official opening monday september 5, 19.00 – session print-journalism highlights and own experiences/ future print journalism, trends, convergence

Door Rudie van Meurs / POLDERPERS.NL

Ladies and gentleman, colleagues, thanks for the opportunity to introduce the department of print journalism of the Kosovo Institute of Journalism and Communication. Particularly to the candidate-students I would say: congratulations. You are privileged people because you are now on the point of entering the fascinating world of journalism. I am sure that this new institute will lead to higher standards of journalism in this young country.

As agreed I will tell you something about my career in journalism. Not because of extreme importance. Not because it is such an unique story. But because I think there are certain similarities between the fifties in Holland, my youth, and today in Kosovo, when you have the time of your life. And may be my experiences will inspire you.
And I will reassure in advance, no melancholy because it was not better in the past. Read therefore The first Casualty by Philip Knightly to know about the wicked sides of journalists, as provocative war propagandists. Or Scoop in which Eveline Waugh poke fun at journalists.

I remember the fifties in Holland. Happy because we were just liberated from the German nazi’s. Hopeful, because it was a time of reconstruction, fraternization. The rebuilding of Rotterdam, the repair of everything that was destroyed. But it were also dark years. People were poor, prospect was uncertain. In Korea a war was going on that could possibly degenerate in a third world war. In different countries there were nuclear tests and rumours of the possibility of uncontrolled chain reactions that could blow up the world. In the United States general Mc Arthur was hunting communists. The church predicted that doomsday was very near. It was all so gloom and doom and depressing.
The Dutch society was at that time very much built on pillars, a compartmentalization among political and religious lines that is called pillarization. The protestants, the roman-catholics, the socialists, the liberals – all had their own institutes, their own brass-band, their own political party, broadcasting organization and their own newspaper. It was very much a segmented community, when a representative of a particular group slept with one of the other, no doubt the devil was between. Ordinary people were kept ignorant, more or less dictated by their leaders who told them what to do and who hold the real power in their hands. It was an authoritarian time – even the free collection of news was fastened by the borderlines they had drawn. And I lived, locked-up in an isolated village on an island in the south west-part of Holland, selling sugar, beans and eggs and I desperately wanted to go, being a journalist. If you ask why. My teachers had told me that I wrote pretty good essays. I had romantic dreams and I had my models. One was a Dutch reporter traveling through the world with his Leica M4 and a notebook, spending Christmas eve in Bethlehem and operating in the battlefields of Korea, together with American soldiers. He wrote exciting articles in the illustrated weeklies I read. I dreamed to stand in the front like him and with the first money I earned in journalism, I bought myself a Leica M4. But later on, I learned that my favourite reporter was a fierce anti-communist and a trumpet in America’s cold war propaganda.
Don’t laugh, in that time I was a thrilled listener in the evening at nine o’clock to radio Tirana, a loud and clear voice from behind the iron curtain. So far away, so exotic. Also later on, when everything appears to be different as it was, I understood that Tirana defied, with the help of a strong 500 MW transmittor, successfully the CIA-tied propaganda stations Radio Free Europe en Radio Liberty.

Then the sixties came. I started in the north of Holland, with a small regional newspaper. Later on I realized how lucky I was because if you ever want to learn journalism thoroughly, try to find a job in a local daily. I will tell you why. Not only because you need general knowledge and have to do everything – from the weather forecast, a small accident close to Churchstreet 7 to the preaching news – but also because you are constantly watched by your readers. In a small community everybody knows where Churchstreet is, who lives on number 7 and knows – at least thinks to know – how relations are en what is going on. I learned how important it is to write down the exact names with the exact initials and the exact profession – and sometimes it cost me quarters of an hour to find out. For complaints will pour in as soon as you make mistakes.
You will learn to be factual, succinct, bringing the news with a certain distant. Questions are important, not your theory, not your opinion. Working in the region means that you will avoid the arrogance of the urban reporter who thinks his town and his world are the center of universe. You are also taught being humble. Making a newspaper is very much teamwork. At that time when I started, there was a warm composing room with incredible professional typesetters and printers. Standing at the stone slab to assembly the page from type and photographic blocks, the chief lay out and the chief proof reader could make and break you. So asking me about the abilities of a journalist – he/she has certain social skills, knows what is going on, knows to find sources, knows the political situation, the geographical landscape and the religious map of the world you are operating in. In Holland knowing the religious diversities – especially within the protestants – is knowing the cultural diversities. I think in Kosovo things are not different. The function of a good newspaper and therefore of a good journalist is to see life steady and see it whole, formulated the editor of the Manchester Guardian, Charles Prestwick Scott, hundred years ago his principle. And he meant, keep the daily events in proportion. The British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe once gave in The Guardian his opinion about journalists: ‘I like journalists, I like the company of journalists, I like their way of life and the atmosphere: they are always slightly cynical and know quite a lot about things, how they really work.’

