What the papers save

A brief glimpse of the front pages on Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday. Credit: BBC

As this blog is fond of saying, there’s nothing like page one. While breaking news went online a while ago, British newspaper front pages still retain a salience vastly in excess of their dwindling sales: nothing beats them for rhetoric, and nothing in the digital realm has been invented that has their capacity to summarise the events of a calendar day.

Despite app alerts and rolling broadcasts, the 24-hour news cycle still exists, and nothing fits into it quite so well as a daily newspaper. That is one reason why there is still a What The Papers Say-style segment on TV and radio news programmes, morning and evening. Or at least, why there has been until now.

However, the BBC TV’s new flagship politics show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, seems to be breaking with this tradition. Whereas her Sunday-morning predecessor, Andrew Marr, would show every paper in turn, poring over sellotaped double-page spreads and holding articles up to the camera, Kuenssberg throws up a perfunctory montage of some, but not all, of the front pages on a single screen before pulling it down again and turning to her guests. Marr used to have two journalists on the show to talk about the journalism; Kuenssberg seems to operate an anyone-but-hacks approach for her three-person panel, who discuss issues at her prompting with scant reference back to what the papers have actually been saying.

The blog has dreaded this moment: the possible first signs of the waning currency of the front page. I rather thought it would happen as a result of the advance of online news organisations into the discussion (where they are fully entitled to be), rather than simple lack of interest in the Fleet Street agenda. Nonetheless, it’s unsettling.

Does it matter? Of course it does to a middle-aged print hack like me, but more widely? I think so, especially given what has been said about social media recently in the US culture wars.

Over on HeadsUp, there is an excellent post about the fallout from the “Twitter Files” – the leak approved by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, of discussions on censorship and moderation under the site’s previous management. It cites one of the journalists involved in publishing the leak, Matt Taibbi, who writes that he had felt “the version of the world” he had been receiving from Twitter pre-Musk had been “distorted” and “ridiculous”, and that the discovery of the moderation discussions had been a “balm” for him.

“This is the reality they stole from us!” he writes of the censors, making the complaint often heard on the American right that liberal censorship and “cancel culture” has silenced certain voices in certain debates, including ones he wanted to hear on Twitter.

However, as HeadsUp puts it:

What baffles me most about the “Twitter Files” is the quaint belief that someone – generally “our elite overlords” or some variant on that – monkeyed with Twitter and ruined forever the level media playing field on which American politics had played out from the dawn of time through 2019 or so.

To which one could go on and on, but – has AM radio just entirely vanished from public consciousness, or did none of you out there hear Rush Limbaugh’s “Largest Radio Rally in History,” featuring two hours or so worth of Donald Trump… four weeks before the 2020 election?

True, the infamous Hunter Biden laptop (or the copy of its hard drive, or whatever) doesn’t come up in that transcript, but it was certainly no secret to the Limbaugh audience in the weeks before the election. You can try your own site search at foxnews.com (replete with complaints about the rest of the media). What you can’t do is say that reality was somehow stolen from you because your message wasn’t front and center on every platform.

That last point skewers the weakness in this type of argument perfectly: no media organisation is necessarily obliged to align its values completely with one’s own. Twitter was entitled to be dubious about the bona fides of the Biden laptop story: Fox News is fully entitled to embrace it. Both are private companies with the power to set their own rules, standards and agendas. A disagreement on this issue with one social media network – and one that is far from being the largest in the world – is not evidence of a conspiracy.

In times gone by, there was a tradition of impartiality, or hands-off fair dealing, in mainstream American journalism, where newspapers with geographical monopolies would play it straight down the middle, politically speaking, so as not to alienate half their captive audience. Critics of the US media scene, such as Prof Jay Rosen, have dismissed this approach as “the production of innocence” – an artificial neutrality that can fail its readers when difficult truths need telling. And in any event, as HeadsUp says, the advent of new media in the form of Fox News and shock jocks has shattered the old non-partisan model.

