How the smartphone has changed political journalism

When I started reporting in parliament for The Independent, in 1995, most of the business of journalism was conducted by email, landline and pager. If you needed to speak to an MP, you had to phone their office or their pager service and ask them to call you back.

Occasionally you got through to the person him or herself straight away. I was one of many who got through to Denis Healey, former deputy Labour leader, then in the House of Lords, when he pretended to be a Chinese laundry.

Now everything is faster and more transparent. If a journalist wants a comment from an MP about a breaking news story, it is probably already on their Twitter account. Otherwise a text or WhatsApp message will often produce a quick reply.

If I want to clarify a politician’s position on a detail of policy for a comment article, a request that could have taken hours in pre-smartphone days can now be dealt with in seconds.

As well as speeding up journalism, the technology of the screen grab has also made it easier for politicians and officials to leak, as my former colleague Sam Coates was explaining on The Times Red Box podcast this week. Sam started in journalism doing work experience at The Independent, has been at The Times for 20 years and is now moving to Sky News.

He explained how easy it was for people to take a screenshot on their phone of a group chat or a confidential document from an email and send it to him, and that this is how he often gets his scoops.

The other way the smartphone has changed my journalism is that I can write on the move. Before 2007, when I got my first iPhone, I could of course write notes in longhand if I were travelling, and then type them up when I got to a computer.

But now you can write anywhere, without needing a heavy laptop. It’s a bit fiddly and not fast. I remember being horrified when I discovered Simon Carr, The Independent’s former sketch writer, typed most of his articles on a BlackBerry, but you get used to it.

When Gavin Williamson was sacked as defence secretary just before 6pm, I heard about it by text when I was on a London underground train. The patchy wifi at stations is enough to communicate by, and by the time I arrived home I had already written most of a comment article about it.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator