Here, by way of example, is ‘Journalism and Morality’ by Silas Bent, published in 1926 in The Atlantic (and quoted in Can You Trust The Media?). Note especially - towards the end - the attitude of management…

For the hundredth time, savagely, I rang that doorbell. It was not my first visit, by any means, although there was no hope that the mistress of the household could be seen, for she had eloped several days before with a millionaire manufacturer of cosmetics; and as for her husband, he was under restraint in a private sanatorium. There was a grown daughter who was supposed to be in her mother’s confidence, and I hoped to worm out of her the secret of the lovers’ whereabouts. The newspaper I was working for was getting uneasy. It had printed the scandal with gusto but without provocation. There had been no court action, no street encounter between the two men; the millionaire had not even been expelled from his clubs. There was no legal privilege of publication. And as time wore on, the other newspapers not daring in the circumstances to say anything about the case, there had come to the office an acute feeling that unless the runaways were found there might be short shrift in a libel suit.

As I turned away from the door a telegraph messenger boy was wearily mounting the steps.

‘There’s nobody home,’ I told him curtly, ‘not even a servant.’

‘You can sign for this, can’t you?’ he asked. ‘Friend of the family.’

On the open book lie held out for my signature was a telegram addressed to the daughter of the house. It must surely be from her mother. I set down an assumed name, pocketed the message, and waited until the boy was out of sight.

It was evening and I was working for an afternoon newspaper, so I took my booty home. There, with a borrowed and heated hatpin, I opened the telegram—not very expertly, for I tore the flap. The message was dated from Tucson, and was an inquiry from the wife about the condition of the deserted husband. I had found the runaways.

The anxiety behind this telegram did not at all concern me, nor was I concerned at having stolen it. As the child of God-fearing parents I think I may say I had a strict sense of private property rights: I would not have pilfered ten cents or ten dollars. But my conscience was wholly untroubled about the message, because I had done the conventional thing. I was living up to the standards of my fellows. Other reporters would have done as I did, confident of the approval of their superiors; and this was true of nearly all metropolitan newspapers twenty years ago, not merely of those which were denominated yellow. We used to hear of some that did not join in such practices, but they were notoriously stodgy, and suffered correspondingly in revenue. A comparison of the circulation and advertising statistics of the Boston Transcript as against the New York World, of the New York Evening Post of that day as against the Chicago Tribune, will illustrate my point.

Newspapers that were successful financially went after news aggressively, and on occasion made news, as my paper had done in the case of this illicit elopement.

I was exultant, not ashamed; and it was with repressed triumph that I laid the telegram on the city editor’s desk the next morning, explaining in detail how I had come by it.

He heard me unmoved, gazing out over the ‘local room.’ Then he said hastily that he must go into the editorial conference, a daily formality, and would see me when he returned. He took the telegram with him. This impressed me as rather odd behaviour, but what happened when he came back was really trying.

‘You are aware,’ he said severely, ‘that you have committed a felony?’

I nodded. I was beginning to get angry.

‘This newspaper cannot countenance such conduct,’ he continued, ‘and will make no use whatever of information obtained in that way. If I did not realize that you acted from overzeal I should be compelled to discharge you. As it is, you will be permitted to remain on the staff, on probation. Now, what are you going to do with this telegram?’ His gravity relaxed; his manner implied a bantering reproach. ‘Rough work,’ he said. ‘The flap’s torn.’

‘I’ll paste it up,’ I replied sullenly, ‘and stick it under the door.’

‘Don’t do that,’ he advised. ‘Suppose we wait.’

I returned to my desk, and presently the Sunday editor, with a curious smile, handed me a receiving telegraph envelope, properly addressed. As he turned wordlessly away the city editor beckoned me, slipped the message into the fresh envelope, sealed it, and directed me, instead of returning it in person, to employ someone I could trust, and have him telephone me when the task was safely accomplished. The message was slow in coming. Once, when I emerged from a telephone booth after answering a personal call, the city editor summoned me impatiently. He leaned forward and whispered with the air of a conspirator: ‘Have you removed the corpse from the premises?’

Although I was in a state of high moral indignation at the manner which my lawbreaking was being accepted, I was somewhat mollified at this tacit indication of fellow responsibility. After all, the city editor was a good scout. Presently I learned that the telegram had been put under the right door, and that my messenger, after ringing the bell, had escaped without being questioned, and I so reported. I was made to feel, somehow, that I was in quite good odour at the office.

I’ll be keeping up a link with the place as a prof, and I’ll be trying to bash out a PhD. And I’ll also be giving a modest sum for the highest scoring MA project, which will be a prize in memory of Richard Wild. The first £250 will be handed out this autumn, so any City students reading: heads down for the finishing line!

