The Top 5 films about Journalism

From critically acclaimed masterpieces to cult classics journalism is portrayed in many different ways by Hollywood and here's my top five.

Citizen Kane – 1941

Regarded as one of the greatest films ever made Orson Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, telling the story of his life pieced together through a number of flashbacks as reporters search for the answer to the question – what is Rosebud.

The film is loosely based of the life of William Randolph Hearst who had one of the biggest influences on the newspaper world, revolutionising print journalism and essentially creating the modern tabloid paper.

Well’s masterpiece tops this list and is a contender for the best film ever made, and if you haven’t seen it Citizen Kane should top your list of films you have to watch.

All the Presidents Men – 1976

It would be hard to not include the film based on one of the most influential pieces of journalism ever written, I mean the Watergate brought down the president of the United States.

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford star as reporters Woodward and Bernstein who get a tip off from the mysterious Deep Throat that lead them to discover Richard Nixon’s involvement in some pretty dirty dealing, forcing him to resign.

The film, directed by Alan J. Pakula, won four Oscars provides a faithful re-telling of the Watergate scandal and should inspire journalists not to give up on a story.

Almost Famous – 2000

Aspiring journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit) gets his big break when Rolling Stone ask him to cover Stillwater as they tour America.

Miller, who’s just 16, departs on the adventure of a lifetime, following the band across America, all the while trying to lock down the big interview he need with the band’s guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup)

This coming of age film may not have the same pure journalistic focus as some of the others on this list, but it is a brilliant film which is definitely a must watch.

Network – 1976

The film that got a whole generation yelling “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a long serving news anchor on the UBS evening news, but after a drop in rating the network decides it’s time for him to move on.

That is until Finch breaks down into a drunken rant on air, which the network exploits Beale for the ratings and eventually give him his own show.

The film won four academy awards, including the Best Actor nod for Finch, and is a brilliant insight into the cutthroat world of network television where in then end ratings are all that matter. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – 1998

This adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s novel by the same name tells the story of Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) as they travel to Las Vegas to report on the Mint 400.

But even before they reach Vegas the concoction of psychedelic drugs kick in and the story descends more into a fever dream as Duke and his lawyer experience Sin City on acid.

The film was a box office flop, but has become a cult classic and is a fantastic portrayal of Thompson’s work, if you don’t see the film I would definitely recommend reading the novel.

Honorable Mention.

Anchorman – The Legend of Ron Burgundy – 2004

While this may be a little more low brow than the other films its hard to argue that Anchorman shouldn’t be on this list at the end of the day it’s a great film about journalism, sort of.

Will Ferrell stars as Ron Burgundy, San Diego’s top rated anchorman, but when the network hires a new female anchor everything changes for Burgundy and the news team.

Adam McKay’s comedy has become one of the most quoted films of all time, and while I’m pushing it a bit by pinning it onto the bottom of the list, I couldn’t resist including Burgundy and co.

You Stay Classy San Diego.

Anthony Harris - Co Founder of Race2Recovery

Anthony Harris was serving in Afghanistan when his vehicle hit an IED. He was injured and after 9 months of surgery he made the decision to have his left leg amputated. During his recovery Anthony started the Race2Recovery a project which inspires to help injured servicemen and women to recover through motorsport.

Earlier this year the Race2Recoevery team took part in the Dakar Rally, an 8,5000 kilometer  endurance race from Lima, Peri down to Santiago, Chile. Antony's car didn't finish the race, but one of the Race2Recovery cars did, and despite not finishing the race himself, knowing that the team he started completed the hardest race on Earth was a brilliant feeling for Anthony.

Magazine Editor Interview - Simon Kurs the editor of the easyJet Traveller

Critical Reflection

This year WINOL has been extremely successful in respects to the website, the focus of the term has been switched from the bulletin towards focusing on the website and increasing the amount of content, quality of the content and number of articles being written to increase the number of viewers of the website an improve its Alexa ranking, which we achieved. The current Alexa ranking for WINOL.co.uk is 10,338 in the UK and 476,793 worldwide which is a vast improvement on previous years and months, and is constantly falling. On the 27^th of November the websites UK ranking was at 21.900 which shows a drop of over 10,000 places in two weeks. I think this is because of the push for better written stories and updating the website all week, rather than just having a mass of stories hit the website on a Wednesday and then have no more updates for the rest of the week, having recent stories makes the website more current and actually gives people a reason to check it daily.

