changes happen. But we can set an example in the hope that our grandchildren will be taught the spelling and the keyboard layout which reason suggests is better.

I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak in the Christmas vacation in 1993 when I was nearly 60 so I know it is not difficult even for someone who has used QWERTY for forty years.

I have decided to lead by example on the spelling issue to. So I am switching to the US language spell check, so this blog will henceforth appear in American spelling. I will let readers know if the change drives me mad.

I hope that Simon will do the same thing. Publish his next book in American English which he can do at his own say-so. But also insisting that his own column on The Guardian appears from henceforth in American English. To do that he will have to persuade The Editor and the Scott Trust and probably have to face the ire of the sub-editors.

But it would be a splendid way of keeping the issue in the limelight. I am sure that not a few Guardian reading teachers of English will be sprinting in their sandals to get in their letters of complaint.

And perhaps we could both suggest to Gordon Brown that the best way for him to show that he is different from New Labour and Old Labour, and that he is in favour of sensible reforms, would be to change the name of the Labour Party to the Labor Party.

Today’s results of the YouGov poll of over one thousand university teachers commissioned by the University and College Union are a clear pointer to the degree of concern amongst university teachers about the changes that have been made to the way our universities are managed. No less than 55 per cent think that a university teacher’s lot is now so bad that they would not recommend it to their children as a career.

This is astonishing. Most university teachers enjoy their work. They have got their present jobs after much longer periods of education than those who do other work. They remain full time students until the age of around 25, building up debts and then work for pay which is not adequate for bringing up a family for a few years as they work their way up the pay scale.

But there are huge compensations. Despite all the changes university teachers have much more autonomy in their jobs than most workers. They don’t have to go into work every day. They can do their research at home. They cannot be fired because their opinions do not fit in with whoever is their current boss, so long as those opinions are backed by solid evidence.

They are most reluctant to use the strike weapon because of the danger of threatening the careers of their students, who are even more short of money than they were themselves when they were students. They are very reluctant to criticize their ‘bosses’ in public. Because the collegiate style of management, although it is under threat, has not yet disappeared. Crucial policy decisions are mostly made at staff meetings, and by Senates and Councils, on which university teachers sit themselves. They regard their bosses as colleagues.

When they answer survey questions they follow the academic rules. Basing their replies on evidence. So perhaps the most worrying result of this survey is that 47 per cent of university teachers say that their health has been damaged by the changes. Quite as worrying is the fact that 52 per cent have considered moving to jobs in the private sector. In terms of personal politics university teachers reflect the population as a whole. But the majority on the left wing would never want to work in the private sector because they believe in a strong public sector.

So what are university teachers complaining about?

Bureaucracy, an overwhelming workload, poor management and external interference.

The first three are all the result of the changes in the way universities are managed, which began in 1980s when Mrs Thatcher was in power and which have been re-inforced by the Blair government. Vice Chancellors and Principals have been encouraged to act like chief executives. They have been urged to learn from the private sector. Many new Vice Chancellors, with experience of managing private companies, have been appointed. University teachers are encouraged to consider their students as ‘customers’.

Above all the university bosses have been urged to look at the profit and loss account. To make decisions on financial grounds rather than on academic grounds. To favour new trendy subjects (including journalism!) at the expense of rather important old-fashioned subjects like classics, physics and chemistry, which are not attracting as many students.

The extra work load that university teachers are complaining about is the new paper work that has been introduced to meet the demands of the new managers.

The impact of these changes on individual universities varies considerably. Changing a university is like altering the path of an ocean liner. It takes a long time. There are still many people at the top in British universities committed to the collegiate style of management, who have managed to mitigate some of the worst effects of the new managerial ethos.

Today’s YouGov poll reflects the present state of play in this change process. The important lesson, is the same as that in relation to climate change. Unless action is now to change course, the YouGov poll in ten years time will find that 75 per cent are fed up.

Time for the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary to get out the beer and sandwiches and start listening to those at the chalk face who are passing on the knowledge and skills to the next generation.

‘Prussians’ managing our universities

A few weeks ago I had a long personal email from one of my former colleagues at City University who was seeking to convince me how much worse things were now than they had been when I had been active on the union branch committee. He described the new managers as the Prussians. My immediate thought was that his was an extreme view, but the word has been rumbling around at the back of my mind ever since, when I have been thinking about the changes that have been made in all British universities over the last twenty years. And I have come around to the view that there was something in what he said. There have been some quite dramatic changes for the worse. They need to be written about. Because most of my colleagues in the press have no idea what is happening and how different things are today than when they were at university.

I hope that today’s report of the YouGov poll of over one thousand university teachers commissioned by the University and College Union will make them sit up.

