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.'

Studs Terkel: A Tribute

Studs Terkel at the mic, circa 1960 (photo: Russ Arnold), pic here

THE great Chicago author, disk jockey and social historian Studs Terkel was the senior keeper of the annals of the American left for the majority of the 20th Century.
He was a rare beast in terms of the modern media - a man equally concerned with interviewing the ordinary working American as he was with locking horns with global leaders or celebrities.
A prominent civil rights campaigner and target for the House on UnAmerican Affairs Committee, he was a committed Socialist and stood by his politics even when he it cost him work in the early 1950s.
He was best known for The Studs Terkel Program which ran daily on radio station 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. He interviewed thousands of guests during that time from Martin Luther King to Bob Dylan and Leonard Bernstein. He asked difficult questions and nearly always got great answers.

His writing career began with a portrait of jazz legends in 1956 and went on to bag a Pulitzer Prize for his legendary book The Good War in 1985.

He continued to write and campaign to the end of his life. He campaigned for health care in 2007 and welcomed the probable election of fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama as President in 2008.
He didn't get to see that historic night for the US but in many ways it was the perfect ending for a life that had been so involved in civil rights and the advancement of rights for the black community.
He died at home at the age of 96 in October 2008 but has left a mountain of books and recordings to guide the way of young journalists wanting to know just how to do it. Maybe if we follow his optimistic and committed example and see the inherently interesting nature of all humans and not just so-called celebrities, then may be new hyper localised form of news media will emerge as voice for all of us.
The Chicago History Museum and the city's historical society have joined forces to produce this remarkable website with transcripts and excerpts from some of his many thousands of interviews of the years, with the wonderful title Conversations with America
He set a standard for all broadcasters in his commitment to finding the real story behind the lives of ordinary people, believing these stories were as valuable as the lives of popes, presidents or pop stars.
Fittingly it is a response to one of his millions of questions that sums up Studs to me. He asked award winning stage actress Uta Hagen about faith, her response could have been about the great man himself.

Hagen: [...] That I am truly religious about. Oh my God, I think that the faith, the miracle of creation is what a human being is capable of communicating. It's not a private thing, it has to be communicated. Which is what I love about art—that you pass on, you make an offering of your spirit to somebody else hoping that it will help them, enlighten them, make them laugh, make them cry. These are things that make our lives worth living as far as I'm concerned. To me, that's art. That's my religion.

This brilliant documentary from Democracy Now is a fitting tribute to a great man.