Happy New Year to all 14 of my unique visitors! The beginning of 2008 is a chance to reflect on the fact that in the six months that I’ve been writing this blog, virtually no-one has read it.
Despite my transparent attempts to build traffic by baiting Andrew Gilligan (which did, at least, result in a link from Roy Greenslade last month), this blog is about as widely read as the New Testament is in southern Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, I shall plough on by drawing your attention to a forthcoming book by Gordon Burn (not the bloke off the Krypton Factor and North West Tonight – that’s Gordon Burns). It’s called Born Yesterday: the News as a Novel and, according to the blurb on Amazon, is “an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us”.
Mark Lawson, no less, has already got Slightly Excited about it, using the premise of Burn’s book to write a piece in the Guardian about how the news has become
a kind of super-fiction, in which one unlikely and inexplicable yarn after another – The Portugal Child, the Perugia Murder, The Deadly Teddy Bear, The Secret Donor, The Panamanian Canoeist – play out across newspaper pages.
According to Lawson, the “new technology of self-expression” (ie Facebook – or MyFace, as my mum called it on Christmas Day) has aided this process by providing a helpful backstory for the protagonists, which reporters are able to feed off.
The other key factor, which isn’t really touched upon by Lawson, is the 24-hour rolling news channels and their incessant need to fill space with wretched conjecture punctuated by moments of “breaking” news. This style of news delivery lends itself to the “dense, messy” soap opera stories highlighted by Lawson, where the twists and turns of the “plot” can be played out day by day on live TV. (The finest example is the “Canoe Man” story from December 2007, which, ten years ago, would have been picked up by one of the Sunday tabloids and would have gone absolutely no further.)
Today, driven by intense competition, the newspapers are mimicking the news channels’ approach. The Daily Express’s coverage of the Madeleine McCann case could conceivably never end and, like Sky News/News 24, is composed almost entirely of guesswork and repeated facts.
Anyway, the book might be interesting, it might not. Burn seems to have a decent track record in non-fiction crime books, although Lawson is convinced he is “a notable cultural observer”. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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The Conversation {4 comments}
Perhaps if you saturate your blog with references to Madeleine you’ll start getting hits from Daily Express readers.
If only they knew how to use the internet, I’d be laughing.
You know, its slightly worrying that alongside a piece about the McCanns the Express chose to show a gratuitous picture of girls in hotpants. While still trying to keep the moral high ground.
I would definitely read a novel by the leg-endary Gordon Burns…
I hesitate to mention it but I read your blog from at least two different IPs.
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