Future Of Media in Digital Age

Future Of Media in Digital Age

Final essay

Viktoria Arakelyan

Humber College

As the overall excitement about the opportunities and benefits of advent of the Internet gradually falls, it makes the way to the common sense and vital questions, one of them being – what is the future of journalism in the digital era?

Being frightened and bewildered by a new growing source of delivering information to people is perfectly essential. Brock (2013) writes: “ Just as people now complain of being unable to tell what is reliable online, people in the 17th century found that the new way of spreading information outran efforts to assess its accuracy”. Fenton (2012) makes the same point, saying that new form of media undoubtedly caused new wave of concerns, but the concerns themselves aren’t new. But what is fresh about today’s concerns?

First of all, it is the long absence of proven efficient business models that would marry legacy media with digital. When Internet had just emerged, the major aim for news outlets was to launch a website, fill it with content and to “aggregate eyeballs”(Huey et al., 2013). As David Graves put it – “For the first part of the Internet, your stock valuation was driven by your audience size because nobody was making any rational decisions about what things were worth” (as cited in Huey et al., 2013). The general belief was that it is necessary to reach to the widest audience possible, which would later on result in a website being a fertile field for advertising. Keeping the content free was crucial for the sake of building user base. Decade later, the model stays quite the same, with a few exceptions like successful practice of putting a paywall to the website (The New York Times). But that is am exception rather than a rule, keeping in mind that The New York Times is widely known and has a reputation of a standard of journalistic quality among general public. What we see much more often are print outlets struggling to find the way to ‘make it work’ while digital-born outlets (like BuzzFeed) expand their sphere of influence in geometric progression.

In that first concern the second one takes its roots, and in my essay I will mostly concentrate on that. Is there a future for a deep, effort-taking investigative journalism in the age when most outlets have no financial backup for it? Especially given the fact that (Jones, 2009)“There are indications that a lot of people aren’t really interested”. After all, (Brock, 2011) “guidance to daily life problems has always been a faster route to a mass readership than essays about political economy.” Jones suggests that the future of media will be almost fully dependent on what the audience is willing to financially support, thus the presence and quality of what he refers to as “iron core” – bearing witness, follow up, explanatory journalism and investigative report – will be purely determined by demand. He also states that nearly 85% of original report comes from newspapers, while TV and the Web are merely a ‘delivery system’. But today, in the environment of enormous competition, even newspaper journalism as we know it has experienced profound changes that do not seem healthy. According to Knight’s research (2011) nearly 80% of stories in newspapers are either secondary or tertiary and mostly originate from institutions, while the percent of unexpected news/crime report/political report is diminished to 20%. That tendency gave birth to a term ‘churnalism’. Davies (2009) describes ‘churnalists’ as follows – “Journalists who are no longer gathering news but are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false.”

In the digital world, news outlets no longer expect their material to be first to reach the reader. Instead, they work on aggregating content from more immediate outlets and (Knight, 2011) “provide context and meaning to people who already knew the basic facts.” That, in fact, doesn’t sound too bad – good work of providing context sometimes may take even more effort and require more investigation than plain news report. The problem is, ‘giving the context’ part is also done by journalists primarily at their desks, without doing any actual investigation besides advanced Internet research. That is not to say that journalists today all of a sudden became lazy and unprofessional – after all, they are just trying to fit the environment in which readers have most likely been already exposed to the story you are going to write about, and there is no time to go out and collect information, find out the details and reveal generally unknown facts. That situation by many is perceived as a threat to democracy because quality, reliable journalism is a vital aspect to it.

On the other side there are people who consider advent of the Internet highly beneficial for more precise, trustworthy journalism that will become more-than-ever powerful tool for citizen self-policy (which is in the heart of democracy). Lewis (2011) in his TED talk shared his ideas about the future of investigative journalism. He believes that in future journalism will be based on crowdsourcing the news. In his speech he gives two examples of stories that wouldn’t be possible without crowdsourcing. One of them was the story of Ian Tomlinson’s death. While the newspapers covered the story relying on the official statement that it was a death by natural causes, Paul Lewis spent time analyzing twitter posts on the issue and attracting witnesses with the help of social media. Among the great amount of citizens’ footage that shed some light on the truth, he was finally sent a video recording. The video showed policeman slaughtering Tomlinson. That evidence allowed Paul to write an article revealing what actually happened on the first of April, 2009 to Tomlinson. Drawing on this, it is possible to argue that efficient investigative work in some cases actually can be done without leaving ones desk. Since we have Internet, it is not necessary to go and physically find interviewees or witnesses – they often can be reached in social networks. Sometimes, in fact, it is a witness himself who will reach to a journalist through Facebook/Twitter to tell something highly important.

