The State of Online Journalism in 2024

or: Why We Insist On Being Grumpy Bastards Every Time This Happens

If, like me, you’re known amongst your more neurotypical friends, family and colleagues as “the Red Dwarf fan”, you’ll have received umpteen messages in the last couple of days, reacting to the “news” that new Red Dwarf has been “confirmed”. These normies will then have been confused by your lukewarm response, before you have to tediously explain that nothing is actually official yet, and the articles that they’ve seen online are just discussing the rumours we’ve known about for months. “But look”, they reply, “it says it right here, the Scrapheap Challenge guy announced it”. At this point, you have to choose between launching into a full scale rant about the intricacies of television commissioning, or just saying “yeah, looking forward to it” in order to maintain the illusion that you’re a well-adjusted individual like them.

It’s especially frustrating when you can also see this happening on a much wider scale. Us lot – you, me and anyone else who’ll visit a fansite for a sci-fi programme from the 1980s – know the score, but there are vast swathes of Dwarf fans who have a much more casual relationship with the show. They might love it every bit as much as we do, but they’re not as obsessive about the details as we are, and are less likely to have been following the series of small scale leaks that we’ve been tracking. But all of a sudden, they’re all over social media in the last two days, sharing their excitement at the confirmation of something that isn’t actually confirmed. But here’s the thing – it’s not their fault. They’re being let down by the people they trust to provide information.

First of all, rumour control. Here are the facts. Robert Llewellyn did a live stream on his personal YouTube channel on Wednesday evening. The VOD has since been taken down, but the relevant section has been snipped out so that we can see exactly what he said.

We knew we were going to do more Red Dwarf, and we’re now actually doing it in the middle of October til the middle of November this year. Three… well, a 90 minute special. Three half-hours. And the whole point was that we don’t announce that until it’s confirmed, and we knew that. So then I was at a science-fiction convention sitting next to Craig Charles, and everyone that came up and said “are you doing more Red Dwarf?”, he just said yes! […] Anyway, so yes, we are making more. I can’t believe I’ve agreed to do it, I’m insane. I’m much too old.

Our interpretation of that is the only real piece of new information is the October-November shooting dates, which hadn’t previously been mentioned. There’s two ways of taking the “90 minute special / three half-hours” bit. It either means that it will be broadcast in three parts, or it could simply be Robert comparing the runtime to the standard episode length. Either way, we won’t know for sure until we’re explicitly told by UKTV and/or Grant Naylor Productions.

So that’s how we’d report the news, complete with context and caveats. But we don’t have adverts on our site. We’re not run for profit, so there’s no incentive for us to lure people over to boost our stats. Unfortunately, the vast majority of news sources on the internet are much less discerning; they rely on your clicks to generate income in order to pay their staff and remain viable, and so it doesn’t matter to them what you’re clicking on, as long as you’re clicking.

And so when Jay Richardson of the British Comedy Guide saw the YouTube video, it somehow became an EXCLUSIVE. Red Dwarf IS returning. It’s a “new three-episode special”. The absolute gall of the phrase “British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal” is staggering. It’s an abhorrent display of total disrespect towards your audience. In fact, it’s just a plain lie. You’re not exclusively revealing shit, you’re transcribing a publicly available livestream. Furthermore, you’re reporting your own interpretations of what was said as fact. This “three episodes” thing is going to be attached to whatever this project is for good, and we don’t even know if it’s true. It’s bad journalism, but sadly that’s what this industry feeds on right now. Nuance goes out of the window when you need to get page views in order to get paid.

Then it snowballs. British Comedy Guide got there first, so that allows other publications to follow suit. The Radio Times says Red Dwarf is ‘returning to TV with 3 brand new episodes’, citing BCG as their source. They haven’t watched Robert’s video themselves, they’re just copying what Jay Richardson said. And how do we know? Because Jay Richardson got his facts wrong. The British Comedy Guide article states that “Llewellyn yesterday confirmed the show’s return on his Fully Charged YouTube channel”. He didn’t, it was his own YouTube channel, not Fully Charged.

And yet the Radio Times article says “Robert Llewellyn reportedy [sic] confirmed the news on his Fully Charged YouTube channel”. Thus confirming that they’re just re-writing what the other website says, with no attempt to verify the information. This article has not been fact-checked. They’re just repeating what they’ve heard verbatim. And if that’s the case, why should we trust anything they report on? All it takes is for these click-hungry demons to report on something you personally know something about, for you to realise that this is how it works. And it’s very worrying. We know that it’s not that important a mistake, we know that there’s bigger worries in the world than the accurate reporting of Red Dwarf rumours. But if they’re getting this wrong, because they have to churn out as much content as they can as quickly as possible, what else are they getting wrong?

Incidentally, by the time the story reached the absolute depths of the gutter, ie. The Sun, it had somehow mutated to “Robert Llewellyn, who played the mechanoid Kryten, told the British Comedy Guide…” Oh, did he now? Not content with repeating other people’s inaccuracies, you introduce your own because you haven’t even bothered to read the thing you’re copying properly. Leave the Red Dwarf reporting to us, you focus on hacking the phones of murder victims.