Until the sixties, the journalist in Holland was the henpecked husband of public opinion. Decent and obedient and patronized by their parties, pillars and political leaders. Then, slowly they brake away of that past. Due to the development of economy, mass production, the increase of income and better living conditions, journalists conquered their independency. No doubt that more prosperity makes stronger. In poor and vulnerable societies media easily can be manipulated and abused for propaganda and violence. Higher educated and better equipped journalists will fight for their right to express unconcerned and free. Indeed, it is the economy stupid. But we, ourselves, have to widen the boundaries. I remember, it was about the end of the sixties when a reporter within the roman-catholic broadcasting organization was sacrificed because he spoke too openly about the royal family. Afterwards we won also our right to treat the oranges as ordinary people – one of the last taboos. Thanks to the independent media, we now know that the Prince of the Netherlands was a crook, who received millions of bribes to sell airplanes to the Dutch army.

In those years I switched to Trouw, a national newspaper in Amsterdam. The name of the paper means be trustful, loyal to the principles of truth, religion and the country. A daily with a heroic history. It started as a resistance newspaper against the nazi’s. After the war it was the mouthpiece of the protestant political parties. Soon it developed as a rather stubborn newspaper. It confused the political majority by questioning the Dutch colonial politics. Later on it demanded government to give up our colonies as matter of justice. The newspaper lost ten thousands of readers.
Later on it was the first national newspaper that accused the Americans of war crimes in Vietnam and it consequently reported that the Americans should withdraw. Again it cost the newspaper thousands of readers. For principles and openly speaking, you will learn, cost sometimes readers, adds and money.

Working in that years as a reporter was just great. It was the time of the de-pillarization. Emancipated citizens and involved journalists blew up the ancient society of regents. Old men disappeared and young people (women) jumped in. Some newspapers did not survive, others grew stronger and stronger. Public radio and public television still had a monopoly. News was not yet commodity, life was simple and we were still innocent. No one knew the word media-circus. Memorable moments in that time were covered by only a handful of journalists. In the end of the sixties, between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly in Cornwall, the supertanker Torrey Canyon broke in two and lost three hundred thousand ton of oil. It was the worst environmental disaster ever. I think I met a dozen other journalists on the spot. Another time I traveled to Austria to trace a war-criminal who was released wrongly. Simon Wiesenthal, a nazi-hunter and the Dutch government wanted him in prison because he was responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Jews. It was news all over the world, press agencies gave detailed reports. Still we were only with I believe eight or ten journalists to cover the search.
It were rather comfortable times. I was working with that particular newspaper because I wanted to work there. I felt myself happy because I shared the same cultural background. There was no need for ridiculous discussions as target groups, taking care for relevant news or questions what ordinary people moves. We were taught to select the news that was fit to print, a kind of instinctive feeling about what our readers liked to read as important, interesting, stimulating or what tingled them with excitement.

But then, the world of black and white coloured up. Now, the same events will set an army of journalists, camera’s and directors in motion. In a highly competitive atmosphere, thousands of newspapermen analyse every inch of the news. On a huge number of TV-channels people find the same news, the same pictures, and after two or three days of collective hyperventilation the same unsatisfied feeling– all will come suddenly to an end. Nothing really happened. Once making of news was a craft, now it changed to be a business operation. Competition maybe has beneficial effects in some parts of society but is does not work in the media – except of course for the Murdochs and the Berlusconi’s, the owners. In the ruthless hunt for readers and consumers, news got popular, sensational, dramatic, unreliable. Rupert Murdoch, who now owns all over the world newspapers, tv-stations and satellites, started to make his fortune by writing articles about a virgin in Australie who was raped by an ape and expected a monkey-babe. He damaged the British society more than the bombs of Hitler, an editor of The Times told Shawcross who wrote a biography about the tycoon. He operated according the S-curve: Sex, scandal, sensation and screw the facts.
And now, in books about the undermining of the American press is noted that all the media, from the prestige press to the sensationalist rags have been infected by a tabloid culture that celebrates sleaze. If it bleeds, it leads