But it’s tempting to wonder if some of that tradition still informs the likes of Musk’s and Taibbi’s expectations: that there should somehow be one “version of the world”, one consensus “reality” that sounds the same from all media outlets. If so, it is an American rather than a wider anglosphere problem, because British audiences – thanks to the partisan excesses of Fleet Street – have never believed that.

Laura Kuenssberg discusses the papers with a non-journalism panel. Credit: BBC

As a whole, the British newspaper industry will never present what Barack Obama calls an “agreed set of facts”, but it does manage to produce a plurality of facts – a sense that, taken in the round, most stories, from most points of view, have a chance of being covered. And it’s long exposure to this – at the newsstands, or in the broadcasters’ press reviews – that I think insulates the British public from the slightly paranoid fear of having “reality stolen” in the way Taibbi describes.

The UK national press has never been trusted for its probity, but it is, grudgingly, trusted for its breadth. It ranges so far to the left and right that most constituencies feel their views and concerns are getting an airing. The messages are not front and centre on every platform, but they will usually be on one or two. This has also led to a sophisticated form of media consumption in Britain in which even hated papers will be given a selective hearing if it appears that they’ve got something big – think of the Guardian on the Windrush scandal, the Daily Mail on “smart” motorways, or the Telegraph on MPs’ expenses. British readers have learned to look past newspapers’ glaring institutional biases if the bona fides of a story are convincing enough.

One of the main reasons this mechanism functions is because of programmes such as What The Papers Say and its successors. Because broadcasters are regulated for impartiality in the way papers are not, they must be even-handed about every front page they show, but are not obliged to identify with any of them. Meanwhile, the parade of different agendas and political positions, one after the other as the front pages flash through, is broadening and chastening for viewers: you see your concerns aired in one headline, but a quite different set of priorities in the next one. Many “realities”, not just one.

However, if you take the Kuenssberg approach of curating the talking points and reducing the warts-and-all selection of front pages, you lose that sense of a world beyond the careful broadcast-news consensus. In effect, you take the responsibility of setting the news agenda, the points for discussion, yourself, rather than letting the papers do it for you – and perhaps eventually exposing yourself to criticism, like Taibbi’s, that you are narrowing the discussion.

Fleet Street is guilty of many sins, but its journalism still plays a vital role in complementing public broadcasters’ – not because it is better, but simply because it is more plural.

Glossed in translation

At the anglosphere-girdling modern Tribune, as regular readers know, the Australian reporters write Australian and the American reporters write American, and we don’t enforce British English anywhere except Britain. But there is one partial exception to this rule and that is for the original Tribune – the print Tribune.

The newspaper takes in reports from all three newsrooms but is only distributed in Britain, and so what was initially written for the understanding of customers in Melbourne or Pittsburgh can subsequently find itself in front of a completely different audience. And if you’re editing it for print, for an entirely British audience, you do have to intervene and translate – sometimes quite intensively.

Take, for example, this piece, filed online in Australia for Australians, and then sent through as-is for print in the UK:

Putting oneself in the place of a British reader, one might find oneself asking:

• Who?

• What’s that?

• What were they?

• Where?

Scott Morrison needs no introduction at all to Australians, but British audiences may need a gentle reminder of who he is. “Federal parliament” is a significant distinction to make in a country that also has state parliaments, but the distinction is probably unnecessary for overseas readers, who will be working on the assumption that only controversies at national level will be making the foreign pages. The five secret self-appointments were the talk of the country at the time, but presenting them like this – in a brief, second-news-cycle way, for people already closely informed – doesn’t sit entirely well 10,000 miles away, where readers may have missed the story. And Cook here is “the Division of Cook”, that is to say Morrison’s parliamentary constituency in Sydney – not a name that will resonate at all with Britons.

So after some British-ising, you might end up with something like this:

I’m not sure if there are any “rules” to this yet, but a few principles, as illustrated above, often seem to apply:

(1) Anything that is too obvious to mention for the piece’s original audience (eg, who Scott Morrison is), may need explicitly putting in.

(2) Any detail obscure enough that even the home audience needs to be reminded of it (for example, the name of Morrison’s seat) may need taking out, simply on the grounds that it’s too much information for an audience already processing a lot of unfamiliarity.