The re-design of the website has been a massive success, the new layout is much simpler to navigate and more attractive to the eye. Sport on the website has been sparser than news, partially because of a smaller reporting team and no dedicated sports writers updating the pages throughout the week and because of inconsistency within the team, some reporters would write and upload their match reports or stories promptly when told whereas other would not.

During the final week of the term WINOL 99 news was introduced. These short 99 second long daily updates where a new project to provide a daily video update, although each of these videos was only viewed between 47 and 105 times together throughout the week they gained more views than the weekly bulletin for the week. This can also be used to help explain the very quick increase in the Alexa ranking for the website over the last 2 weeks, these videos show that at least 47 people a day viewed the website to watch the daily 99 second news update which can only be a positive thing. After a bit more practice the production of these short bulletins will become much more streamlined and it will become easier for them to be produced, but this does add another daily deadline on top of the weekly one for the bulletin and it is important these are met.

The features section of the website and the features team have been extremely good this semester. They have been consistently producing well produced features including two extremely good profile interviews, one with a elderly man who used to Hitler's neighbour and another with Paul Blackburn who spent 20 years in prison due to a miscarriage of justice. These two videos alone have gained nearly 800 views on youtube. The features sections on the website are varied and interesting ranging from fashion photo shoots to confessional interviews and sports gonzo pieces, overall the features have been well produced and have been a real credit to the website.

The bulletin itself has been good this year, in the first few weeks it was rocky because of the new reporters getting to grips with new equipment and not knowing how to properly structure packages. The first three packages are of good quality because they were produced by experienced reporters, the 4^th package and the 'and finally' have many technical issues as does the sport because of inexperienced reporters and a lack of correct equipment. Although all the reporters received basic camera training and an understanding of how to use them they lacked an understanding of controlling sound, they did not know that radio microphones were available and were still unsure about some fairly basic camera functions. The technical ability of the reporters did improve but editorially they were still weak, I believe this was because of a lack of a bulletin focused debrief. Although we did receive a debrief from the guest editors each week this does not give enough of a focused review of the work for people to really improve editorially, and myself and Dan, the news editor, also gave our teams feedback but are not as detailed as Chris and Brian. I think that having these focused sessions would have improved the quality of reporters packages faster. Overall the quality of the packages did improve by the end of the year with reporters learning to use sequences and planning how they will structure their packages.

The production team was well run and organised on Wednesday and the bulletin was uploaded promptly, before five, each week which helped the bulletin views, which although were lower than normal were not terrible, the highest number of views the bulletin reached was 246 views, and the lowest gained only 43 views. There was a lack of production help on a tuesday during the filming of Sportsweek, although myself and Graham, the production editor, were experienced enough to produce the show ourselves there was a lack of focus and urgency towards sportsweek, especially when compared to the bulletin.

We have produced several special shows this semester, which I have been heavily involved in, including the coverage of the US election results, live coverage of the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate and producing an awards ceremony for the yearly British Journalism Training Council Awards. For the US elections I used the tricaster, a portable vision mixer, to live stream the output from the gallery to Ustream. This was the second time I had used the tricaster for this, the first being for the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate. The stream was successful although it did suffer sounds issues which were either due to a poor connection between the tricaster and the sound desk or a problem with the way the tricaster was pushing the sound to youtube. Although the stream had sound issues it was active for the two hours. The special itself was successful, although the planning had to be changed at the last minute because the result was announced before the broadcast. The highlight of the output were the Skype calls from America, we have tried several of these before, not from america, and it is very rare that they work live or are good enough quality to broadcast.

The second special I mentioned was the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate, I was heavily involved with the production of this event, leading the production team. This event was extremely well organised by Louis O'brien and he managed to get all 6 candidates and an audience of nearly 300 people to the university for the debate. As with the US elections I set up the tricaster to live stream the debate, this time with three cameras. We also set up two separate cameras for use in the final edit as well. The stream was live for the hour and a half that the debate ran for. Throughout the debate I live mixed between the three cameras, because there was no ability to have talkback it meant that I couldn’t communicate with the camera operators, this meant that we have to designate shots for each camera. This was a simple solution but was by no means perfect because. The stream was viewed by nearly 300 people when it was active.