Since I came to City in 2005, we’ve launched an MA in Journalism with new pathways in science and investigation, a Masters in Political Campaigning and Reporting, an MA in Creative Writing Non-Fiction, and a BA in Journalism. We’ve gained some fantastic new staff to go alongside the existing terrific team, including the Guardian’s veteran investigator David Leigh, Channel 4 legend David Lloyd, ITN’s Penny Marshall and visiting fellows like Heather Brooke and tech guru Robin Hamman.

We have a distinguished scholar as head of research, Professor Howard Tumber, and we’ve just appointed Steve Schifferes as Britain’s first professor of financial reporting, a chair in honour of Marjorie Dean (expect more too on financial journalism soon).

We brought the Centre for Investigative Journalism to City, and its successful summer schools, and hopefully there’ll be new initiatives to announce in that area soon.

We’ve established a digital core to our curriculum – there should be a partnership with Nokia coming up in the autumn.

And this year we finally moved into multi-million pound facilities (on Flickr) worthy of the talents of the people who teach and study here. And we have a Graduate School of Journalism to go alongside the finest anywhere has to offer.

Best of all, I’ve witnessed the annual progression of an extraordinary group of people who’ve joined us from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Lancashire to Lagos – our students. Their qualities are what make so many people want to give up time to teach here. Their enthusiasms and passions are among the rewards.

It’s not all been plain sailing, as anyone who’s brushed up against me will doubtless agree. But I hope it’s been worth it. City is now, more than ever, a global school for journalism, bringing in people from around the world to share experiences and gain new insights. Its future is already being mapped out in areas like political and humanitarian campaigning, and in deepening specialist knowledge amongst those competing to enter what is still an extraordinarily privileged world.

And the privilege of journalism? It’s the privilege of speech. Maybe it’s narcissistic, maybe it’s worth dying for.

But despite our disagreements (and let’s be honest, academics have to be able to start arguments with themselves) it’s what unites me with colleagues in education, in the news business, and with new friends and acquaintances in the ever-widening world beyond.

So, with whatever voice you choose, keep speaking up.

Flair was a short-lived, loss-making, vanity project, meant to showcase the persona Fleur had invented for herself. Media professionals and students have admired it ever since its 12th and last issue appeared on US newsstands in January 1951.

But I’ve been struggling to express why that mission seems such a recurrent trope in history. The use of stories for entertaining and moral purposes is clear as early as Ugaritic, Akkadian and Homeric myths.

The replacement of those myths and parables with ‘real’ stories for the purposes of secular instruction begins with the classical historians. As Thucydides notes (in Hobbes’ translation):

To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable.

That tradition, that underpins the humanities, the story-ing of the past - a rationalization of our own intuitive method of self-management and self-definition - is under threat as practised in contemporary journalism. Not because stories have ceased to be popular, but journalistic stories have lost out as entertainment to alternative methods of manufacturing stories (e.g. ‘reality’ television), and lost out intellectually because stories no longer capture value.

What do I mean by that? Well, the great intellectual divide of our age is not cultural or religious - it is linguistic. And it’s not a divide between Urdu and Spanish, English or Mandarin, but between all languages and math.

The divide goes beyond C.P. Snow’s idea of the two cultures - the arts and the sciences.

Just a small glance at the impact of mathematization in one minor field of advertising will serve as a reminder.

Math has demonstrated its superiority over verbal reasoning in almost every area of human endeavour, chiefly perhaps because of its reproducibility.

Adorno’s insights into American popular culture were delivered in the opaque, academic German of the Frankfurt School. Lazarsfeld’s insights were delivered in numbers. Polls can ‘concretize’ words by turning questions into percentages. Figures also capture something of the currency of words. But words alone remain salmon slippery.

The inability to express oneself mathematically is as profoundly disabling for anyone wishing to engage with the intellectual challenges of our age, as was the inability to understand Latin in medieval times.

Even then, scholars understood the importance of the new language over the ancient. As one of the most important intellectual figures of the fourteenth century, Thomas Bradwardine, wrote: “Mathematics is the revelatrix of truth, has brought to life every hidden secret, and carries the key to all subtle letters.”

But Bradwardine’s enthusiasm for mathematizing theology revolutionized worldly, rather than religious understanding.
In our time the revolution in knowledge is coming through data and the means of interpreting it and modelling it. People who are able to engage with that revolution are more generally, and more consistently valued than those able to deploy verbal dexterity.

The idea of hidden information revealed as morally transforming or cleansing remains the popular - indeed the mythologized - journalistic standby (see the Telegraph and MPs’ expenses). A revelation, appealing to intuitive moral feelings, remains a powerful journalistic trope. But not a consistently valuable one.

