Many journalists have mid-life crises when they begin to doubt their capacity to capture the truth in words or escape the media echo chamber. Joris Luyendijk had his crisis early – when he was 31, to be precise. He was Middle East correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, was widely admired, had just covered the Gulf war . . . and he packed it all in to write a book. A book that sought to demonstrate that it was almost impossible for a journalist to say anything worthwhile about the Middle East, where societies are closed, sources are often in the pay of the secret service, and western media lack the patience to get to grips with "the Arab world", a term he in any case rejects.
That book, published in the Netherlands in 2006 and in the UK last year with the title Hello Everybody!, is a punchy dissection of the way the media operates, and shows how easy it is for governments to manipulate information. He argues that journalists did a poor job after 9/11, failing to admit it was impossible to gauge support for al-Qaida among ordinary Muslims and failing, too, to explore the roots of anger with the west. He also says the Israelis' media savvy makes it easy for them to win the propaganda war with the Palestinians, and that in the Gulf war "the authoritative Anglosphere media adopted the perspective of the American PR machine".
Hello Everybody! is not a piece of agitprop. It's an insider's guide to the impossibility of seeing the whole picture, of getting inside the houses – and the minds – of those living on the "Arab street". And Luyendijk, who did a PhD in anthropology in Cairo, speaks Arabic – or at least the urban slang that passes for Arabic in Egypt's capital. Plenty of Middle East correspondents don't. Their bosses' knowledge of the region is even more limited: one of his editors told him to hasten to Iran, where his Arabic would come in useful (only 1% of the population speak Arabic). Middle East dictatorship and western media dumbness make a potent mix, hopelessly biased against understanding. But now back home in the Netherlands and calling himself a "meta-journalist" – a term, he says, that is guaranteed to empty rooms – he thinks he may be edging towards a solution. This should be worth hearing.
"What will you have? I spent a long time in the Middle East and have to offer you something," Luyendijk says when I arrive at his office, slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam's red light district. He disappears and comes back a few minutes later with a perfectly executed espresso. He shares a floor of a three-storey building with a group of freelance writers and designers – "it's like a newsroom, but without the hierarchy," he tells me. He retains an arm's length relationship with NRC Handelsblad, but the success of Hello Everybody! has bought him freedom. He hosted a chatshow on Dutch TV in 2006/7 that burnished his celebrity status, has just completed a stint as professor of journalism at the University of Tilburg, and a few days before we met had launched his latest book, which he describes as "an anthropological survey of the political class in Holland". Add his good looks, angular cheekbones and spiky, close-cropped hair to this burgeoning portfolio career, and I think I'm starting to dislike him as much as the politicians, lobbyists, PR people and journalists skewered in his new book.
His main focus over the last couple of years, however, has not been the book, but an attempt to develop a new way of doing journalism. One legacy of his time in the Middle East was a belief that oil added to the problems of the region, fostering autocracy, corruption and an arms race. He is also interested in sustainability, so started a weekly column on electric cars in NRC Handelsblad. "I talked to lots of people, but instead of doing the research and then sharing my conclusions with my readers, I tried to share the journey," he says. "I started at zero. I knew nothing about electric cars, but they seemed great, so I began an experiment to see if you could seduce readers to go along with your curiosity, rather than saying from a pedestal: 'This is the truth about the electric car.'"
At the outset, he wanted to test whether it would be a good idea for NRC Handelsblad to be distributed solely by electric cars. "There's no neutral position for a paper when it comes to sustainability," he says. "Either you pollute or you don't." He says a weekly column proved the perfect vehicle for the experiment. "I was not subject to the competition of the newsroom, where I would have to inflate my stories to get them into the paper. If I'd done an interview and it was hopelessly boring and the PR person tried to inflate it, I would write about the attempts of the PR person to inflate it, rather than go along with the inflation." The column was called "Starts with himself" – perhaps it trips off the tongue better in Dutch. "If you improve the world, you have to start with yourself," he says. "Our idea was sustainability is always boring, but what if it's not about making the world sustainable, but making yourself sustainable? Then you become the protagonist in your own story, and you write about the obstacles in your way to becoming sustainable." The main obstacle being yourself.
The columns were a big success – even the boring ones – and built up a loyal following, but he pulled the plug after 18 months and before he had reached the end of the journey, when he had planned – if the conclusion was that electric cars were a good thing – to ask his readers for €100 each to buy a fleet of them for the paper. NRC Handelsblad was being sold and it all became too bureaucratic and complicated. But rather than abandon all the material and contacts he had gathered, he got in touch with a software company that specialised in staging internet dialogues between experts and building "mind maps" to establish areas of consensus between them.
