Journalism's shaky future
Newspapers may not be dying but the environment in which they operate is indeed in tumult, writes Mark Day
August 31, 2006
THE British magazine The Economist killed off newspapers this week in a report Mark Twain might have described as greatly exaggerated. Perhaps a more relevant question today is: Are we killing journalism?
Across the world, the future of newspapers is being studied and debated. Type the words "death of newspapers" into the Google search engine and you'll get 52.7 million references.
The Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association conference on the Gold Coast this week spent session after session chewing on the all-consuming issues of readers and advertisers migrating to the internet.
But there has been precious little talk about the kind of journalism emerging from the internet age: soft, easy, cheap, shared and, increasingly, packaged to feed our needs for self-assurance and gossip.
As media companies pursue a place in a brave new world of slicing and dicing news and information to fit the requirements of emerging technical platforms, it is valid to ask if they are losing sight of journalism's original core role: to be a public watchdog, probing and digging around governments and public institutions. Don Chipp might have modified his political slogan to describe the work of the fourth estate: keeping the bastards honest.
Good old-fashioned journalism - news reporting, digging into questions of misconduct or the unlawful deeds of public officials - is still alive in the internet era, but only just. So many forces are working against this kind of journalism that its future is clearly threatened. Governments pay millions for spin doctors to divert attention from their areas of weakness. In place of unwanted scrutiny, they offer favourable and often recycled "scoops" to media outlets.
Corporations set up divisions of public relations to control the messages they send to markets rather than be scrutinised by a questioning and sceptical media.
Courts impose suppression orders where once there was openness. The task of reporting our communities to ourselves is getting harder, yet many media companies are responding to declining readership and consequential falls in advertising revenue by cutting back on reporting numbers. When Fairfax, for instance, shed more than 50 journalists last year, chief executive David Kirk said there was no direct relationship between the number of journalists employed and quality journalism.
Investigative journalism is costly to produce - an expose can be months in the making - and media companies are under pressure to cut costs. Besides, it rarely works, in the sense that any spike in circulation or viewer numbers as a result of the story is short-term. Invariably, litigation follows. This can tie up reporters for months as they do further digging to defend themselves in court, led by legal teams costing tens of thousands of dollars a day.
Is it any wonder, then, as the demand grows for content to fill emerging services, the best journalism is the least likely to meet that demand? If cheap material is plentiful and the public reaction to it is positive, why bother with the hard stuff?
This is the process commonly called dumbing down. It may be convenient for the media, and it may be well-received by some consumers, but it can also lead to the traditional media forgoing its role as community watchdog.
This process involves all branches of traditional media, but although it is not limited to newspapers, they nevertheless are the focal point because they are the agenda-setters of the daily news cycle.
If newspapers can no longer afford to underwrite the best journalism, it has a flow-on effect. Breakfast radio - the most popular timeslot among listeners - would be lost without the stories produced by newspapers.
A strong community-interest story published in a newspaper is grist for radio's mill, with early news bulletins built around the story and initial reaction, with follow-ups reporting political or participants' responses later in the day. Evening television news services pick up the same stories and report on public reactions and political responses.
The flow-on effect is also felt on internet news services and, logically, will extend to new services such as "snack" news and information delivered to hand-held small-screen devices. Although the web is the ultimate tool for deeper and deeper mining of information, Australian newspaper-related websites until recently were content to take breaking news from the same agency-based sources. These do not report with any great depth.
American journalism professor Philip Meyer says in his book The Vanishing Newspaper that the last crumpled edition of the last newspaper will be tossed aside by its last reader in the first quarter of 2043.
That long? No, it will be much sooner: on March 9, 2014, to be precise, according to the Googlezon scenario, a perhaps not-so-fanciful peek into a future in which the online monoliths Google and Amazon merge to redefine the world of news. In this scenario, computers are used to aggregate news, even to write it, and distribute it according to individual demand or habit. It speaks of an outbreak of "news wars" in about 2010 with computer software giants such as Microsoft and Yahoo! as the participants, while existing media companies are left out.
Deconstruct the Googlezon scenario and you find its starting point is not far from the origins of newspapers, where news is gathered from sources near and far and arranged by editors in a fashion designed to attract and hold the interest of consumers.
Blogs are booming because the the individual blogger plays the role of editor. Information is still aggregated from a variety of sources, with comments and links provided by the blogger. Readers are invited to participate with comments or contributions.
Internet communities are also booming, with the prime example being MySpace, recently acquired by News Corporation (parent company of News Limited, publisher of The Australian). It has more than 100 million members in the US, each creating a unique presence on the internet.