(3) If the home audience is on the second or third news cycle for the story, it may be worth re-editing to take the story back “half a cycle”, so to speak, for an overseas audience – in other words, you may not be able to rely as heavily on readers’ knowledge of prior developments as the home reporter is entitled to.

This might seem like a very traditional kind of editing – spelling things out and putting sentences into British English, damn it – but in fact it, too, is a product of the burgeoning world of anglosphere news. In the old days, when your Australian bureau filed a story, it would have been written for the desk in London, and all the glosses and explanations necessary for comprehension in Britain would have already been added. It’s only now, with unmediated copy arriving from two newsrooms with their own priorities, that the job needs to be done at home base. And at the Tribune, the task seems to have fallen to the copy desk – another small example of how much growing online news organisations need subeditors to keep things running smoothly.

The three-newsroom problem

Vienna – “Austria’s capital, Vienna” – is the most liveable city in the world, and the Tribune is all over the story. Global news, global news organisation: it’s the perfect fit. Except that, no sooner have we announced the winner than, one paragraph later, we’re straight into a controversy about … Auckland.

Now, Auckland was last year’s winner by reason of its strict lockdown, and now it’s 34th for the same reason, which is interesting. OK. But two brief paragraphs about Vienna later, we move on to … Melbourne. Melbourne came tenth.

Then we address Australia’s other major cities, none of which are in the top 25. Finally, at paragraph seven, we get to a brief rundown of the six European cities in the top 10.

By paragraph 11, we’re back on the subject of Melbourne, with a quote from the premier of Victoria,

and you start to suspect that, just possibly, this global-interest story about all the world’s cities was filed by the Australian office. The byline tells you only that the article is by “Staff and agencies”,

but the dateline reveals a launch time of 2.43am, British summer time – approaching 10pm for the US office, which is day shift only, but 11.43am, right in the middle of the working day, down under.

The Tribune has three fully fledged newsrooms: London, New York and Sydney. The demerits of having a trio of autonomous operations running in parallel have been rehearsed at length in this blog, but of course there are merits as well. For instance, live blogs and big rolling stories in one country can be kept alive all night and into the morning by the other two offices; as a natural consequence of the time zones in which it operates, the Tribune never sleeps now. Quality of coverage may dip a little as, say, London reporters wrestle with the snakepit machinations of Capitol Hill, but breaking political news at 5am EDT will be up ready for a breakfast audience across the US before the baton is handed back.

In these circumstances it is instinctively understood who the story “belongs” to, and which are the senior and junior newsrooms in each case. There is also a clear, if slightly troublesome, policy about whether you should write local news chiefly for a local audience in each jurisdiction: the answer is yes, even if those stories sound a bit baffling to readers abroad. The three-newsroom problem that we do not seem to have addressed yet is what to do about stories of apparently global relevance where all the interest will in fact be local, and vary according to where it is being read.

Last year we discussed the Sydney-bureau story about heat deaths around the world in which all the experts quoted were Australian. This story has a further problem: despite introducing antipodean figures as though they were familiar names, it also tries to adopt a slightly tortured citizen-of-nowhere approach to the geography (“Switzerland’s Zurich”, “fellow Swiss city Geneva” and so on). London, the Tribune’s home and headquarters, is not mentioned until the 18th paragraph. The same is true of New York (or, as the article calls it, “the US city of New York”).

A conscious attempt at impartiality mixes with the subconscious desire to find relevance for the home market, and for two-thirds of its audience the story jars. But it’s hard to believe that writers in New York or London would, or could, have approached it any differently.

And that leaves us with a suggestion that defies efficient planning and good internet practice, but seems to make the most journalistic sense: if you have three newsrooms, are there in fact some stories that you need to cover three times?

On repeat

(Warning: graphic content and links to graphic stories)

On the Mail homepage, next to a piece about an OnlyFans model’s “eye-popping assets”, there is currently a video playing of a man being blown up by a sea mine. Filmed by a surveillance camera from long distance, it shows a wide, empty beach in Ukraine on a sunny day, suddenly punctuated by an explosion at the water’s edge and a dark upsurge of sand.