In Bradwardine’s time the idea of revelation through direct acquaintance with a hidden text - the Bible - inspired John Wyclif, who thought that salvation lay in such knowledge. The result of his work? An eventual ubiquity of Bibles, rather than mass moral transformation.

Journalism today, if it wants to pursue value (economic or intellectual), has to give up the two sides of revelation - showy glamour and moral appeal - in favour of generating and presenting mathematized knowledge. Sounds boring. But so too does most of what we don’t understand…

In a penthouse apartment on the right side of town, a 28‐54 year old man called Dan tried to control his breathing. Someone or something was moving about downstairs. He listened intently. There it was again. In the inky dark, the sound had real cut‐through compared to the thousands of messages he was bombarded with through multiple channels each day.

My favourite bit?

Dan looked around for a weapon. There was nothing heavy but he found his 5.2 megapixel mobile phone in the hall. Even if he couldn’t stop the intruder he could at least create a piece of content to upload and share with his friends online.

In the new role I’ll be removing my commentary hat and travelling a lot more, so the blog will probably fall into abeyance - it’s been suffering from neglect of late.

I’ve had a great four years at City, with terrific and talented colleagues and even more terrific and talented students.

There’s been a lot of change: new people, new programmes, and fantastic facilities for the new Graduate School of Journalism. With the paint dry and the official opening scheduled for June 17, now seems as good a time as any for someone new to take journalism at City onwards and upwards.

Lis Howell is kindly taking the helm as interim whilst the post is advertised.

So if you’d like to lead the world’s greatest journalism school…there’s an opening.

Is he merely playing to the gallery? Or is he providing the intellectual justification for future action? Or am I simply indulging my journalistic passion for over-interpretation?

Nothing wrong with that. It was a more efficient use of resources.

But it wasn’t really designed to involve the process you and I would know as journalism. It was intended to produce a happy simulation of a television news broadcast to a standard adequate enough to satisfy regulators.

Five News shared resources - as did the new ITV London when it started - with the rest of ITN. The biggest and most expensive of these resources were the satellite trucks and needless to say, the deployment of said trucks went to the people paying the most money - ITV’s national news and Channel 4 News.

The editorial decision-making process played second-fiddle to the negotiation and horse-trading around satellite dishes, technicians’ overtime and working hours without which stories and guests (even cheaper!) couldn’t make it on air.

Now I love television news, but it’s an impressionistic not an informative medium. Its poetry is images not ad-libbed studio conversations. ITV’s regional news programmes - produced from studio hubs far removed from the politically and geographically diverse areas they serve, and manufactured to a process I had a hand in shaping - have, by force of that process, become hybrid forms of factual entertainment.

And there’s nothing wrong with that either. But in its current emaciated form ITV regional news is not really worth saving as an instrument of ‘public service’ news information. So why have the BBC and ITV signed a memorandum of understanding to share resources?

Well, the BBC is desperate to use partnership as a line of defence against the predations of Channel 4 and others who might question the casuistry that sees its populist and entertaining mainstream TV programmes labelled as ‘public service’. Partnership proposals beats enforced budget cuts. The BBC shows willing. Refusal to partner looks churlish.

But in the case of ITV’s regional news, partnership simply sustains something that neither the market, nor the term ‘public service’ really support.

One BBC regional news head lamented to me recently that no one covered court cases in his area - not the local papers, not ITV, not the agencies - no one. He also pointed out that he could have used his multimedia newsroom to produce hyperlocal sites, and even newspaper copy - but he wasn’t allowed to, because the local newspaper lobby had weighed in to point out that he would drive them out of business.

It’s easy to feel sympathy for both sides. The commercial local news media and the BBC regional journalists who just want to do a better job.

But they’re not really the issue.

The issue is bigger and it affects all of us, not simply journalists. It’s about the collapse of plurality of media provision and how we adjust to that. Because plurality has collapsed.

And the BBC can’t take its place, and the partnerships the BBC offers are simply life support machines for local news companies caught in a downward spiral of cost-cutting, audience decline, and share price collapse.

Allowing the BBC in to hyperlocal would have killed those companies quicker. Partnership will ease their dying. Yet the question of how (or if ) we use public money to inform citizens about the governance and the good times in their localities in a way that isn’t simply puff and spin goes unasked. And the political and popular will to address it is almost entirely absent.

So expect partnerships - or rather forced marriages - with all the happiness associated with relationships born of expediency…

[Thanks to Paul Bradshaw for kicking me to write something. More at the Online Journalism Blog.]