Probably the best years were the seventies and eighties, when I spent my time as a reporter/editor of the news weekly Vrij Nederland. It also started as an illegal paper during the nazi-time, it was highly democratized. Initially I joined a team of eight people and in theory each of us was one-eight editor-in-chief. We were very successful. We constantly were looking for the limitations of press freedom. I think our weekly was doing better and better because almost all of us were involved with society. In long editorial meetings in smoky rooms, we selected our topics very carefully. Could be the prime minister who had committed fraud or the prince of the Netherlands, but also we try to find out the reason on the sudden rise of the price of the split pea – the working class food in Holland. Personally, I found the possibility to invest time in investigative journalism. Don’t think investigative journalism differs much from other types of journalism. You need a feel for news, it is good to feel indignation about things going wrong, be stubborn, never give up. I remember a Dutch daily that one day established a research unit, put it in a room apart and instructed: expose. But it does not work in that way. Investigative journalism sometimes start on a press conference, reading an unnoticed report in a local newspaper, with an anonymous letter or a leaked report. Ideas come up during your normal work. But above all, you need engagement, you need endurance for may be you should campaign and crusade to see results.
Some weeks ago a Dutch radio program, with a name in investigation, run a forty minutes program about the former president in Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, now in prison in The Hague. Journalists received, they told, a very confidential report unveiling war crimes, fraud, abuse of power of the former president. And assisted by some mysterious former secret agents, interviewed by phone, the program painted a ominous picture – indeed Haradinaj has a lot to explain. But this was not investigative journalism at all. It was made careless, neglecting the codes to check and double check, they did not know the source, they did not know the reason why the report was leaked on that particular moment, they even did not know if the facts were true. The journalists of the program were simply used by unknown powers. In the slang of the secret service, they were used as useful idiots

One of the best books(The demasque in society) about the phenomenon of the American muckrakers is written by the Dutch sociologist and Americanist Den Hollander. He described how hundred years ago, small gang of roving reporters exposed the crimes, bribes and killings of the then starting oil-kings and steel-barons. Reading these stories, there is hope for Kosovo. For by example the Rockefellers started as ordinary crooks and mafia. Now they have their Rockefeller-foundation doing good and not looking back.
Most of the muckrakers operated out of conviction, love for human beings and their desire for a higher moral. They showed sympathy for the underdogs, for the poor people and their fellow citizens.

In the weekly I worked for, we stimulated each other to invest time in investigation. We exposed corrupt business men, greedy politicians, the constantly attempts to dismantle health care. We revealed the mystery of the cheap jean by doing research in sadly sweatshops in Hongkong, Taiwan ans Indonesia. We sent ministers home, wrote honorable people to jail, we were loved and hated. It were lively and exciting years. But successful media have a cycle, just like empires rise and fall. Suddenly – may be the readers are fed up by all these exposures, may be also news inflates, may be format and formula need changes, may be we lost contact with reality – things grew different. As a result of our growth, the number of editors tripled. A new generation of affluent reporters came in. Nice people with their own priorities. Well-to-do, living in the better quarters of town, identifying themselves with their well-to-do neighbours and readers. At once I saw articles in my own weekly about day care, mortgages and the use of personal computers – yuppie subjects, we said with a look of disapproval. I even noticed an inside story about sadomasochism because one of the new girls was interested in. Nice written articles but with an alarming lack of engagement. And they were sitting there in the editorial office, staring to their screen, the whole day doing their reporting by phone and fax and reading internet. The very honorable Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, he is in his seventies but goes on traveling the third world as he used to do his whole life, noticed that when he spent a week in the editorial room of his newspaper, everybody is growing suspicious. What is he doing? He is sitting there, doing nothing. He has to go out, making reportages. For in brief, a reporter belongs in the street doing his/her job.
Talking about internet, of course it is a great medium with unprecedented possibilities. But for a journalist it is far from enough. At best, internet can be used as background, as an addition to other sources, to prepare your interview and story, to know what has been published already. What this school students has to teach is that internet is only a start, you can’t trust it because you don’t know the sources. Internet is only one source more, an extended clipping service, second hand information that has been handled with care. Sometimes, I wonder if all the excitement about new inventions is rightly. Now I read discussions about so called citizen journalism – people out of the tube and WTC-tower putting their GSM-video pictures on line, showing their misery. Is that really new or just an improved system of transporting Morse-characters from the Titanic? Basic remains that all the information has to pass the selection of the journalists – the gate keepers.