There is no graphic content warning. The video autoplays when the site loads and repeats, so if you have just popped in to read about Coleen Rooney’s new bikini in the sidebar, your eye is constantly caught by the tiny figures of the man’s wife and son, running along the beach some way behind him and then stopping in shock – a three-second snuff movie looping over and over again. If you are trying to read the advertising feature immediately to the right about putting up garden bird feeders with your children, you may also notice the standfirst to the video, which tells readers that the explosion “scattered the 50-year-old’s body parts across the beach” as his “distressed” family looked on.

Twenty or so years ago, in the wild-frontier days of Web 1.0, there used to be a website that specialised in horrific news and paparazzi photographs that no one else would publish – the remains of suicide bombers after detonation, car accident victims in extremis, and so on. Covering itself, supposedly, with the mantle of documentary veracity, its tagline was: “Are you ready for real life?” But that was a small, dark corner of the old internet that wasn’t prominent on the search engines of the time – not a vast news site also eager to keep you updated on a “flash of bronzed legs” and capital gains tax on second homes.

In the unmoderated comments below, meanwhile, readers – no doubt all genuine Mail-reading yeomen of Middle England – are dismissing the video, which was supplied by Odesa regional police, as propaganda relating to the row between Kyiv and Moscow about the mining of the area. “Why would Russia with their mighty Black Sea Fleet want to put mines in the Black Sea?” writes someone listed as coming from Birmingham. “It would have also been Ukrainian since Ukraine seems to not anchor their mines in place very well,” writes Doug, from Sudbury. The Tribune is discreetly offering counselling to the picture editors who are processing the many explicit images coming out of the war, but that seems to be less of a problem for the commentators. “Photo of body parts please – need proof!” writes Dobby from the United Kingdom.

Even if this dispassionate panel of experts is right, in a sense it’s irrelevant: the point is that the Mail believes the video is real, believes it shows a death, and has thought it suitable to place, rewinding unstoppably, on the same page as a jolly read on bedroom turn-offs.

It would be easy to conclude that this bewildering collision of sensibilities is a byproduct of digital imaging and internet culture: a modern-day phenomenon that would have foundered on the gate-keeping and laborious production methods of times gone by. But tabloid tastes go back much further than that: consider the picture-papers of the 19th century, which ranged from respectable to publications such as the Illustrated Police News:

This edition, from September 1888, features the Whitechapel murders – that is, the Ripper murders – in a manner familiar to readers 130 years later. There is blanket coverage and an abundance of queasy detail. The twin tabloid tides of prurience and outraged respectability surge and ebb, between the savage man brandishing a knife and the women demurely holding up their self-defence weapons. They do not have a close-up photo of Annie Chapman as a corpse, so the artist has drawn one instead. There are even more pictures than you’d find in a modern Mail article. And, just for contrast, at bottom left we have “exciting scenes at the menagerie”; in the best desensitising tabloid tradition, there’s a cute animal story right next to the serial killings.

Subs – please check

^{HMS Ambush on sea trials. © Crown copyright 2012}

*

“We have been regularly referring to the value of the Aus-French submarine deal as $90bn,” writes an astute member of the Tribune’s night shift to colleagues. “But this is 90bn AUSTRALIAN dollars, not US dollars.”

That is an excellent point. “This makes sense for an Australian audience but is confusing for everyone else. Lots of writers and subs are referring back to Aus pieces for their info and copying this sum into stories for a US, UK and global audience. Non-Australia folk: please be on the alert for this (and for similar Australian stories of global import). Australia folk: if a story is very much global, would you consider using the notation A$? Anyway, something for discussion.”

It certainly is something for discussion: this blog has wrestled for years with the problems of anglophone news organisations trying to bestride the globe while remaining part of a national dialogue. The Aukus submarines deal, agreed between Australia, the UK and the US, looks like a perfect anglosphere news story – after all, these are the three countries where forward-looking British papers such as the Tribune now have newsrooms. But although that means the coverage has been panoramic, the small but essential details are proving as troublesome as ever.

