Just before Christmas last year, I proposed an idea to give healthy young people with talent and ambition a head start in the media. I suggested that every media company that can, should take on three interns over 2012 for four months each. We’re just about to take our first on and I’ll keep you up-to-speed with his progress.

On a linked note, we have launched a platform for young writers to showcase their talents: The Daily Blot (which has been in live development for a few months) is now part of Media Digest. The aim is to provide a safe haven for aspiring young writers to place their early words, hone their skills and technical disciplines, and have something real to show prospective employers.

If you know of anyone who could benefit from this free facility, please point them in this direction. There are hundreds of potentially great journalists and writers out there and no one knows their names…

Kiss and tells are one thing and the women involved know there will be a downside to telling/selling their story. Their backgrounds will be dug up, former lovers will come forward and it’s Titillation Central for a few weeks on the front pages. The female columnists will get indignant, and chew up and spit out the men involved, as well as the women, repeating the same lurid details from a different angle. But the next week, those same columnists will be vilifying—and objectifying—another woman in the public eye, just because she happens to be a woman in the public eye, and usually with as much venom as they can muster.

Tabloid editors are, by nature, so perverse they don’t see or care that what their rags perpetuate is the idea that it is ok to disrespect women, whoever the woman may be.

Successful women are nearly always objectified. Madonna’s got a young lover (slag), Posh is so thin because she tries desperately to stop her man straying (saddo), Angelina’s a man-eater, while all their other halves are heroes within their professions. The way ALL female stars are depicted in magazines like Heat, with their cellulite close-ups, the “have they or haven’t they had surgery” close-ups, those scrutinising portraits of women on the red carpet in their “hit or miss” outfits—is absolutely abhorrent. And when they can’t get a sexual or close-lens angle, those successful women are simply characterised as bitches or losers.

All this is now normal. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Women in the public eye now need thick skins more than ever to countenance the slanderous headlines with the good things, even though they shouldn’t have to.

The feminist groups who appeared at the Leveson inquiry last week made some good and wide-ranging points. The sexualisation of child models has to go, the reporting of rape and any crime involving sexual assault should be done more sensitively and the mainstream media in general has got to learn to report women in a fair and balanced way without objectification creeping in at every turn. But those groups need to be careful not to push a feminist agenda to imply that we must be protected from anything that could be deemed offensive – otherwise people will switch off.

The Daily Mail is a million times more sexist and misogynistic than the Star, Sun or Express, in the tone and the ideology it perpetuates, from all its writers. Women are not generally so sensitive that we need to be shielded from pictures of boobs in the redtops, surely? There are bigger battles to fight.

What’s wrong, on every level, is the sexual objectification of women who have made it into the public eye without seeking fame, and women who are in the papers as victims of a crime. This trend in reporting needs to be quashed, and soon.

Nicola Thornton is a freelance journalist from Brighton with 12 years’ experience in regional press and magazines. She’s a self-confessed “sucker” for fair and balanced reporting, something instilled in her by a course tutor who “scared the hell out of us” with stories of defamation and contempt of court every Thursday morning.

It used to be that unless you had travelled the well-worn path of local newspaper to regional and thence to national, possibly with excursions and diversions to a news agency or glossy mag en route, you were always regarded as something of a second-class citizen in the hierarchy of the media.

Trade mag journalists in particular were always treated with varying degrees of condescension by the aristocracy of the nationals. Perhaps the permanent sneer adorning most Guardian executives’ upper lips was more of a reaction to that paper’s relative importance when contrasted with the impeccable manners and urbane politeness always offered by the gentlemen from The Times.

As someone who has worked on trade mags, I retain not only an affection for the genre but also huge respect.

Trade mags tend to employ genuine specialists, who really know their subject and are credible founts of knowledge. Were the grander elements of the media less proud to do so, perhaps if they tapped into that expertise they might improve the accuracy of their stories and, as a consequence, make them more authoritative.

As I write I have before me the American magazine Defense Technology International. It’s not habitual reading for those whose main business isn’t war and the kit required for same, but I like to flick through it each month. After all, one never knows when one is likely to be asked to be a tyrannical potentate, and it is as well to be prepared for these things.

On pages 16 and 17 of the latest issue is a chilling feature: World Conflict Map.

Now that’s something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the media. It’s a pretty scary thing, not least because we’re a mere six years away from the centenary of the end of the War to end all Wars, as HG Wells called it. Maybe another commentator of the time, Lloyd George, was unfairly accused of gross cynicism when he said: ”This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.”

At a memorable lunch last year, one of the raddled old hacks at my table recalled how an editor of his was wont to come up with grand sayings to cover most eventualities. Of the two which stuck in my mind, the first was ‘Never overlook the obvious – the bloke’s a complete …’.

The second was much sharper as it impacts with deadly accuracy the disease of over-exposure, marketing or otherwise: ‘I heard you twice the first time’.