The third special that I mentioned was the BJTC awards. Again as with the HPCC debate I lead the production of this project which was a large undertaking. The show had been partial organised as far as a venue had been arranged and then presenter and guests were organised, but all the live and video production work was left to me to organise. The final production included 6 cameras, a vt operator, sound, lighting, Autocue and the project was directed by Angus Scott. As well as prepping the production team and working on the script with Angus I also produced close to thirty minutes of video which was to be played during the show, these videos were a big challenge because they had to be played to match the presenter, Alistair Stewart, as he announced the nominees, winners and cued several video clips of the nominated projects. I edited several versions of each video for each section before discovering a system that worked. The show was a success and nearly went off completely without a hitch, the only issue came about because some of the nominees were late and Alistair failed to cue some of the videos. After the event I also edited the footage from all 6 cameras together into a 20 minute video of the awards show, there were several challenges while editing, there were major sound issues which took 9 hours to resolve. These projects where a massive undertaking and took up a lot of time, especially the BJTC awards, but they have helped to raise the profile of the course and WINOL within the university and to future employers who were at the ceremony.

My main role within WINOL was sports editor which means that I was responsible for the sports output on the bulletin as well as producing the weekly sports show, Sportsweek. Overall I am happy with the semesters sports coverage although there are several ways in which it could have been improved. Firstly I had the challenge of gaining access to the clubs who let us film, most were extremely cooperative and happy to have us back but Eastleigh FC demanded that we get a football conference photography license. To obtain this I first had to gain a copy of the university insurance policy and send that to the conference league, I eventually obtained the license and gained access back into the club, but during the period that we could not gain access it was difficult to have enough content to fill sportsweek.

Due to a lack of home fixtures, the only ones we can film, and a shortage of reporters due to personal reasons I found that I would often have to produce packages and interviews to fill time to have enough content to fill sportsweek. The lack of fixtures also meant that reporters would often have to find news stories or produce sports based features to make sure they produced a package each week, this started of well with reporters finding stories to pitch in the sports meetings but lost momentum as the term went on for reasons I can't really place.

The quality of the sports coverage was fairly poor to begin with, as can be expected, but I tried to get the quality up as quickly as possible to provide the best service possible to the clubs. The quality did improve quickly as the reporters got used to filming sport and with my help they improved their scripting, which is a difficult skill to master in sport. One problem I encountered early on was reporters not finishing their packages early and putting pressure on me to get sport ready for the bulletin, because of this I introduced a sports board, like the news board, which set out which match the reporter would go to each week, set them times for their packages and most importantly deadlines, which were mostly met.

One change to the sports this semester was that we pre recorded the sports output for the bulletin each week, this decision was made because of the new desk which was too small for two presenters to sit at. This put a lot of pressure on me on a wednesday because while trying to finish the sportsweek production and make sure that the packages were up to a good quality and edit the sports for the bulletin.

The audience for sportsweek varied a lot and was mainly reliant on twitter and if the football clubs retweeted the links to their followers. The Basingstoke Bison videos continued to get good viewing figures with two videos getting around 500 views each, but again these figures fluctuated and I failed to get any consistency in the audience figures. I did try to gain access to several football and ice hockey forums to try to get a consistent audience but the registration was refused so I could not post the links which would have increased the number of views.

Reporting Elections

The election period starts with either the dissolution of parliament or an earlier time when the Queen announces her intention to dissolve parliament. Once this period begins there are several laws and regulations that journalists must keep in mind while reporting. The main reason for these restrictions is because during an election period it is even more important than normal for broadcasters to be fair and impartial, because we cannot influence the voter’s opinions. These impartiality guidelines are set by the broadcasters codes of conducts, either the BBC of Ofcom.

During an election period it is extremely important for broadcaster to be impartial, and show their impartiality. Newspapers do not have to be impartial and can be as biased as they want towards a political party. But because of the intrusive nature of the media impartiality is extremely important.

Each of the main three political parties must be given equal time and prominence to express their opinions, this goes further than normal balance which is showing both sides of the story. A broadcaster must give the exact amount of time to each major political party, and if there is a fourth that is also prominent in the area, this means that each candidate or leader must be given an equal amount of air time, to the second, to give their opinion.

Due weight means that you do not have to give each opinion the same amount of time and prominence throughout a broadcast, package or article, but instead give due weight to an opinion with regards to the amount of people that hold it, so minor opinions do not need to be given the same weight as commonly held ones.