Some newsdesks did fall into the trap. Eastern Eye converted the “$90bn” that France stands to lose from the cancellation of its own submarine deal with Australia into “£66bn”:

But that is the sterling equivalent of 90 billion US dollars, not Australian; the correct figure for A$ is about £48bn.

The Tribune does not appear to have gone that far, but by saying “$90bn” in several pieces without context we may have been giving the impression – it’s easily done – that we were speaking of the world’s reserve currency when we were not. And in this article in the Mail, focusing on the Biden angle and with a US political writer leading the bylines,

the $90bn figure also stands unqualified.*

Interestingly, the same article gives comparative costings of various submarine types further down,

and those figures are not in US dollars either. A Virginia-class boat seems to cost about US$3.4bn (which is about A$4.5bn) and a new HMS Astute would set you back about £1.4bn-£1.6bn, which is not as much as $2.6bn in US currency. It would seem that the costs in this US-focused article are being given consistently in Australian dollars, but without ever saying so.

Why would you not specify? Perhaps because, as we have discussed so often, journalists at the Tribune and similar organisations are often encouraged not to. Our purpose in expanding across the anglosphere is to provide local coverage in underserved markets, to bed in as a homegrown news source. So we write in different flavours of English depending on which continent we’re on, and speak of weights and measures as locals would. In which case, as the night sub’s email suggests, adopting international terminology for a national currency is something that very much needs to be “considered” before it is enforced. Too much globalist perspective, too much wire-service neutrality, betrays you as an outsider.

This causes a slight problem when local stories meant for one country’s consumption become visible on another country’s homepage. But it causes even greater problems when the three jurisdictions you cover collide in the same global story. Because then, whose worldview wins?

*“Advanced” warning – I know, I know.

Weather outlook

Any of the Tribune’s three world-girdling newsrooms could have produced this alarming story on heat deaths:

Some stories are local, which is why we set up English-speaking operations in the US and Australia, but some stories are global, and the climate crisis affects everyone. In the end, it was Australia who wrote up the report for all three of us, and it duly found its way into the print subs’ queue for the newspaper in London.

Which was fine, except that, in this globally relevant story, the first person quoted …

was Australian, and the second person quoted …

… was Australian, and the next part of the story …

… concerned a study in which Australia had done notably badly (whereas the UK and the US had only done moderately badly), and the broadening out of the theme …

… took us into the kind of Australian domestic shorthand that I suspect may never have been encountered in the Tribune’s home news pages before.

It’s not hard to guess what the Australian Medical Association is, but the Hesta Super Fund is more recondite: a huge pension fund of a specifically Australian type called a “super fund” that once (but no longer) restricted its membership to employees in the health service. That explanation almost leaves UK readers none the wiser than the name: It’s sort of a “health body”, but not quite, and seems to be politically engaged in a way that no major pension fund in the UK ever is. In the end, I glossed it as something like “major health-focused pension fund”, but I’m not sure that enlightened many readers on the Tube.

We have come across this problem in a minor way before, when a developing international story gets handed off between newsrooms: the weights, measures and currencies start to fluctuate, and views change about what the reader can be assumed to know. But this is a slightly bigger problem. We don’t yet have reporters with a contact book big enough to provide region-specific quotes and examples for three different continents. Nor do we have the resources (usually) to write up a story three times in all three jurisdictions. So you end up with a story flavoured with the sources, agenda and analysis of one particular newsroom, and the other two have to make do with what’s supplied.

As we have discussed more than once, the UK’s anglophone news organisations are anxious to ensure Australian readers don’t feel their domestic news has been written by outsiders. But what we haven’t considered so far is the possibility that British readers might be getting that feeling instead.

The Christiansen Method

‘I did not see anything about the Liberal transport proposals’: Christiansen on screen. (BFI)

Thinking further about Arthur Christiansen’s wooden yet commanding presence in The Day The Earth Caught Fire reminded me of a thought that frequently occurs to this blog: that journalists are only famous to other journalists, and even then not always for long.