What a stylish intellect that forged it, knowing instinctively how irritating the same points, made over and over again can be. After a happy Christmas which much of the nation spent digesting in front of the telly, is there anyone who wasn’t driven completely bonkers by the crass and endlessly repeated marketing and advertising messages that infected every second of festive viewing?

The Economist published a clever essay at the end of last year, showing how Martin Luther (the 16th Century Reformation chap as opposed to his 20th Century assassinated namesake) used the social networks of the day to distribute his pamphlets and tracts all over Europe. Bright, fresh, accessible and unique content on a common theme was the key to his success. His enemy (the Catholic Church) hammered out its defence against Luther’s radical ideas using existing material mostly written in academic and largely impenetrable Latin.

At the end of the game it was Reformation one; Established Church nil.

So how about it you purveyors of awful advertising for consumer goods from soap to sausages – where do you stand? Are you the agile, quick-witted reformers that you claim to be or are you the slow dullards of the marketing establishment? The people who advertise hair products don’t need to respond as we already know.

Time was that for bright creative people, advertising was the career of choice; what is it now?

It is the custom in Her Majesty’s Press to look back at the end of the year, to retell the big stories and also recount the odd ones that grabbed headlines in the previous 12 months. It is an easy task, that requires little experience and is thus usually passed to the callow youth or youths seeking to gain a solid foothold in the craft of journalism.

Their elders, meanwhile, traditionally seek solace down the pub as they anaesthetise themselves against the festive jollity that assails them on all sides. We’re not taking that easy route because we have a little mission with which we’d like your help.

Journalism specifically and the media generally (including advertising, marketing and PR) can only benefit from a steady influx of those callow young persons – but few can land unpaid internships, let alone paid jobs. The employment market is a buyers’ one and the media is shrinking exactly in line with its paid readerships and advertising revenue. This does not bode well for any school leaver or recent graduate whose heart is set on changing the world with words.

If every person reading this piece who is in a position to do so will offer a three-month post four times over 2012, to help encourage new talent come into this business, it would be a good start.

Don’t let a simple idea like this be killed off by HR half-wits or similar; the cost will be simply travel expenses plus a few quid for a daily sandwich. Who knows, you may find gold that will transform your life. If you’re interested in this informal media apprentice scheme, please drop me an email.

Have a Merry Christmas and don’t call a policeman if a curiously dressed stranger drops down your chimney – he’s delivering peace and goodwill!

Does anyone know what’s going on, and why we’re fighting, in Afghanistan? Does the man on the Clapham Omnibus understand the implications of the effects of a collapse of the Euro? Who understands the context and possible end-game of the Leveson Inquiry? And is it possible to establish once and for all whether Robert Peston is playing the part of Nostradamus or an actual reincarnation of the ancient and rather gloomy seer?

For answers to these questions and more we need decent, honest, professional reporting by trained reporters. Despite what we learned from Paul McMullen’s colourful appearance at Leveson, the word ‘reporter’ is an honourable title as well as a description of a specific skill.

Revel Barker, writing in Gentlemen Ranters this week defines it perfectly.

“I spent the bulk of the 1970s doing ‘investigations’, first for the Daily Mirror, then for the Sunday Mirror, into people like John Poulson, Reggie Maudling, John Stonehouse, Jeffrey Archer, Anthony Blunt (the names will be familiar to older readers), into the oddly behaving charity, civil servant or government contractor, and occasionally into organisations like the IRA, the PLO (and the ‘loony Left’, the National Front and the Tory party).

“The description on my business card – although it wasn’t the sort of job where you handed many of them out – was Reporter.

“If you sit in the office duplicating the agencies or putting your name on PR handouts, you are not a reporter at all. At absolute best, you’re a sub in a suit. A reporter is somebody who turns up a piece of information (it may be just a snippet or it may be the whole kit and caboodle) and enquires into it further. A reporter doesn’t accept any information at face value unless he is confident about the source and, even then, about the source’s own motivation in talking. And when he gets sufficient to make what he considers is A Story, he tell his boss about it and, depending on the substance and the provenance, may be directed to the office lawyer to explain and justify why the newspaper thinks it’s important and intends to use it.

“Some journalists have become totally confused by ‘public interest’. The News Of The World, apparently, thought it was any story that might interest the public. But it’s not so.”

There you have it. In a few short pars a clear description of what newspapermen and women used to do, should be doing now and will, if Leveson is any good, do in the future. I am rather optimistic that he will be.

The Jeremy Clarkson furore boils down to this: the Unison-led attack on the popular Top Gear presenter is the PR own goal of the year.

Whoever decided to go after Clarkson has allowed a notorious wind-up merchant to get under their skin and cloud their judgement. This outburst of righteous indignation has comes across as desperate, petty and even disingenuous.

Clarkson’s tongue was located somewhere between his molars when he delivered his funny/boorish/offensive remarks on BBC’s The One Show.

It doesn’t matter which of the above adjectives applies to your own view; threatening Jeremy Clarkson – who many people, like it or not, regard as something approaching national treasure – with legal action betrays a degree of militancy that more serious anti-unionists will not hesitate to use as ammunition (pun unintended, honest).