The future according to the Googlezon view is that super-powerful computers will be able to do the searching and aggregation of information for you, according to your likes and dislikes. Human intervention will be a thing of the past. This is the antithesis of journalism. Yet the first steps down the road to homogenised, one-size-fits-all journalism are under way. The evidence is plain to see from the dossiers of despair that predict the decline and fall of newspapers: declining circulations, staff cutbacks, the loss of advertising revenue to the internet and the lack of interest from youth, just for starters.
Broadcasters are under similar pressures. Radio news is increasingly networked, to the detriment of local journalism, particularly in regional markets. TV is turning away from an already small slate of in-depth reporting in favour of light and breezy.
Sunday, the long-form news-magazine program on the Nine Network, folded its tent this week and will re-emerge next week in a relaxed, chatty format more akin to Seven's Sunday Sunrise.
Nine's former news director Paul Fenn describes this as a "sad dumbing down". He says Sunday in its heyday came up with "some wonderful stories, but it doesn't happen any more".
TV news veteran Peter Meakin acknowledges this. Now director of news and current affairs at the Seven Network, after decades running the same divisions at Nine, Meakin says Sunday "was always an extravagance". He says today there is less emphasis on fires and traffic accidents in news bulletins and more attention paid to stories seen to be more relevant to people's lives: the environment, health, finance and transport.
Meakin says newsrooms are run on budgets that are getting tighter and tighter: Nine recently slimmed down its Sydney news team by almost 100 and both networks have shut their London offices as cost-saving measures.
"Newsrooms have traditionally run at a loss and audiences are not as big as they were," Meakin says. "They're still substantial numbers, but spread more across the day rather than nightly at 6pm."
He also acknowledges commercial TV's current affairs offerings, A Current Affair on Nine and Today Tonight on Seven, have turned away from serious subjects such as politics towards consumer-oriented material.
Meakin says this is a case of TV giving its audience the stories they want. "The producers of programs like ACA and TT read the ratings more closely than anyone else. They have their fingers on the pulse.
"Investigative journalism doesn't have a particularly good strike rate; it's expensive to do and litigation is almost guaranteed," Meakin says.
"But doing consumer stories - what's good and bad for you, product analysis and the like - is not a sign of cowardice. TT still takes on major players such as supermarket chains, banks and oil companies, and we do not buckle under commercial pressure. We're about catering to an audience, not imposing our standards on people."
This argument is also used by those who defend the weekly women's magazines, a genre that relies on gossip. The proposition is that consumer demand for any bits of information about film and TV stars validates the invention of plausible-sounding but untrue stories.
That was never the role of journalism, but there is a growing public appetite for it. If the Googlezon scenario takes hold and computers use highly sophisticated algorithms to aggregate news from millions of web pages, what will be the future impact of invented stories?
Perhaps that is jumping at shadows that do not yet exist, but so far newspaper responses to their looming crisis cannot be described as journalism-led. One of the industry's problems is that the slack interest among young people who prefer to use the web rather than buy a paper is being met with the introduction of free "lite" newspapers aimed at the commuter market.
In Sydney and Melbourne the genre is represented by Mx (published by News Limited) and next week two new giveaways will be launched in the British capital: Thelondonpaper and London Lite. In each case, familiar news reporting gives way to short bites covering entertainment, gossip and fashion. The focus is on readers' interests rather than the events of the day because the bulk of readers care more about their diets, wrinkle creams, safe places for personal savings or tonight's entertainment than they do about earthquakes or wars in the Middle East.
Future demands for content on emerging hand-held services are likely to call for less, rather than more, depth.
Perhaps the decline of watchdog journalism as a public benefit doesn't matter. The Economist argues that democracy is unlikely to be shaken by the process and there's no point in being misty-eyed when products or services evolve into something different.
As blogger Tim Blair, a former news editor of The Bulletin, says: "I know people who yearn to once again hear the clip-clop of horses delivering the milk, but it's not going to happen. Technology is giving us the tools to bring about the death of a delivery system called print, but not for quite some time yet. I think newspapers will get smaller and more expensive. It won't be long before carrying a copy of a newspaper will be a symbol of enormous wealth."
That presumes, of course, that newspapers continue their tradition of in-depth public-interest reporting and there remain customers prepared to pay for something more than once-over-lightly, surface-skating journalism.
So far, neither proposition has been fully tested.
[source]
===========
Interesting to say the least, discussing it in my subjects at the moment actually, interested on the thoughts of others.
