Words Dept.: entry

Jay Rayner, the Observer food critic, is researching a feature on genetically modified food. The reason I know this is that he’s written a post on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog asking for pointers. It’s the first time I’ve heard of a national newspaper doing such a thing. Rayner describes it as “a different approach”.

This initially struck me as a cheeky way of getting a bunch of unpaid minions to do a highly paid celebrity journalist’s work for him. Then I thought the joke might be on him, because it’s surely more trouble than it’s worth.

The art of journalism is, of course, as much about what you leave out of a story as what you put in. By inviting the web and her grandmother to bombard you with opinions and links to background material, how do you find time to get round to writing the feature? As well as worthy amateurs, you’ve got academics, lobby groups, PR firms and others, who are presumably under no obligation to declare an interest in what they are pushing your way.

I get bogged down by dozens of time-consuming calls and e-mails from PR people when I ask for contributions for a feature about, say, the Manchester office market. This is a narrow and – despite my best efforts – inherently dull subject matter of interest to virtually no-one. I do hope Rayner has a team of interns to sift through the mountain of drivel that’s headed his way – there are 126 comments already, although, in fairness, most of them seem to be quite helpful.

The other problem in this approach is that your source material is on view to all. If you leave something out of the finished article either deliberately or by mistake, you lay yourself open to allegations of ignorance, malice or possibly both. And people who post on the Guardian’s blogs can be a savage bunch.

Perhaps I’m being a bit “old media”/Andrew Keen-ish about all this and the Observer should be applauded for opening up the process of researching and writing an article on an important subject. Why shouldn’t “amateurs” be invited to contribute before a feature is published? It might actually make the journalist’s job more pleasant, since, as Rayner observes, what usually happens is:

The piece is written, posted to the web and then the debate begins, sometimes rancorously. Despite – or perhaps because – they are being introduced to both arguments and sources of information that they missed, the journalist, understandably, becomes defensive. The posters become increasingly adamant.

Like GM food itself, the Observer’s approach is essentially a new and unusual experiment with the potential to go horribly wrong. Let’s hope it doesn’t, for the sake of all mankind.