Any dispute played out in the media is always a tricky PR balancing act. For the unions, it is about winning public support while they are fighting for fair pay and pensions.

But that will be difficult now because, somehow, they’ve contrived to engender sympathy for Clarkson, obscuring the real arguments of their cause and doing a disservice to nurses, teachers and the like who take the difficult decision to go out on strike.

Having taken the bait, Unison will now find it difficult to remove the hook from its mouth.

Writing in The Quarterly (supplement to The Week), journalist and broadcaster Justin Webb recollects the first foreign assignment which came his way with the splendid phrase: “There’s been a coup in the Maldives; we want you to go.”

By the time he arrived the coup was over; he still had time for a swim, meal, drink and a game of table tennis before he had to file his piece for the BBC. As he says, that is what life was like in the news business in 1988.

Today’s fast-moving, mobile phone driven media, he says, “might make up part of our picture of what is happening in the modern world. It is immediate, exciting, potentially hugely influential.

“But,” he adds pointedly, “it is not reporting. It does not delve beneath the surface of the obvious. It does not reveal things as they are, rather things as they seem to be.”

One has to ask oneself whether it was the race for what seemed to be news – but in fact wasn’t – that led terrified hacks and their equally terrified executives directly down the path to Leveson. And of what were they terrified?  Nothing more complicated than getting fired for having fewer readers than their competitors. And what’s the best route to more readers and avoiding the chop? Probably not proper reporting; not any more.

“Missing McMullan at Leveson. Seems I’m missing the equivalent of a man shitting into a pram and saying ‘what? what’s wrong with this?’” were the words of Charlie Brooker as Paul McMullan answered questions at the Leveson inquiry.

McMullan, previously features editor at the now-defunct News of the World, made little effort to shy away from the nasty side of tabloid journalism. There may have been a shred of truth to his claim that “privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in”, but it was obfuscated by unrepentant tales of digging through bins, stalking, stealing family photos, blagging and hacking phones.

He said former News of the World editor Piers Morgan “set the trend” for morally questionable practices in the newsroom. When asked to track down and obtain a photo of the woman who took John Major’s virginity, McMullan explained how he stole a picture from her mantlepiece, prompting a “well done” from Morgan.

Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor and former communications director for David Cameron, was also targeted by McMullan, who claimed Coulson “brought the practice [of phone hacking] with him when he was appointed deputy editor”. McMullan added: “We did all these things for the editors, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson… They’re the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.”

McMullan blamed some of the News of the World‘s nastier stings to its readership. Asked how he felt about the ethics of the paper, with the story surrounding Charlotte Church’s father having an affair as an example, McMullan said: “They [the readers] are the judge and jury [of] what’s in the paper. If they don’t like what you have written about Charlotte Church’s father having a three-in-a-bed with cocaine then they won’t read it.”

On the subject of Milly Dowler, McMullan believed the hacking of her phone “was not a bad thing for a well-meaning journalist to do”. He said: “We were doing our best to find the little girl. The police are utterly incompetent and should be ashamed that the killer was allowed to carry on.”

He also claimed that any legislative changes made in the wake of the Leveson inquiry “won’t stop it”. He said: “You might be able to legislate, but the Italians, Mexicans, the paparazzi all round the world won’t give a hoot what you’re saying, they won’t be watching, all they want to do is take money.”

Towards the end of his evidence, McMullan seemed to suffer from delusions of grandeur, claiming he could “bring down the government” in his own “Watergate” by planting a surveillance van outside Rebekah Brooks’ house in an attempt to catch her dealing with David Cameron. “I didn’t mean to bring down the News of the World, but I got nothing,” he claimed.

“Is he basically performing a self-exorcism?” asked Charlie Brooker. It will take more than this to exorcise the demons of Fleet Street.

(Source: MediaGuardian)

The press is getting a bitter taste of its own medicine at the moment. As with most reported news, the worst of it is given prominence.

The same is happening with the Leveson inquiry, and those with an axe to grind – justly in some cases – are making the bad name given to journalists sound like more than just a cliché.

Mud sticks, which is why the estimable Andrew Gilligan has warned that the behaviour of a “fairly small minority of journalists” could be allowed to tarnish the entire trade.

It didn’t make any major headlines when he told a House of Lords committee this week of his concerns for the future of investigative journalism, which occasionally needs to employ some of the same methods of subterfuge now inextricably linked to the News of the World, and has all but disappeared in the local press.

“The difference between me and the News of the World is that this kind of behaviour is done rarely, with a great deal of consideration. It is not something you do on your own initiative,” said Gilligan.

Journalism as a whole shouldn’t be punished by what boiled down to “a failure of the police to enforce the law”.

That’s the problem when big media is in cahoots with the powers that be. But whatever you think, it would be helpful if media covering the Leveson circus gave equal prominence to the few voices of reason being drowned out by all the noise.