In the nineties I worked with public radio and TV, because I wanted to learn something new. Still Holland has some excellent broadcasting corporations, hardly infected by pulp, sensation, lifestyle programs, big brother and sperm shows – a latest attempt to influence the viewing figures by searching a high classified biological father for a yearning woman. I joined a team that managed to make a weekly documentary and research program. Everything was complete new and exciting. To combine word, sound and picture is a different profession. A class apart also. In Holland, like in other western countries, almost all public and commercial broadcasting corporations are situated on a huge media-complex. A kind of enclave with thousands makers and producers, separated from the real world. People who look at each other, praising each other programs and finding their inspiration in the always crowded canteens. Everyone is so extreme important. A little bit incestuous world. And again I did not like the aloofness.
Once John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Culture of Contentment, a book in which he shows how the American politicians lost their interest for the underdog. They don’t care the discontented poor because politicians know that there is not any electoral gain to catch. The fortunate pay, the less fortunate receive, the fortunate have a political voice, the less fortunate do not.
In a recent book from a former Dutch minister social security, the christen-democratic government in Holland has been accused for the same indifference, neglecting the less fortunate.
The catastrophe in New Orleans again was a tragic example what happens if a government neglect the underdogs.
So therefore, journalists have to take care.

And I realized more and more the importance of the word, the print press. There are problems. People read less. All over the world, circulation of newspapers steady goes down. But at the same time, daily’s and weekly’s never were so attractive. They succeed in fighting back. For a long time, newspapers – and radio – more or less had a monopoly in distributing news. Now there is a motion for a new balance All over Europe publishers come back with ideas to create new lay-out, to pay more attention to photo’s, to write succinct and attractive, to look for better ideas and subjects, to use info graphics and colour and to change format.
In Holland three of our best newspapers changed from broadsheet to compact – a less infected word than tabloid. Eight regional newspapers are united in one new compact newspaper, starting a circulation of almost a million. In Britain compact-newspapers – according the experience of The Independent – sell better. The Guardian will appear on tabloid. In France, newspapers as Le Monde, and Le Figaro probably will follow Liberation – a successful tabloid format from the beginning. Even in Germany the very conservative looking Suddeutsche Zeitung now appears in tabloid – apart from the broadsheet. In train stations nowadays, you can obtain newspapers for free. If you buy during the weekend a newspaper in Spain, El Pais and El Mundo offer you a DVD, a CD and sometimes a complete book for free.

In Holland some weeks ago a new commercial TV-station was launched but programs are so bad and viewing figures so low that pessimism dominates. And that is good news for the print press. Because as long as commercial TV continues to broadcast their unbearable lightness of programming, people desperately need newspapers to be informed. If journalists demonstrate that outrage is not death and that they are really concerned about society, readers will stay and return. And if publishers continue to improve their newspapers, they will live forever.

To be honest, I think there are bigger threats than the tiredness of the reader. More and more governments want to take over the chair of the editor in chief. Every moment, when time is ready, Dutch government thinks it has to express deep concern about the way the media are operating. Every moment again discussions raised about rules and laws in the media – while ethics and moral codes have to be embedded in the conscience and the hearts of the journalist.
In the mean time quietly arise the state of communication, in which governments and corporations try to control the flow of information. Now in the governmental center in The Hague, on every working journalist are four communicators. The new enemy of the journalist. Asking facts, young, good-looking people, so polite, answer with a counter-question: What is your angle sir? Next they will tell that you can find all the information on the website. That’s not enough for a critical journalist. You have to hear it from the president himself, you have to see his face and eyes to find out if he tells the truth.
I am curious how this school will bring these two opposite professions together.

Still I am optimistic about the future of the print press.
The last century, teaching and training young journalists all over, I realized that concepts as western journalism or American journalism or Balkan journalism don’t exist. There is only good and bad journalism.
I once met in Almaty a journalist who became a friend. He worked more than thirty years with Litterature Gazette. During the old, cold communist period, he opposed the construction of a thousand square kilometer artificial lake, designed by the communist government in Kazachstan, headed by Dinmukhamed Koejanev. The government said the lake was important for the development of Kazachstan. My friend wrote that it was just a prestige-project which would destroy the countryside and waste a lot of money. The government reacted that the lake was necessary for the rice-culture, which was going to start. My friend wrote that the steppe with minus 40 degrees in winter and plus 40 degrees in summer was absolutely not fit for rice. The government than pointed that the lake was needed for a hydropower station. My friend than wrote that this was an impossibly argument because the fall in water was minimum and insufficient. Then mr. Koenajev called his friend Leonid Brezjnev in Moskou with the request for help to get rid of that journalist. So my friend was put in a sanatorium near the Black Sea for two years. A critical voice felt silent. When he was set free, the so-called Kapshagai-lake a hundred kilometer from Almaty, was constructed. During summertime billions of mosquito’s are dancing above the water. Even the sheep refuse to drink is. Completely useless, as my friend warned.
So, you understand that I never call him a former communist journalist, a Russian journalist nor a central-Asian journalist – often attempts to classify people. Because he is simply a good journalist.

Rudie van Meurs / POLDERPERS.NL
September 2005
Pristina – Kosovo