Mal O'Doherty, Studs Terkel and some thoughts on the hyperlocal

RECENTLY in the chat about podcasting I had with Malachi O'Doherty (see below), he remembered following a Dutch TV crew to the scene of a shooting in Belfast about 25 years ago.
Malachi remembers thinking 'We'll get nothing off the police or the injured man so why go?' But when he got there the crew interviewed people on the street and kids coming home from school and assorted people coming and going.
What resulted was a fantastic piece of human interest journalism which said more about the shooting and its effects on the area than any conventional form of news report ever could.
But in this age of being conditioned by the for-and-against style of adversarial journalism (you know the kind: 'Hey, let's talk about the Arab Israeli crisis - and on my left Abu Hamza...) we have rather lost sight of the kind of journalism that Malachi remembered.
Who'd have thunk it? Getting honest to goodness interesting stories from people, real people? This must be one of the ways forward for our industry, especially in an age of PR, spin and councils putting out their own propaganda sheets.
We must look at the effects of process and policy journalism and not the forms themselves. We have got to get back to those we have left behind (not just them venting nonsense in the blogosphere) and look at the prosaic elements of their lives and see the glory of the minutiae of those lives.
The democratic divide doesn't just mean not seeing our democratic bodies in our papers, it means not seeing the effects of what they do in our communities in our papers - two very different things.
But that is a side issue to my point - we need to recover the interesting, valuable people in our communities and write about and/ or broadcast them.
To be hyper local we have to connect with the local and not just in an advertising revenue sense, although that is important.
So who are the interesting people in our communities? The answer? Everyone. Everyone has a story to tell, we have to give them multiple opportunities to tell those stories.
While we in Britain involved in journalism's future have been distracting ourselves looking at networks and imagining building bogus business models based on major American cities full of tech literate people (thought up by a generation US academics who are themselves feathering their own nests BTW), we have lost sight of our everyday reality.
Studs Terkel, whose death a year ago robbed the US of one of its great journalistic talents, spoke to remarkable people from every walk of life. From Martin Luther King at the bedside of Mahalia Jackson to the soldiers and domestic helps he spoke to for The Good War, he was interested in people rather than their news worthiness. Their human worth was more valuable than any kind of manufactured hook to hang them on for the perceived audience.
And it is this model we should be looking to in the new age.
Wrestle away the blogosphere from the mountains of people interested solely in themselves, their shopping lists and scatter gun reactionary opinions and get them to write about other people - and who can do this best? Journalists.
Who can be at the heart of the knowledge transfer which perpetuates this new form of journalism? You guessed it, journalists and media organisations.
The first professional job I had in journalism was on the Crosby Herald 15 years ago. It's a paper in a small town which is essentially a suburb of Liverpool and the growth of Liverpool is changing Crosby's old distinctiveness by the week, almost.
But in all the sports teams and groups our daughter is now involved in and the church groups I go to, I get the sense that everyone wants to know the same kinds of information I once gathered for the Herald.
In 1995, I wrote the paper's People page and the pub column. They were about marriages, deaths, people in boozers and so much more besides.
I had more reaction from those pages than any I have written since - bar the massive legal action Cavern City Tours took against the Liverpool Daily Post in 1998. (The Post hierarchy were pussies. The story stood up.)
People love people, they simply like things, objects or devices. People are sexy, things aren't. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Here, and listen to me, I'll let you in on a wee secret Studs taught me: ordinary people are more interesting to read about or speak to than celebs or pop stars. FACT. Well mostly fact - Strummer was great, Jack Charlton fab, Paul McCartney even fabber.
But, I had a whale of a time speaking to John McHugh the composer or Gill Burns the rugby player or Nick the manager of the Blundellsands Hotel than I ever had speaking to Jimmy Carr or Sean Lennon or some identikit singer of a doomed indie band.
Journalism's future is recalibrating ourselves with our immediate environs and that which means most to us and not just in seductive global networks linked with nodes or whatever.
As journalists we know good stories and the best of us can tell those stories and teach people to pass them on.
The lesson of this tirade? To paraphrase something I quoted here a few months ago: Then Patrick Kavanagh's ghost came whispering to my mind, he said  'Gods make their own importance.'

Gobshite's interviewed by the wonderful Malachi O'Doherty

IT was a pleasure to voice my admiration for Belfast author, broadcaster, journalist and podcaster Malachi O'Doherty (right)  previously here, but it was an even greater pleasure to chat to him about the future of big and small media on Thursday.
I did talk far too much, but it was brilliant to be speak to the great man and the result is available above.

Rather anachronistically for an author who has written much about the decline of Christianity in Ireland, I most associate Malachi with listening to him on Radio Ulster on a Sunday morning on the way home from mass in the car with the family, after Sunday Miscellany on RTE on the way there.
That, however,  may be an example of what (name drop, ahoy) Joe Strummer  once described to me as 'false memory syndrome.'
Please listen to extracts from his new book here and listen to the future of arts journalism and broadcasting here.
You can download the podcast from the Sound Cloud website by clicking on the audio bar above.

Malachi O'Doherty reads from The Telling Year: Belfast 1972

Podcast TY1  by  VoiceofMal

MALACHI'S book The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 is one of the best written about the bloodiest year of the of the Troubles. Please listen to this extract, because it says much of what it was like to grow up in Northern Ireland in that period.
You can listen to extracts of his new book Under his Roof here.

Malachi O'Doherty: A wonderful writer and podcaster

BELFAST author Malachi O'Doherty has been one of the most insightful and provocative writers about Northern Ireland for more than two decades.
As a teenager I was always inspired by his journalism with the BBC and he has served venerable old Belfast intellectual institution Fortnight magazine as editor in the very recent past. He writes occasional and wonderful columns for the Belfast Telegraph too.
He is the author of four outstanding books 'The Trouble With Guns' (Blackstaff), 'I Was A Teenage Catholic' (Marino), 'The Telling Year: Belfast 1972' (Gill and Macmillan) and 'Empty Pulpits: Ireland’s Retreat From Religion' (Gill and Macmillan) with the first and third among the most essential books written about the Troubles.
Last year he was a brilliant panellist and the most realistic voice among a self congratulatory bunch at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies' John Kennedy Memorial Lecture commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
His next book 'Under his Roof', a series of vignettes about his father Barney, is almost with us. A couple of recordings of excerpts from it are here.
But having given up the editor's job at Fortnight a few years back he is now full time with his writing and journalism and through this he has become a tremendous podcaster. His short interviews show at the premier of Steve McQueen's Bobby Sands film, Hunger, is brilliant, but his podcast portfolio is a tremendous example of what the modern 360 degree author could become. Journalist as writer, broadcaster, producer and public intellectual.
Listen to them here. They are a tremendous day spent for anyone who loves the arts, Radio 4, Northern Irish affairs or simply great journalism.
Here is his interview with Belfast academic Carlo Gebler and former prisoner and Guardian columnist Erwin James on education and writing in the prison system.
Erwin James and Carlo Gebler