As far as the legal restrictions go, we still have to be mindful of libel as always, but within elections candidates are likely to make defamatory allegations about one and other. There is no statutory privilege for media covering elections, but if the statements are said within a press conference or public meeting, then as long as they report is fast accurate and fair the journalist should be able to rely upon qualified privilege.

The laws against publishing false statements is designed to stop any dirty tricks between candidates and their supporters. This law makes it a criminal offence to:

• make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of an election candidate, if the purpose of publishing the false statement is to affect how many votes he/she will get.

It is a defence to show that when the statement was published it was believed that the comment was true or had reasonable grounds to believe that the statement was true

Exit polls and reporting from a polling station is another legal danger zone. In the UK you cannot release exit poll data before the polls close, this includes vox popps with voters.

Section 66A of the Representation of the People Act 1983, says it is a criminal offence to:

• Publish, before the polls are closed, any statement about the way in which voters have voted in that election, where this statement is, or might reasonably be taken to be, based in information given by voters after they have voted

And to

• To publish, before a poll is closed, any forcast – including any estimate – of that election result, if the forecast is based on exit poll information from voters, or which might reasonably be taken to be based on it

So if a journalist broadcasts or prints any information from exit polls or information about how people have voted while the polls are open then the publisher is liable to a fine of up to £5000 fine or up to 6 months in jail term.

This limits what reporters can say and do during an election day, the election is the news of the day but as far as being able report the only thing journalists can really report about are how many people are voting. This is why during elections, like the Police and Crime Commissioner elections a couple of weeks ago, all the news, online and broadcast, will be focused on the numbers that are coming out to vote. There is no way this can affect the outcome of the results or affect public opinion so it is legally safe.

Confidentiality and privacy

A breach of confidence occurs when the confident, the person who has been told the confidential material, abuses the confidential material.

There are three elements to a breach on confidence:

• The information must have 'the necessary quality of confidence'
• The information must have been imparted in circumstances imposing an obligation of confidence; and
• There must be an unauthorised use of that information tot the detriment of the party communicating it

This means that for there to be a breach of confidence the material must first be seen to be confidential and to have been obtained in confidential circumstances. Information that is seen as trivial is generally not confidential.

Certain situations create an obligation of confidentiality, a contractual relationship like one between employer and employee, will usually contain a confidentiality clause so that employees cannot reveal an employers secret. Employees in the security services may not have any contract but due to the nature of their work it is viewed that they have a duty of confidence because of the nature of their work.

Injunctions were introduced to prevent breaches of confidence. When a journalist obtains confidential material the journalist should contact the person, or as it is put in the BBC style guide they should be give 'the right to reply'. The issue with this is that this gives the opportunity for the person to obtain an injunction preventing the use of the information. This creates the 'Journalists dilemma' as McNae's calls it where a journalist has to make the decision if they should check the information and risk an injunction or publish and possible face libel damages.

Journalists do have a defence against injunctions in matters involving freedom of expression which comes under section 12 of The Human Rights Act. The confider, the person who has had their confidence breached, must show that it is likely that at trial it will be deemed that the publication should not be allowed. An injunction cannot be granted unless the journalist is not present when the application is made, unless it is deemed that the person seeking the injunction has taken all practicable steps to inform the journalist.

It is important to remember that an injunction against one is an injunction against all, so if one newspaper has an injunction against it not allowing it to publish confidential material if they are aware of the injunction, and if they do publish they can be guilty of contempt of court. This means that is up to the person seeking the injunction to persuade the court rather than the defendant, and the court must try to decide the likely outcome of the full trial.

Injunctions are not cheap and the fees can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. The person who seeks and interim injunction must agree to pay any damages to the defendant if it is deemed at trial that the injunction should not have been granted.

The right to privacy is granted by article 8 of the human rights act, which says:

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private or family life, his home and his correspondence
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society.
   -in the interest of national security, public public safety or the economic well being of the county
   -for the prevention or disorder of crime
   -for the protection of health and morals, or
   -for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others

To put it simply there are several exceptions to the rules on the grounds of public interest, there are :

1. deterring or exposing crime or serious impropriety
2. protecting the public health or safety, and
3. preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of the individual or organisation

As it is with confidence, where information mist be seen to have the 'necessary quality of confidence', it is necessary to judge whether a person has a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. If it is deemed that they do then to publish this information is a breach of confidence the person may obtain an injunction just like confidentiality.

