Do you think there is a future in print journalism?
Here's a tip for anyone who wants to launch themselves as an expert in the media futures market: pick a random date in around 20 years time, put together a fancy powerpoint presentation which shows newspaper circulation figures going through the floor, and then announce with a swagger the precise time that the very last newspaper will roll off the presses (or the digital virtual printer). Hey presto, you get your name in lights and probably your byline in MediaGuardian.
It's all preposterous nonsense, of course, but who's going to notice in 20 years time? Anyone who has followed the hysteria that traditionally follows every new advance in media technology will recognise the narrative: television was going to kill off the cinema, computers were going to kill off television and the poor old wireless would degenerate into a nostalgic companion for the elderly.
As most sensible commentators understand, old media are integrated into the new in a fairly seamless transition process which will ensure that many millions of people are still tucking into their folding dead trees in 20 years time. There will be more downloads, fewer newspapers, and no doubt another media advance which will allow the same futurologists to predict with certainty the death of the iPad on 20 March 2087. But the newspaper, God bless it, will still be with us. As for the journalists who write the stories – that's a different story.
Do you think people trust journalists? What more can we do to restore public faith in British journalism?
It is now an act of faith that journalists rank somewhere in between estate agents and Arthur Daley in the credibility stakes. As I showed in a survey for the British Journalism Review in 2008, the public makes a clear distinction between broadcast and print journalism: journalists on the red-top tabloids are clearly bottom of the pile, while their broadcast colleagues are up there with judges and headteachers.
But trust is certainly in decline, and it ought to worry us. Good journalism is a vital source of accurate information about local, national and international issues which allow people to come to informed views on the world around them. How can we react intelligently to policy initiatives around transport, taxation, crime, health or education – let alone a government decision to take the country to war – unless we have access to reliable information and analysis about what's being proposed? The new generation of web-based, mobile and user generated journalism is potentially a wonderful addition to the panoply of news sources, but is no substitute for verified facts and painstaking research which holds public and private institutions to account.
Good journalism makes a difference to the kind of society we live in, and we should do everything we can to sustain and encourage it: for a start, maintain the impartiality rules which underscore trust in broadcast journalism; and make the PCC code an integral part of every print and online journalist's contract with their employer. Guaranteeing good professional conduct won't be a panacea for restoring public trust but it would be a start.
Steven Barnett is Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster. Since 2007 has been a specialist adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications since 2007. He is the author of several books on the media and was an Observer columnist for many years. His new book, on the rise and fall of Television Journalism, is being published by Bloomsbury later this year.
NOTES
British Journalism Review is designed as website forum of analysis and debate to monitor the media, submit the best as well as the worst to scruting and to raise the level of the dialogue
Arthur Daley is one of the characters in Minder a British comedy drama about criminal underworld, shown on ITV (1993-1994) and announced that it would go back into production for broadcast in 2009. Arthur Daley isa socially ambitious highly unscrupulous importer-exporter, wholesaler, used-car salesman and anything else, which there was money to be made whether inside the law or not.
PCC is the Press Complaints Commission established in Britain at the beginning of 1991. The Commission replaced a previous body, the Press Council, which progressively lost its authority since its own establishment in 1953.
Дата добавления: 2015-12-08; просмотров: 55 | Нарушение авторских прав