Keynote Tony Harcup’s reflections on journalism today – Day 2 of AJE Summer conference in Derby

The morning started with an introduction of keynote speaker Tony Harcup – author of Journalism: Principles and Practice, a text on every reading list – by outgoing AJE chair Lada Price. Lada had been a colleague of Tony’s at Sheffield.

Tony’s presentation, titled Curiouser and Curiouser, reflections on journalism today, talked about the early days of the AJE when few courses existed and journalism PhDs were rare. Tony’s a prolific author on journalism and few media academics don’t have one of his texts on his shelves. “We were applying journalistic questions to the academic texts in clearer language,” he said.

He detailed several stories over the decades, including how in 1971 the pupils at his school in Stepney had gone on strike and marched to Trafalgar Square to stand up for an English teacher who had been sacked. The story had ended up on the front pages of the nationals and on TV news because the teenage instigators of the protest had gone to their local paper and told them what was planned. He’d found copies of the grainy newspaper coverage of his school friends and has included in teaching over the years of his career.

He mirrored this with the 1971 nomination of a US graduate for the Pulitzer prize, for his famous and shocking photograph of a girl kneeling by the body of one of the students shot by the national guard at Kent State university. This in turn was reflected with the images of Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi shot in the leg by the national guard in the recent protests in Los Angeles. All these stories relied on people being present for news – witnessing – not picking it up remotely from a distant location.

He detailed the problems of news avoidance and the choices of newsrooms about the news agenda – “To me the real problem is those who do not engage with news at all, rather than those of us who, understandably, sometimes just want to switch off from some of the details of a particularly harrowing case, or incident. We shouldn’t forget our humanity, and the impact of these stories on our humanity, and it’s important that they are covered.

“But you can’t just have an endless parade of death and horror, you have to have something else as well. “What binds these things in common is thinking about the audience and the kinds of journalism we value.

“We can all despair about the state of the media, particularly the demise of the local press, but there are still local outlets that are valuable and should be supported. We should value that patch reporting – the stuff we teach our students on newsdays – and not give up on it just because there are fewer local outlets. And make sure you do those other stories.” (He detailed some great examples of non court/police/crime stories).

At the end of his speech he called back to the photo of the protesting students – he’d recently been given a print that was much clearer of that protest in Trafalgar Square, and there, tucked away at the back of the action, was a teenaged Harcup.

Harcup’s book What’s the point of News, an ethical study in journalism (Palgrave Macmillan) is available in print and online for university libraries.