He was editor of the Daily Express from 1933 to 1957, hailed as one of the great press innovators and a genius of presentation, but I wonder how many people in Britain today remember who he is. I had only barely heard of him until I saw him on screen, and even at the Tribune he is never mentioned as a guiding light in the way that others such as CP Scott and Harold Evans are. (Of course that may be because the Tribune is a broadsheet that only looks up to broadsheet figures; I’m sure he is venerated to this day at the Express).

In his glowing but not uncritical account of Christiansen in How Journalism Works (1964), Roy Nash writes:

Time may well prove him to have been the greatest of all creators of the commercially successful popular newspaper image. Night after night, for nearly a quarter of a century, he designed an ingeniously eye-catching paper so compelling in appearance that it had to be read … He and his work almost totally dominated Fleet Street, conditioned and moulded its life, and only now are the rivals of his Daily Express trying to free themselves from his powerful influence.

But, Nash adds, his drive to “capture the reader’s interest … and lead it along by the hand” had unforeseen consequences:

Reporting in the Christiansen manner called for great skill in writing and especially in sub-editing. Sub-editing was, in fact, for the first time raised to a high professional level. But the technique had its dangerous traps into which the unwary fell. The logical step in trying to present every story in a totally simplified fashion was to assume that most news was, inherently, composed of simple black and white elements …

This led to something that Christiansen had neither intended nor wanted; a return to embroidered reporting. News tended, in the Fleet Street phrase, to be “hardened”. Events that were compounded of the indecisive greys and off-whites of news were turned into apparently clear-cut blacks and whites. Selected aspects of many of the highly complex problems that Britain faced immediately after the war were reduced to ludicrous levels and treated with alarming irresponsibility.

The Express was still broadsheet-sized at the time Christiansen edited it, but what Nash is describing here sounds like, in effect, the birth of the modern tabloid: a combination of vividness, exaggeration and jumping to conclusions that one associates more these days with the likes of Paul Dacre and Kelvin MacKenzie.

As editor, Christiansen used to write a daily bulletin to his staff, and the former Express journalist Geoffrey Mather has collected many of the most engaging quotes from them on his website. They’re fascinating. And they do, as Nash suggests, hint at a journalist of a somewhat different type to Dacre and MacKenzie: one constantly struggling, not always successfully, to reconcile the instinct to excite with the desire to be high-minded. (At one stage, for example, he writes: “Watch out for loaded stories. There is a tendency for reporters to write copy which, sentence for sentence, seems innocuous, but which adds up in detail to the dangerous business of creating a prejudicial atmosphere.” Well, quite.)

Some of his observations are resonant aphorisms for modern journalists that might stand alongside words from Scott or Evans. Some of them are rather less so: dated quibbles about grammar or now-baffling social niceties. And many of them involve discussions of people and scandals that are now – like the journalists who wrote about them – almost completely forgotten:

Yesterday in a story about a broken romance we referred to the the girl’s occupation as that of bottler in a lemonade factory. We used to have a rule that we did not refer to the occupations of people in lowly stations when romance or broken romance was involved. It is a good rule and should be revived. (3 March 1953)

In the early editions at any rate there were too many stories about things and not enough stories about people. Significant news predominated – and while that is fine, you will never get people to digest significant news if there is nothing else on the diet sheet. Contrast is the heart and soul of a newspaper. (Even the Manchester Guardian, on a day pregnant with heavy news, found space on its front page to say that goats are to be replaced by sheep on the Malayan rubber estates.) (17 March 1953)

Many, many stories in the Daily Express today are of violent character. Maybe a leavening of more “thoughtful” news is necessary. I do not see anything about the Liberal transport proposals, for example. We should always seek to balance so-called shock tactics with an appeal to the thoughtful reader. (8 August 1952)

All my journalistic thinking is based on making the news so inviting to people that they read involuntarily news which normally would not interest them. That is why I rejoice when headlines such as “Four Mr Europes woo Miss Britain” are written on a story from the Strasbourg conference. It is the hope that such novel presentation will at least open the door. (27 November 1951)