The main thing to remember with confidentiality as a journalist is to weigh up the two sides of the dilemma, if you have confidential material and contact the confider before publication you rick an injunction and the story ending, but if you publish without contacting them then you can risk a libel case.

Copyright

Earlier in the semester we had a special guest lecture on Copyright given by Peter Hodges who worked in the BBC as a senior member of their legal team for a number of years.

The importance of copyright law is to allow people to protect their intellectual property, it protects the products of peoples skill, creativity, labour and time. This includes literary, dramatic, artistic or musical work, sound recordings, film, broadcast or typographical arrangements.

There is copyright in so many areas of life that some people may not realise when they are being breached, for example there are several copyrights in a single musical recording. As well as the recording itself there is also a copyright for the arrangement and the original song. So a song writer can write a popular song, they will own one copyright which is to the melody and words in the song, then several artists may record a version of the song, each of these different recordings would be covered under a new copyright, one for the performance and one for the arrangement.

One interesting example that Peter flagged was the Eiffel Tower, obviously it is one of the most recognisable landmarks in the world, but it is a danger for any tourist who wants a nice holiday snap. This is because the lighting design that illuminates the tower at night is copyrighted by the company that created it, this is mainly to restrict the way that the tower is shown and distributed in commercial media but it is something to be aware of.

To create a copyright of your work it is fairly simple, merely create a piece of work that shows some skill, creativity, labour or judgement, and then publish it. There is no need to seek for the copyright to be obtained by registration. Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you created the work, you may not hold the copyright. If you create the work while under employment then the employer will hold the copyright rather than the person who created the work.

There are several rights that are granted to the holder of the copyright with regards to the work that is copyrighted, there are:

• to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies
• to import or export the work
• to create derivative works
• to perform or display the work publicly
• to sell or assign these rights to others
• to transmit or display by radio or video.

As you can see these are very restrictive, as you would expect, but there are ways of still using copyrighted material even if you did not create it yourself. Before I move onto that I will briefly talk about how long a copyright lasts, using material that is out of copyright is always easier when possible.

The standard length for a copyright is the life of the author plus 50-70 years dependant on the type of work. For literary, dramatic, musical works and films the copyrights lasts for 70 years after the authors death. For broadcast and sound recordings the copyright lasts for 50 years, from the end of the year it was recorded or released.

As I said the easiest way to deal with copyright is to avoid it by either creating your own work, e.g. taking your own photographs, or by using work which is in the public domain.

But there are several ways of using copyrighted material within the law, the first is to simply buy the martial. This then passes the copyright from the original author onto the person who bought it, this then gives them the right to distribute the work as they want.

The second and most commonly used way of using copyrighted material, this time without permission of the copyright holder and without paying for it, is fair dealing. You can only copyrighted material use fair dealing for 3 purposes, these are:

• research and private study
• criticism and review
• reporting current events

The first purpose is not really important for us because it is purely non-commercial. Criticism and review allows the use of quotes from books and plays and clips from films and broadcast when being used to write a criticism or review. On WINOL we have used fair dealing for this purpose a lot within Ewan's gaming review show.

The third purpose is reporting current events, this allows you to use copyright material to report a current event as long as sufficient acknowledgement is given to the author and it has been made available to the public. This defence does not cover photography. For a while there was a dispute over the football highlights and if they could be used under fair dealing of reporting current events, this is because of the amount broadcasters pay for the rights to broadcast sports.

I mentioned above that reporting current events doesn’t cover photography, but there is a way of using photographs within copyright law without paying the creator. Creative commons is a way of sharing copyrighted material, usually photographs, within certain guidelines set out by the author. These guidelines include crediting the author, whether the work can be modified in any way and if the work can be used for commercial means. Good sources of creative commons work are flickr and youtube, and on WINOL we try to use as much creative commons material as possible when we cannot get the images ourselves.

One point that Peter made that was important for me and my role within WINOL was about incidental inclusion and how it doesn't cover music. This means that if football fans are singing a song or tune at a match or if there is music being played over a PA then it is a breach of copyright. This is something I deal with on a weekly basis, especially with ice hockey and so have had to make reporters drop clips or cut shots shorter to avoid incidentally including music.

One of the biggest copyright battles in recent years involved Youtube and its parent company Google who were being accused pf massive intentional copyright infringement by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. The lawsuit would have cost Google $1bn but they won and the lawsuit was thrown out. This is a landmark case between two global companies but it is good to note that copyright infringements incur much higher costs that libel cases.