Newspapers may not be dying but the environment in which they operate is indeed in tumult, writes Mark Day
August 31, 2006
THE British magazine The Economist killed off newspapers this week in a report Mark Twain might have described as greatly exaggerated. Perhaps a more relevant question today is: Are we killing journalism?
Across the world, the future of newspapers is being studied and debated. Type the words "death of newspapers" into the Google search engine and you'll get 52.7 million references.
The Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association conference on the Gold Coast this week spent session after session chewing on the all-consuming issues of readers and advertisers migrating to the internet.
But there has been precious little talk about the kind of journalism emerging from the internet age: soft, easy, cheap, shared and, increasingly, packaged to feed our needs for self-assurance and gossip.
As media companies pursue a place in a brave new world of slicing and dicing news and information to fit the requirements of emerging technical platforms, it is valid to ask if they are losing sight of journalism's original core role: to be a public watchdog, probing and digging around governments and public institutions. Don Chipp might have modified his political slogan to describe the work of the fourth estate: keeping the bastards honest.
Good old-fashioned journalism - news reporting, digging into questions of misconduct or the unlawful deeds of public officials - is still alive in the internet era, but only just. So many forces are working against this kind of journalism that its future is clearly threatened. Governments pay millions for spin doctors to divert attention from their areas of weakness. In place of unwanted scrutiny, they offer favourable and often recycled "scoops" to media outlets.
Corporations set up divisions of public relations to control the messages they send to markets rather than be scrutinised by a questioning and sceptical media.
Courts impose suppression orders where once there was openness. The task of reporting our communities to ourselves is getting harder, yet many media companies are responding to declining readership and consequential falls in advertising revenue by cutting back on reporting numbers. When Fairfax, for instance, shed more than 50 journalists last year, chief executive David Kirk said there was no direct relationship between the number of journalists employed and quality journalism.
Investigative journalism is costly to produce - an expose can be months in the making - and media companies are under pressure to cut costs. Besides, it rarely works, in the sense that any spike in circulation or viewer numbers as a result of the story is short-term. Invariably, litigation follows. This can tie up reporters for months as they do further digging to defend themselves in court, led by legal teams costing tens of thousands of dollars a day.
Is it any wonder, then, as the demand grows for content to fill emerging services, the best journalism is the least likely to meet that demand? If cheap material is plentiful and the public reaction to it is positive, why bother with the hard stuff?
This is the process commonly called dumbing down. It may be convenient for the media, and it may be well-received by some consumers, but it can also lead to the traditional media forgoing its role as community watchdog.
This process involves all branches of traditional media, but although it is not limited to newspapers, they nevertheless are the focal point because they are the agenda-setters of the daily news cycle.
If newspapers can no longer afford to underwrite the best journalism, it has a flow-on effect. Breakfast radio - the most popular timeslot among listeners - would be lost without the stories produced by newspapers.
A strong community-interest story published in a newspaper is grist for radio's mill, with early news bulletins built around the story and initial reaction, with follow-ups reporting political or participants' responses later in the day. Evening television news services pick up the same stories and report on public reactions and political responses.
The flow-on effect is also felt on internet news services and, logically, will extend to new services such as "snack" news and information delivered to hand-held small-screen devices. Although the web is the ultimate tool for deeper and deeper mining of information, Australian newspaper-related websites until recently were content to take breaking news from the same agency-based sources. These do not report with any great depth.
American journalism professor Philip Meyer says in his book The Vanishing Newspaper that the last crumpled edition of the last newspaper will be tossed aside by its last reader in the first quarter of 2043.
That long? No, it will be much sooner: on March 9, 2014, to be precise, according to the Googlezon scenario, a perhaps not-so-fanciful peek into a future in which the online monoliths Google and Amazon merge to redefine the world of news. In this scenario, computers are used to aggregate news, even to write it, and distribute it according to individual demand or habit. It speaks of an outbreak of "news wars" in about 2010 with computer software giants such as Microsoft and Yahoo! as the participants, while existing media companies are left out.
Deconstruct the Googlezon scenario and you find its starting point is not far from the origins of newspapers, where news is gathered from sources near and far and arranged by editors in a fashion designed to attract and hold the interest of consumers.
Blogs are booming because the the individual blogger plays the role of editor. Information is still aggregated from a variety of sources, with comments and links provided by the blogger. Readers are invited to participate with comments or contributions.
Internet communities are also booming, with the prime example being MySpace, recently acquired by News Corporation (parent company of News Limited, publisher of The Australian). It has more than 100 million members in the US, each creating a unique presence on the internet.
