“We wouldn’t do this story,” Gawker’s Nick Denton tells presenter Mukul Devichand. “We would have done it three years ago. I appreciate that Radio 4 listeners are just discovering the viral headline but our audience is largely beyond that.” In fact, the story told in 23 Amazing Reasons This Radio Programme Will Change Your Life (Radio 4) is a dynamic, current and in-depth one. It unpicks the world of digital media and the effect it has had on journalism, making a good case for the fact that actually nothing has changed that much.
Devichand talks to folks from Buzzfeed and Mashable on the importance of shareability, listicles (“It’s quite an old form actually, the first was the 10 Commandments”) and of writing attention-grabbing copy where “we will use the word ‘you’ in the headline, like we’re looking them in the eye and directly engaging with them”. But listening to this lot evangelise about the science of engagement can feel as if you’re stuck in a lift with several HAL’s bleeping “nanoo nanoo” at you. Or at least a living version of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley. It is striking how dehumanised people can sound when talking about connecting with humans.
Devichand finds that digital journalism may hold a different set of values to the traditional print-based form (depressingly referred to as “legacy journalism”) but the tone – a search for the authenic and partial – is still all-important and its centre is more traditionalist than full on Minority Report. “News organisations have always been there to entertain as well as inform,” Mashable’s Jim Roberts points out rather sensibly.
Using archive news reels and a smattering of talking heads, Stephen Tuck’s overlong but still illuminating programme, Malcolm X In Oxford (Radio 4), tells the multi-layered story behind the civil rights leader’s trip to speak at the Oxford Union, just weeks before his assassination in 1964. It’s fascinating to learn of how and why he came to visit the UK – his interest was piqued once he learnt about the significant racial tensions in Britain at the time. Tales of segregated accommodation at university, prejudiced syllabuses, race riots and the hoo ha over Oxford’s international student intake tell a lesser known but important story.