The results are dramatic to anyone who knows the university sector. Most university teachers are dedicated to their jobs and they are not prone to whinging about it, even in anonymous polls. They have seen their pay relative to jobs requiring equivalent skills, steadily eroded. Civil servants, MPs, journalists and other professionals are outstripping them and have been doing so since the early 1980s.

But poor pay is not main target in this poll. It is bureaucracy, an overwhelming workload, poor management and external interference that is most complained about.

No less than 47 per cent say it has affected their health. 55 per cent say the university teacher’s lot is so bad that they would not recommend it to their children. 52 per cent say they have considered a move to the private sector.

Bureaucracy, an overwhelming workload, poor management and external interference are the main reasons why nearly two thirds (62 per cent) of lecturers think about moving to work abroad.

So much for the poll results. The rest of this blog derives from my own personal experience over the last twenty years and talks I have had with many colleagues at other British universities and some universities overseas.

Much as I admire the building I shall not be swanning down the M4 to the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff on Friday to join thousands of others blessed, or cursed, with the surname Jones. The event is organised by the Welsh television channel S4 and they hope to break the world record for an extended family gathering. They hope to have all manner of famous Jones, including Tom Jones, whom I am told is a singer, and Jack Jones, whom I saw at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton in September who is still spry aged 22.

I shall be doing my bit to reduce the climate change which is threatening the planet. But that is not the reason I am not going. The event re-aroused my curiosity about my own genetic heritage and also the general question as to whether it matters. So I did a little research on the web. I discovered a research project at University College London which is establishing the regional pattern of surnames in. The url is:

http://www.spatial-literacy.org/UCLnames/

The team running it are:

Professor Paul Longley : Project development
Professor Richard Webber : Project co-ordinator and content
Dr Daryl Lloyd : Co-data manager
Alex Singleton : Co-data manager & website manager

The British data is based largely on the 1881 and 1998 censuses. If you go into their web site you can key in your own names and get up some maps showing where the greatest concentration of people with your own surname is.

The results for my own family were quite dramatic. The maps are colour coded with purple, red, brown, yellow and white in descending order of concentration. The Jones results for 1881 show Wales as purple, red and brown, with the rest of Britain white except for a few of the border counties. Even by 1998 the three deepest colours are still in Wales, though the yellow has extended into the west midlands and into Devon.

When I keyed in my mother’s maiden name, Hughes, the results for 1881 are almost exactly the same. In 1998 the pattern is again very similar, though by then the yellow had also spread to parts of north west England and western Scotland.

The UCL team label both Jones and Hughes as Celtic surnames. And the evidence they are producing backs up that. Increasingly, however, I am coming around to the view that the belief in both my mother’s and father’s family that we originally came from Wales was wrong. One of my cousins did some research a few years ago which showed that the Hughes had always been iin towns near to Wolverhampton as far back as the sixteenth century. On the Jones side I knew that my great grandfather was born in Walsall in 1840. A few weeks ago I did some research on the web and found that his father was born in Walsall in 1807. It is still possible that his father might have come from Wales at the time of the industrial revoltion so I shall have to do some more work.

However, the probability is that I am not Celtic. My great-grandfather was a giant of a man, tall and broad and weighing 35 stone. He was a horse collar maker. His father was also in leather, but he made shoes. And shoe making was a specialty in parts of both the east and west Midlands.

My curiosity is aroused. I particularly want to know why my great grandfather was a Roman Catholic, because in the Midlands nearly all the Roman Catholics were Irish, apart from a very small minority of the upper classes. So deep down perhaps I am hoping to discover that we have blue blood, rather than Celtic blood, in our veins.

Checking a few dates with my sister nourished yet another fantasy. She was leafing through an old diary of my father’s sister, in which she kept birth and death dates. In it she found a Guggenheim. Perhaps somewhere in the family tree there is a rich American? Maybe he left us some money which is waiting for us in some bank on Wall Street? Sadly the likelihood is that Guggeheim was no relation but a client of my aunt’s dressmaking business.

But I want find the answers to these questions in Cardiff, where all the Celtic Joneses will be gathering. I shall have to go to Walsall. The birth certificate on the web shows his name as Janes. But this is based on an interpretation of the handwriting in the original document, so it is possible that whoever transcribed it made a mistake. The only way to find out is to seek out the original in Walsall.

I also want to find out a bit more about why both Joneses and Hugheses are so concentrated in Wales. As I understand it both names were originally a corruption of John’s Son and Hugh’s son. So why more in Wales than England, Scotland or Ireland?

And so to the final question, does in matter who our genetic ancestors were and where they came from? My reason says not much. This view was re-inforced a few days ago when I was writing about adoption. I think that the influence on the character of the child of de facto parents is much more important than the genetic parents. Nevertheless my curiosity persists. So I shall try and watch the Jones programme in Friday evening and hope that everyone will not be yapping away in Welsh.