JOURNALISM IS “alive and relatively well” but is coming under serious pressure because of economic difficulties and the growth of online media, a debate on the industry has heard.
Public relations (PR) material and spin is playing a greater role in reporting because financial constraints mean fewer journalists are now expected to produce greater amounts of copy.
However, good journalism is still regularly found in Irish newspapers and broadcasting, the debate titled Has Journalism died and been replaced by Spin?, which was held in Dublin Institute of Technology, heard.
Alison O'Connor, a columnist with the Sunday Business Post, said spin was as old as journalism but has become increasingly sophisticated over the years.
Ms O’Connor said a prime example of this came during the 2002 general election when Fianna Fáil developed a powerful public relations operation that, through regular engagement, attempted to beat journalists to stories before they were written.
She said financial pressures and cutbacks in media outlets have allowed spin and PR to thrive in recent years. Recent stories, however, such as the Ryan report, proved that when journalists had time to reflect on and familiarise themselves with a story, they could produce good material.
Ms O’Connor added that the growth of online journalism was a threat to traditional print outlets, but that “journalism is alive and relatively well” for now.
Mark Brennock, a journalist with PR firm Murray Consultants, said that the relationship between journalism and public relations worked both ways because if a newspaper was full of spin or PR it became less credible, which would be bad for the products, events and people being represented.
Mr Brennock said that because of financial troubles and the need to fill pages, almost half of newspaper business material comes from PR firms.
Good quality journalism though was produced when it was well funded and given time.
He said the roles of both spin and journalism were being eroded by the growth of online media.
For example, the recent story of the leaked Leaving Cert exam paper spread on the internet before journalists or PR companies were aware of it.
Irish Timescolumnist Fintan O'Toole said that there was a hostile relationship between spin and journalism and that good reporting should see journalists challenging the orthodoxies presented to them by PR firms.
He said that spin was not an obstacle to good journalism, as it was age old and “as much a factor of life as the air we breathe”, but it was important that a degree of “independent scepticism” existed to assess the relevance and background to facts pitched by PR firms.
Deputy government press secretary John Downing, a former political correspondent, said journalism had not died and been replaced by spin, but that public relations had become “hugely influential” in the modern media.
Mr Downing said the Government required a large number of press officers as the country had become “over-mediated” and that he and his many colleagues are kept going, feeding information to the media “beast”.