On the other hand, the work of checking your sources can hardly be done solely on the Web. I believe that although crowdsourcing can be really efficient and beneficial, it doesn’t mean that today to be a journalist means to sit at your laptop and ask people on Twitter what happened out there, and aggregating it afterwards, mixing up with press release information or whatever else that doesn’t require leaving your computer. That is what Brock (2011) calls his ‘worst nightmare’ – a world were newspapers are bankrupt, news only come from press releases and amateurs and high-prices newsletters are luxury for rich and powerful.

Presence of amateurs in media is widely discussed – mainly because of blogosphere. Professional journalists argue that bloggers can’t be perceived as trustworthy because they are ‘unedited and unaccountable’ (Huey et al., 2013). But Dave Winer answers to that – “I’m so accountable because I can’t spread it out. I wrote the whole thing. Every word in here is my word.” That might be absolutely true for Winer, but not all bloggers are so honest and aware – some will use their follower base to spread wrong information on purpose, and some will do that just accidentally – but their message will still be spread, leaving readers in misbelief.

That is why I find the clear line between ‘citizen journalism’ and professional media outlets crucial, and that’s why I find preserving quality standards for media crucial. But unfortunately that doesn’t just require a group of journalists to get together and make a decision that something must be changed. With an enormous variety of websites containing loads of entertainment feature stories about relationships, makeup, sex and cute animals, the fight for readers’ attention becomes fiercer than ever. And not many media outlets are in a position where they can risk their initially not huge revenues from ads on their websites to try to force their audience to pay attention to serious news. To be more precise, only huge and well-known outlets can afford that – The New York Times, CNN, BBC, CBC and so on. But there is no evidence for so far that it is possible for a new media to emerge and launch a successful website that will focus strongly on news, not to mention launching a print edition. Meyer (2006) predicted that the last newspaper would print its last copy in United States in 2043. That doesn’t sound nice to me, but that can turn out to be very close to reality. So while we are speaking about “saving the news” we should try to concentrate less on solely preserving the print at any costs, and concentrate more on saving and nourishing the ‘iron core’ of news at any costs, regardless of the platforms we will are dealing with today and ones we will be dealing with in 50 years perspective.

Jones (2009) defines “saving the news” as “finding a commercial model that will sustain professional journalism focused on serious news”. One of the solutions he suggests is “to wring money out of Google”, as Google pays nothing for the aggregated material on GoogleNews. I believe that it would be a right thing to do, if the way will be found to actually do it. It is, to put it simple, quite wrong when organizations that aggregate news profit more than those who generate it.

Summing up, I would say that the advent of the Internet definitely harmed the business and practices of journalism in short-term perspective, but it is rather early to talk about long-term one. Drawing on the research I did and readings I refer to, I can’t say that any effective commercial model has been suggested yet. However, some keys to developing those models can be observed – like Jones’ suggestion to make Google pay for material they aggregate.

Without efficient business model sustaining high traditional standards of journalism doesn’t seem possible. I would dare to say that if for the sake of preserving those standards some or all media outlets will someday have to stop their print edition (if the cost of sustaining one will be higher than revenue) and go exclusively online, that will have to be done. Although I lean towards Brock’s (2013) vision of the future – “ Journalism in most places of the world will be on a mixture of digital, broadcast and print” and Jones’ (2009) metaphor of newspapers in the age of digital being ‘railroad industry in the face of airplanes and automobiles’. He writes that railroad industry survived by hauling freight, and what newspapers have to do today is to find a way to ‘haul freight’.

Michael Kinsley, founder of Slate magazine, says that although he’s been said that “it will all work out somehow” is one thing you are not allowed say in that kind of discussions, that is exactly what he believes (Huey et al., 2013). And I do, too.

Quality journalism is too vital to become extinct, after all.

Bibliography

1. Allan, S. (2012). The Routledge companion to news and journalism. London: Routledge.

2. Brock, G. (2013). Out of print: Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age.

3. Davies, N. (2009). Flat earth news. Trafalgar/Mar.

4. Jones, A. S. (2009). Losing the news: The uncertain future of the news that feeds democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

5. Huey,J., Nisenholtz,M.and Sagan P. (2013). Riptide: What Really Happened to the News. Retrieved from: http://www.niemanlab.org/riptide/

6. Knight, M. (2011). The Origin Of Stories: how journalists find and create stories in an age of social media, competition and churnalism. Paper presented at the IAMCR, Istanbul.

7. Lewis, P., (2011, April). Paul Lewis: Crowdsourcing the news [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_lewis_crowdsourcing_the_news.

8. Meyer, P. (2006). T he vanishing newspaper: Saving journalism in the information age. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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