There is one crucial piece of information buried at the end of all of these pieces. Very deliberately placed at the end, because they’re not banking on people getting that far – as long as they click the article, it doesn’t matter if they actually read it. To quote the original BCG piece:

UKTV declined to comment.

And you know why they declined to comment? Because Red Dwarf‘s return is not confirmed. UKTV would be the people to confirm it. But hey, who cares about piffling details like that when there are misleading headlines to write. Most news organisations have this as part of their process – they write their article, then ping an email to the channel’s overworked PR department to give them the right to reply, then publish as soon as they hear back either way. It’s theoretically there to ensure the story is true, but it doesn’t stop them from publishing details that are completely unconfirmed and unverified, leaving the disclaimer until a point where most people will have scrolled away.

But, you may ask, why hasn’t the news been confirmed by the channel yet? Well, because it’s bloody well up to the channel when they announce it, regardless of how leaky the cast are. There are numerous reasons why they wouldn’t want to say it out loud just yet. It’s possible that contracts haven’t been signed yet – it may well be verbally agreed but not signed on the dotted line, and it’s far from uncommon for early stages of pre-production (such as checking the actors’ availability and pencilling in dates) to start while the legal departments are still going over the finer details of the commission. Not only that, they’d surely want to include confirmation that all four (or five?) regulars are returning in any press release, and they can’t do that until they’ve all signed their contracts.

Alternatively, even if it is all officially signed, sealed and delivered, it’s still their prerogative to announce it in their own good time. Take a look at the television industry right now. It’s on its arse. Nobody’s got any money, and so every single commercial broadcaster is scaling back its commissioning. They’re making fewer new programmes than ever before, and so naturally they want to control the release of information. No point shouting about all your big new shows now and then having nothing to announce for six months, they want to pace themselves.

Incidentally, this is often at odds with the wishes of the production companies and creatives behind the programmes, as they’re usually keen to get news of their successful commission out there as soon as possible, to prove to their peers and competitors that they’re still keeping their heads above to the water. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of Robert’s previous live streams stayed up on the channel, but this one was taken down, once it started taking off to a point where UKTV were undoubtedly aware of it.

Not all of the blame for the current confusion lies at the door of what passes for online journalism, although most of it does. Things would no doubt be a little more under control if we still had official sources of Red Dwarf news. Back when reddwarf.co.uk was updated on a weekly basis, they’d be able to elude to the show being in the news even if they weren’t able to officially say anything. A “watch this space” type placeholder was enough to assure people that things were happening behind the scenes, and that they’d be the source of the eventual news that people could truly trust. But we don’t even have @RedDwarfHQ any more, and so we’re in the faintly ludicrous position where the closest thing we’ve got to an official social media account is Robert Llewellyn tweeting in character as Kryten to 8,400 followers, looking to all and sundry like a parody account.

Look, we have no doubt that Red Dwarf is probably coming back. It seems extremely likely that everything Robert said in his live stream is true (or at least true to the best of his knowledge, as things stand), and that there will be official confirmation at some point in the next few months. It’s not that we don’t believe the stories, it’s just… well, we’ve been burned before. Consider this. In 1997’s Swirly Thing Alert special (coming soon to G&TV by the way), Robert Llewellyn told viewers of Seattle’s KCTS:

I think we probably will do [a movie]. They’ve raised a lot of the money for it already. The producers and the director, Ed Bye, are absolutely determined. They’ve booked the studios and you know… Officially, we’re doing a series, Series VIII, next year, in about a year’s time, and then after that, in the Fall of next year we’re supposed to be shooting Red Dwarf: The Movie. And also I think they’re going to combine it with a live stage show, where we’re actually trying out some of the dialogue we’ll use in the movie on stage so that we get an audience response and they’ll tighten it up and change it. […] It won’t be a Hollywood film, they want to do it with the original cast in Great Britain, but with American names too.

Everything he said was true, to the best of his knowledge, as things stood. But if the internet of 1997 was like the internet of 2024, the headlines would write themselves. Red Dwarf: The Movie CONFIRMED. It will be shot in Autumn 1998. It will be directed by Ed Bye. It will feature big-name American actors. The funding is in place. There will be a live stage show too.

And that’s just the most notorious example of the countless abandoned Red Dwarf projects that were discussed but never saw the light of day. We’re confident it won’t, but this latest special-slash-mini-series could go the same way. Which is why it’s important, as fans, to hold your fucking horses, and curb your excitement until we have official confirmation from the right people, at which point we’ll shout it from the rooftops. But unfortunately, when we do, those normies we mentioned at the start will go “pfft, this is old news, I saw it online ages ago”. UKTV and Grant Naylor will be denied the splash and the buzz that they’d been planning for, just because one journalist saw an opportunity to get a decent number of clicks from a premature and totally bogus “exclusive”, and kicked off the news cycle early.