With the arrival of June weather we should try to make the paper suit the optimism of the masses. Never forget that the Daily Express is noted for its tonic effect. And while on this subject, it might be well to restate the three-fold rule for our paper:

1. Never set the police on anybody.
2. Never cry down the pleasures of the people.
3. Remember our own habits and frailties when disposed to be critical of others. (4 June 1951)

I get queasy about salacious reporting. All the papers are going in for it, and in the case of the Indian doctor it was quite shocking for a family man to have to read so much detail. Surely we can take a decision to print as little salacious matter as is necessary to prove the case for the prosecution or the defence – and no more. A typical example last week was the phrase in the doctor case that there was “intimacy in a car on two occasions on the back seat”. It is the phrase “on the back seat” which leaves little to the imagination. (5 March 1951)

It is the journalistic fashion to concentrate on the first paragraphs of stories. I believe in that. But I believe just as emphatically in the perfection of the last paragraph. (5 February 1953)

Many more here.

 

 

Batwoman or bane?

REVEALED! Shady Chinese lab was performing experiments on BATS! REVEALED! Heroic Chinese lab sequenced virus genome and was GAGGED! Oh no, hang on, they’re the same institution! Aaaaah!

It’s hard to know what to make of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the Mail on Sunday’s coverage this weekend, especially when these two stories are right next to each other on the homepage at time of writing (and, indeed, appended to each other as footnotes). Are the staff disgusting Frankensteins playing fast and loose with nature, or courageous boffins trying to save the world?

In the scary story:

The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government …

The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 – and doing so with American money – has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source.

US Congressman Matt Gaetz said: ‘I’m disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.’

The $37million Wuhan Institute of Virology, the most advanced laboratory of its type on the Chinese mainland, is based twenty miles from the now infamous wildlife market that was thought to be the location of the original transfer of the virus from animals to humans.

According to documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday, scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments. …

The news that COVID-19 bats were under research there means that a leak from the Wuhan laboratory can no longer be completely ruled out …

American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests COVID-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan laboratories, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analyzed.

Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only ‘level 2’ security – rather than the recommended level 4 – which ‘provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers’.

In the heartwarming story:

… Shi Zhengli [is] known as China’s ‘Bat Woman’ after years spent on difficult virus-hunting expeditions in dank caves that have led to a series of important scientific discoveries.

The virologist was called back to her highsecurity laboratory in Wuhan at the end of last year after a mysterious new respiratory condition in the city was identified as a novel coronavirus – and within three days she completed its gene sequencing …

Shi is a specialist in emerging diseases and has earned global acclaim for work investigating links between bats and coronaviruses, aided by expeditions to collect samples and swabs in the fetid cave networks of southern China.

She was a key part of the team that traced SARS to horseshoe bats through civets, a cat-like creature often eaten in China …

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, based ten miles from the wildlife market blamed as the source of Covid-19, developed a £30million high-security laboratory after the SARS outbreak with French assistance.

It was the first laboratory in China with P4 status – denoting highest global biosafety levels – and contains the largest virus bank in Asia.

It was this fact that sparked now discounted conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was man-made.

Shi, the laboratory’s deputy director, admits that when summoned back from a conference to investigate the new disease, she wondered at first if a coronavirus could have escaped from her unit.

She has warned about the danger of epidemics from bat-borne viruses. But she says she did not expect such an outbreak in Wuhan, in the centre of China, since her studies suggested subtropical areas in the south had the highest risk of such ‘zoonotic’ transmission to humans.

Shi told the respected science journal Scientific American last month of her relief when, having checked back through disposal records, none of the genome sequences matched their virus samples.

‘That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days,’ she said. …

Shi has worked alongside many of the world’s top experts on infectious diseases. ‘She is a superb scientist and very nice person,’ said James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory, a high-security biocontainment centre in Texas.

‘She has been very open and collaborative for the decade I’ve worked with her.’

The fact that Shi’s superiors at the lab may have hushed up her conclusions is not contradicted by anything in the other story, and the wider narrative of Beijing’s bad faith in relation to the outbreak is not affected by either. But this seems to be essentially the same set of facts cooked two ways: one flavoured with angry, shoot-from-the-hip congressmen and conspiracy theories, the other with a personable heroine and glowing character references. An instructive reminder that journalism is not just about what you find out, but also who you then approach for comment.