Suddenly, he saw a new way of doing journalism: instead of a journalist talking to half a dozen "experts" holding a range of opinions and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion based on what they say, he would let them talk to each other and allow conclusions to emerge organically. He thought this would be a way to see the whole picture, and could be applied to many areas beyond the relatively restricted one of electric cars. "On climate change," he explains, "you get all these assertions, but never a consensus. This is a way of establishing what people agree about and where there are areas of meaningful disagreement. If you bring in lots of people, you can filter out the biased stuff." The wisdom of crowds – as opposed to the individual perspectives of the usual suspects who get invited to opine by the media; and the idea of information as an ocean rather than a series of rivulets.
His electric car project is now heading for a new life – on the internet, where it will be the first of what he hopes will be a series of "agoras" (the agora was the place of assembly and debate in the ancient Greek city-states). The metaphor of an agora in cyberspace, where experts and interested lay people meet to thrash out issues concerning the electric car (or oil, energy, sustainability, the Middle East), is captivating: an online world peopled by Greeks rather than geeks; an ocean that might, after all, be navigable.
Luyendijk says "the old model of journalism is broken" – but so what? It didn't really work anyway. "The best time is ahead of us," he insists. "It will be possible on our site to have different entry points. If you are an expert, you go in at one point; if you are a novice, you enter somewhere else. The whole idea of what an article is will change." He reckons we are still at year zero in terms of journalism adapting to the internet. "The first cars were horse carriages where they had taken out the horse, stuck in an engine and said: 'Ha, there we are.' Everyone said: 'Who's going to sit in that?', and somebody had to walk in front with a flag. This is what we're doing now. We have the horse carriage, which is the story. We stick it on the internet, and we think: 'Ha, that's it.' But once a story's on the internet, where there is no deadline and no limitations in terms of space, the whole thing begins to change. What papers do at the moment is collect stories that were written for a paper knowing that tomorrow fish will be in the paper, and they just dump them on the web. But we need a completely different way of presenting them."
Papers, he believes, will disappear, though he offers no timescale. Once they have gone, the rationale for the "story" goes, too. One of the central conclusions of Hello Everybody! is that there is never just one story in the Middle East. In every situation, there are many stories, depending on your perspective. Luyendijk quit conventional journalism because he was always being railroaded into telling a linear story, packaged for one-off consumption. In the new net world, he believes, it will be possible to tell many stories, work on their development with other people in the agora via crowdsourcing, be open about saying "I don't know", be provisional in drawing conclusions, and endlessly return to the same subject. The agora exists in perpetuity; the debate never ends.
Luyendijk shows no interest in the subject that obsesses media organisations: how to make this transition work financially. "Imagine people trying to invent the airplane, and from day one they have to present an airtight business case," he says. "No airplane would have got off the ground ever. If you're going to innovate and from day one you have to explain how that's going to make money, it's not going to fly. I don't think I'd have had any of the ideas with the electric car if I'd been thinking commercially. You won't have ideas if your first angle is, how is this going to make money?"
The start-up costs of the agora site are being underwritten by the Dutch lottery, and some income is coming from chairing panel discussions on sustainability issues, but he just trusts that in the longer term a financial model will emerge. "In an information society, if you have good information there must be a way of making money from it," he says. "Also, your costs will be so much lower because you no longer have to pay for distribution."
Luyendijk, who is now 38 and married with three young children, sees himself as an anthropologist who stumbled into journalism by accident when Dutch newspaper Volkskrant signed him up to report on the Middle East in 1998 on the strength of his book about Egypt, A Good Man Sometimes Hits His Wife (he has a winning way with titles). Volkskrant did not see the job as especially significant. Then 9/11 happened and Luyendijk was suddenly its star man. He says that according to the rule of cui bono, he should be a prime suspect for the 9/11 attacks, because he was one of the main beneficiaries.
That catastrophe made him as a journalist – but it broke him, too, because he came to disbelieve the pretensions of journalism. Now he is groping for a new way of telling stories, of embracing complexity. I ask him what he thinks he'll be doing 10 years from now. "I have no idea," he says. "I would get really worried if I had the answer to what I'll be doing in 10 years. I'm making a lot of enemies now [with the new book], so maybe I'll be living in a different country." In chilled-out Amsterdam, this contingent life seems natural.
An old-style interview would have a neat conclusion or killer quote with which to finish. But I am tiring after an early flight, the interview rather dribbles away and, in any case, old-style journalism is dying. There is no neat conclusion; no killer quote; no dramatic denouement; just a rather spurious full stop.
Hello Everybody! One Journalist's Search for Truth in the Middle East, by Joris Luyendijk, is published by Profile Books (£8.99).