The future according to the Googlezon view is that super-powerful computers will be able to do the searching and aggregation of information for you, according to your likes and dislikes. Human intervention will be a thing of the past. This is the antithesis of journalism. Yet the first steps down the road to homogenised, one-size-fits-all journalism are under way. The evidence is plain to see from the dossiers of despair that predict the decline and fall of newspapers: declining circulations, staff cutbacks, the loss of advertising revenue to the internet and the lack of interest from youth, just for starters.
Broadcasters are under similar pressures. Radio news is increasingly networked, to the detriment of local journalism, particularly in regional markets. TV is turning away from an already small slate of in-depth reporting in favour of light and breezy.
Sunday, the long-form news-magazine program on the Nine Network, folded its tent this week and will re-emerge next week in a relaxed, chatty format more akin to Seven's Sunday Sunrise.
Nine's former news director Paul Fenn describes this as a "sad dumbing down". He says Sunday in its heyday came up with "some wonderful stories, but it doesn't happen any more".
TV news veteran Peter Meakin acknowledges this. Now director of news and current affairs at the Seven Network, after decades running the same divisions at Nine, Meakin says Sunday "was always an extravagance". He says today there is less emphasis on fires and traffic accidents in news bulletins and more attention paid to stories seen to be more relevant to people's lives: the environment, health, finance and transport.
Meakin says newsrooms are run on budgets that are getting tighter and tighter: Nine recently slimmed down its Sydney news team by almost 100 and both networks have shut their London offices as cost-saving measures.
"Newsrooms have traditionally run at a loss and audiences are not as big as they were," Meakin says. "They're still substantial numbers, but spread more across the day rather than nightly at 6pm."
He also acknowledges commercial TV's current affairs offerings, A Current Affair on Nine and Today Tonight on Seven, have turned away from serious subjects such as politics towards consumer-oriented material.
Meakin says this is a case of TV giving its audience the stories they want. "The producers of programs like ACA and TT read the ratings more closely than anyone else. They have their fingers on the pulse.
"Investigative journalism doesn't have a particularly good strike rate; it's expensive to do and litigation is almost guaranteed," Meakin says.
"But doing consumer stories - what's good and bad for you, product analysis and the like - is not a sign of cowardice. TT still takes on major players such as supermarket chains, banks and oil companies, and we do not buckle under commercial pressure. We're about catering to an audience, not imposing our standards on people."
This argument is also used by those who defend the weekly women's magazines, a genre that relies on gossip. The proposition is that consumer demand for any bits of information about film and TV stars validates the invention of plausible-sounding but untrue stories.
That was never the role of journalism, but there is a growing public appetite for it. If the Googlezon scenario takes hold and computers use highly sophisticated algorithms to aggregate news from millions of web pages, what will be the future impact of invented stories?
Perhaps that is jumping at shadows that do not yet exist, but so far newspaper responses to their looming crisis cannot be described as journalism-led. One of the industry's problems is that the slack interest among young people who prefer to use the web rather than buy a paper is being met with the introduction of free "lite" newspapers aimed at the commuter market.
In Sydney and Melbourne the genre is represented by Mx (published by News Limited) and next week two new giveaways will be launched in the British capital: Thelondonpaper and London Lite. In each case, familiar news reporting gives way to short bites covering entertainment, gossip and fashion. The focus is on readers' interests rather than the events of the day because the bulk of readers care more about their diets, wrinkle creams, safe places for personal savings or tonight's entertainment than they do about earthquakes or wars in the Middle East.
Future demands for content on emerging hand-held services are likely to call for less, rather than more, depth.
Perhaps the decline of watchdog journalism as a public benefit doesn't matter. The Economist argues that democracy is unlikely to be shaken by the process and there's no point in being misty-eyed when products or services evolve into something different.
As blogger Tim Blair, a former news editor of The Bulletin, says: "I know people who yearn to once again hear the clip-clop of horses delivering the milk, but it's not going to happen. Technology is giving us the tools to bring about the death of a delivery system called print, but not for quite some time yet. I think newspapers will get smaller and more expensive. It won't be long before carrying a copy of a newspaper will be a symbol of enormous wealth."
That presumes, of course, that newspapers continue their tradition of in-depth public-interest reporting and there remain customers prepared to pay for something more than once-over-lightly, surface-skating journalism.
So far, neither proposition has been fully tested.
[source]
===========
Interesting to say the least, discussing it in my subjects at the moment actually, interested on the thoughts of others.