Are you ready for some soccer?

Spotted on the Daily Mail, both on the UK homepage:

Blackburn Rovers’ Bradley Dack and his reality-star ex-girlfriend are bread and butter for the Mail’s British site, and you might argue that the son of Lance Armstrong is too: but for sure neither Bradley nor (one suspects) anyone else in League One has ever been a “preferred walk-on”*. Of course, that’s because the two men operate in entirely different sports: but last week Mail UK had them both playing “football”.

This blog is generally sanguine about the accidental merging of news agendas as media organisations spread out across the anglosphere. A story’s a story, even if confusions occasionally arise over different dress sizes or the fact that more than one country calls its currency the “dollar”. If articles leak across the content management system into other jurisdictions, as one has here, there’s often no harm: British readers are happy to critique an NBA player’s scatter cushions or admire a Jersey Shore star’s $5,000 dress.

But this word, you suspect, is going to be a sticking point. In the US, American football is just “football” and football is “soccer”. In Britain, “football” is the game sanctioned by the FA, and all other games with the same name are qualified geographically: American football, Australian rules football, even Rugby football. American readers might be disappointed to discover that a story about a troubled “football player” doesn’t involve the NFL, and in Britain there would be open revolt if UK news organisations routinely referred to the national game as “soccer”, even though the term is British in origin.

Imposing one style across all jurisdictions is out of the question here. So what to do? This appears to be another case where the sometimes unsatisfactory approach adopted by the Guardian on its transatlantic ventures – that of “honouring the author’s voice” – is the only one that’s going to work. As its former production editor in the US, Maraithe Thomas, explains:

We might be born of a British news organisation but we were here to report on the US and to carve out our own space as a fully American news outlet. But then were we going to change the English of veteran British journalists, who were reporting over here, into American English? That didn’t feel right. …

What we decided to do, as I did my best to explain to the Atlantic, was to honor the individual reporter’s voice. British English would of course be maintained throughout the Guardian newspaper, but online we would follow the reporter’s lead.

This approach does, of course, create many problems of its own, not least the one of leaving readers to work out which “football” a news organisation is talking about in any individual story. But not every Americanism or Britishism travels smoothly across the Atlantic: sometimes there’s serious cultural resistance. And when there is, whichever sport you’re talking about, it’s unwise to pick sides.

 

*That is, a college player not good enough to be granted a sports scholarship, but nonetheless likely to see playing time (as opposed to normal non-scholarship players, who frequently must hang on tooth and nail just to stay in the squad).

 

Cootamundra to the world

BONUS UPDATE: The very day after we were discussing Rebel Wilson and the Australian dollar exchange rate, this appears on the UK homepage of the Daily Mail! Man from Cootamundra (where?) discovers crashed ute (what?) on the Olympic Highway (where?) and, with great courage, pulls him to safety. Now he’s all over the web front page of Britain’s best-selling mid-market tabloid without a hint to international readers about where the drama took place (which is, of course, Australia).

If you need footnotes: Cootamundra is a town of about 5,500 in New South Wales; the Olympic Highway is a country road in the southern part of the state, so named because it formed part of the route of the torch for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics; and a ute, that most distinctively Australian of vehicles, is a light pickup truck based on a saloon car chassis (it’s short for “utility”). None of these explanations make it into the front-page standfirst for British readers, although on the article page itself, there is at least a description of Mr van Baast as an “Aussie hero” in the display type.

In fact, the story is written from such a defiantly local angle that one suspects even readers in other parts of Australia might be nonplussed: it’s not clear how familiar readers in Perth might be with the name of an inland rural highway through another state, even though viewers of Prime 7 News Wagga Wagga (which provided the dramatic pictures) would know at once.

But it also underlines the other emerging trend in the globalising digital news agenda: that, from celebrity photoshoots to fiery rescues, a story’s a story, wherever you are in the anglosphere.