Break The News

Joris Luyendijk’s year-long project is to make sense of the news in a way that’s accessible and has multiple entry points. As a result, journalists may have to relinquish the advantages they hold dear

DO YOU WANT the easy story, or the real one? The easy one would position Joris Luyendijk as the hero in his own personal battle for the future of journalism, seeking a way of telling important and complex stories to an increasingly bewildered audience. It’s certainly not the version he would choose to tell. But it would make my life easier. A simple journey with a clear result at the end, in the style of a football match report. All over in 1,200 words. Press send. Then retire to the pub across the road. Job done.

Real life, as we know, is not like that. But much of newspaper journalism is, tending as it does to want to simplify and condense; adept at delivering the latest update but not good at allowing those late to the party to catch up. The web, with its limitless capacity, can help add context. But even then, the design of most blogging-based websites is geared toward the turnover of stories, leaving the reader to sift through archives and to rely on search algorithms to get what they need.

I meet Lujendijk in the large atrium below The Guardian'soffice, just north of Kings Cross station in London. He is here on a year-long sabbatical but made his name as a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper working out of Cairo, Beirut and east Jerusalem. He studied anthropology and wrote a well-received book about how the media's reporting of that region routinely misrepresents what is really happening there.

“When I was working in the Middle East I’d have conversations with foreign editors where I’d ask, why don’t we do a little column where we explain the paper’s choice of stories, angles, interlocutors, topics, words. So then we can say, ‘Today we’re leading with a story on Libya. We’re doing this because it’s very important due to these reasons’.

“The painful answer came back that we don’t spend a lot of our time thinking about what we should cover and what the reader wants to know. We are part of a stream – CNN is covering it, BBC is covering it, so are our competitor papers, and our correspondent is there so it is cost efficient. It is a production line. The explainer column would be so painful to the paper that they don’t do it.”

“The truth would be more like, ‘Our correspondent in Paris is a very powerful figure on the paper, and although we all thought it was a boring story we ran it as the page lead’.”

During this period he recalls going to a family party where he got talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict with his 16-year-old cousins and referenced the Green Line, which marks the bitterly contested border between Israel and Palestine. His young audience looked back at him blankly. “I realised that in three years I had never written a story explaining what the Green Line was, but had written more than 40 on its implications on the politics of the region.”

Luyendijk is about to begin a year-long project for The Guardian newspaper in London. He has chosen the financial sector as its subject because, he says, “there is nothing more important than that my money comes out of the ATM and that my pension is safe. Everybody has organised their lives around a secure financial future, but still nobody really knows what is going on , apart from a small number of financial journalists who do fantastic work”.

“How can we bring this alive? To create an ecosystem. That’s the project. To be able to talk about what happened today, the news, but also what happens every day in a way that is accessible and has multiple entry points.”

“I was walking in Ikea recently. The way we organise blogs is a bit like being in the part of Ikea where you just see the carton boxes with their numbers. We have May 2011, April 2011, etc, and you have to use search words to find anything.

“When I go on the web there is Wikipedia, which has a very accurate but very dead summary. If you are already interested and know a lot, then it’s not that useful. Nowhere is someone telling me stories starting from where I’m starting. Nobody who can move me from ignorance to bliss.”

This gap between what’s happening and the general public’s awareness of the issues makes it difficult for politicians to create meaningful policy, he says, particularly when the topic moves to bankers’ bonuses.

“There is so much that doesn’t lend itself to the good guy-bad guy monocause, where we find this one cause and punish the bad guys and the village is safe again. Take something like the European Union, where there is not just two sides – government and opposition – there are three governments and five oppositions. So how do we talk about this? In the end we don’t. We reduce it to: who was this a victory for? Sarkozy? Merkel? Who?”

This multilayered approach to reporting will include posting raw material and inviting experts to interrogate it independently, while other devices, such as social media and daily diaries, will help those with less knowledge to become engaged. He hopes readers will take his research and “mash it up, adding their own research, from their own sources”.

For this to work requires journalists to relinquish many of the advantages they have previously held dear, such as control of the process of reporting and the position of authority they hold over the readers.

On the contrary, Luyendijk’s calling card is his own ignorance of the specific subject matter. The City of London, he says, is like the electric car before it, “another thing I know nothing about”. He has purposely avoided reading any of the post-2008 “crash-lit” in the hope of bringing an open mind to the process.

“There is the whole ignorance is bliss thing. You are inclusive. You come off a pedestal. In the old days of newspapers, when space was limited, it was more important to be the person with all the knowledge. Now we can sit alongside the reader and explain what helped me to achieve a better understanding, but that it is also a conversation, where the journalist, if they are open to the concept, can learn from the reader.”

This opening up of the journalist’s craft carries difficult questions. At the top of the list is how transparent newspapers can be about their decision making processes. Likewise when looking at financial issues, should readers know more about the personal circumstances of journalists? Do they own their house, pay a mortgage and therefore have a personal stake in the fluctuation of interest rates?

All this talks to a bigger question, how much transparency can accompany authority? This is, he says, one of the biggest questions we face.

“Say your brother was working for a bank. That would cause you not to write about that bank, because that would create its own dynamic within the organisation for your brother. This is when it gets very tricky. Transparency is not a solution to all. It is just the next step.

“Any type of story that says that this level of authority is unjustified creates enormous attention. Will any kind of authority remain after a few decades of this stuff? These are really major questions.

“We are so worried about our profession as journalists, and what will happen to democracy if we were not there, that we have parked these issues. If transparency goes too far there are serious implications for democracy.”

Geeks, he says, were once absolutely not what you wanted to be. “Now they walk among us, collecting our data.” Blessed are the geeks, but so too the narcissists, who thrive in this era of transparency. “If you are a narcissist and you want to lay out your entire life, you have such an advantage over someone like me, who wants to protect my family. I’m not sure I want my children to live in a society where privacy no longer exists, where holding on to your privacy is seen as inauthentic and as decreasing your authority.”

It’s a big project he’s taken on. One which will challenge many vested interests, not least within the newspaper business itself.