Listening to Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch podcast this morning, I heard this fascinating excerpt from ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra program three weeks ago, from former editor of The Age and publisher of online business publications The Business Spectator and the Eureka Report, Alan Kohler, responding to former News Limited editor Campbell Reid:
I actually agree with Campbell in the sense that journalism is extremely vibrant at the moment; there’s a lot going on, but for precisely the opposite reason to Campbell, and that is that I believe that newspapers are dying. But not only does that not matter, I think it’s a great thing. I think newspapers hold journalism back for a couple of reasons.
One is that they’re an incredibly inefficient way of delivering information. They require a whole lot of wood pulp, they need to be delivered using a whole lot of energy to get them there. They get wrapped up in plastic, and so they’re terrible for the planet. And secondly, they’re incredibly limited in scope and size. I mean the size of the newspaper each day — and I’ve been an editor of two of them; I know this — that the size of the newspaper each day is determined by the amount of advertising that’s been sold for that particular paper. So whether the book is for 54 pages or 32 pages is decided not by the stories that are around or the requirement of the public for information that particular day, it’s decided by the advertising. And also because it’s so expensive to produce, it comes out just once a day. And I just don’t think that’s very good. And I think that the reason that the newspaper circulations are declining is because not only people realise that the newspaper is not particularly good for them, or the planet, they get dirty, they get ink all over their hands, but also they’ve now got an alterative, which is the internet. And Wendy’s right, I mean the internet is by far the best way to deliver journalism. It goes all the time, and Business Spectator is going 24 hours a day, there is any number; we can publish any amount of articles that need to be published. It’s entirely flexible. If there’s a lot happening in the world, if there’s a big story going on, it’s just infinitely expandable. And you know, I mean you can see it now with all of the newspapers themselves publishing far more on their websites than they do in the paper
Hear hear.
The intersection of the global financial crisis and new communications technologies have seen the newspaper industry hit hard, particularly in the US. Newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been shutting down while others continue to strip staff and the amount of news produced each day.
The common refrain from professional journalists and newspaper publishers is that they fear the loss of “quality” or “public trust” journalism. The theory goes that only professional newspaper newsrooms can produce important journalism which is an essential element of a free democracy.
Others have lashed out at the new technology, attacking bloggers as uninformed amateurs and accusing Google News of “stealing” copyrighted materials:
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp. and The Wall Street Journal, says Google and Yahoo are giant copyright scofflaws that steal the news.
“The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright … not steal, but take,” Murdoch says. “Not just them, but Yahoo.”
Apart from the insanity of Murdoch threatening to remove his material from Google News (resulting in a dramatic loss of audience to the many, many, many other news sources available), it’s worth actually considering how much of this theoretical “quality journalism” is in today’s newspapers?
Most of Australia’s newspapers, the News Limited tabloids, have settled into a comfortable pattern of publishing a light-hearted mix of celebrity gossip and racism. The Australian‘s pages, when they delve into serious issues of politics, are rarely more than cheerleaders for their conservative owner’s positions. The Herald and the Age are better, but have already moved a long way towards adopting the tabloid model. You only need look at the SMH website, whose content is hard to distinguish from that on the Daily Telegraph website.
There are some sharp and interesting journalists reporting on Australian politics, but even those fall below the insights available from similar political journalists at outfits like the ABC, Crikey and Sky News. In my own sphere of psephology, there is not a single journalist working for any Australian newspaper who is devoted to coverage of elections, and the little psephological analysis quickly descends into superficial horse-race coverage and the spinning of polls to give them more significance than they really have, in order to justify a newspaper’s expenditure in producing them.
Even in the case of Antony Green, who does excellent work for the ABC and has given a lot to the science of psephology in Australia, others would easily pick up the slack on blogs and online news websites if he were to cease working as a journalist.
As Kohler said, the future of journalism and the news is online. There is no alternative. Newspapers are slow-moving, resource-intensive and using a business model that does not work in today’s online news-rich environment. As far as I’m concerned, their ultimate demise could not come a day too soon. Most cities around the world have now been reduced to one newspaper, and it is only a matter of time before Sydney and Melbourne follow. The Australian newspaper industry will end up following the MX model, with News Limited tabloids being handed out for free in the mornings and the evenings, and the broadsheets doomed to the scrap-heap.
Does anyone really believe that quality journalism can’t survive in another form? We’re still only seeing the beginnings of the development of online news websites and blogs in Australia, but so far the evidence is that most news coverage can be ably provided by a large number of smaller outfits. We will see the rise of larger news websites with the budgets to do investigative, in-depth, professional journalism, the kind that has largely already disappeared from Australia’s newspapers. We will still have the ABC, which is deftly navigating the move to an open-source online environment. I find Radio National’s podcasts to be a fantastic source of information, even though I have never actually listened to Radio National, and don’t plan to.
It was fascinating, as well, to see the way that Twitter has begun to fill the niche of instantly reporting “breaking news” stories. Just yesterday, I saw the story of the blackout in the northern part of Sydney’s CBD appear on Twitter long before any traditional news outfit had reported on it. It was possible to learn about the blackout within minutes of it beginning, and quickly get an understanding for its geographical reach, as Twitterers from different parts of the city reported in. Indeed, SBS’s first reports used Twitter as its main source in reporting on the story.
The other concern many have about the loss of newspapers is the loss of local news coverage. It’s true that Australian blogs have not yet filled the gap of local news for different cities and towns, yet if you look at the US you can see the rise of locally-centred blogs covering issues in their community in a far superior way to my experience of local papers in my own suburb. Indeed, I would argue that RiotACT is on par with the Canberra Times in reporting local news in the ACT. As newspapers continue to decline, we will see similar blogs evolve and develop in all of Australia’s major cities, with bloggers covering events in their own little corner of the world.
We’re going through a revolution in news media. Newspapers are dying, and I don’t really believe that it’s possible for them to adapt in a way that will keep them surviving. It’s not quite clear yet how the revolution will end up, but I believe it’s for the best. The vested interests in the newspaper industry might cry about the loss of their monopoly as their cartel crumbles, but they are already being replaced by something that is far superior, far more creative and far more informative.
Newspapers have only themselves to blame – by moving from investigative journalism to opinion pieces they turned news into a format that bloggers can produce better. However, blogging simply has not filled the void of investigative journalism. Even in politics, which I think is the height of news blogging at the moment, bloggers use the raw opinion polls paid for by newspapers. Yes, they analyse them better than newspapers and I read them in preference, but has http://www.fivethirtyeight.com actually sponsored any of its own polls? Blogging needs professional (ie paid) journalists to produce the raw material. One of the issues of the internet is that the volume of data is enormous, but the quality is highly variable. When war broke out in Georgia, which blogger did you trust to give unbiased analysis? Which blog sent a foreign correspondent?
As much as anyone, I am part of the problem. I only consume news on google news, blogs and podcasts. The problem is – if I don’t pay a cent for news, I am not paying for the generation of original stories that cost money.
I don’t deny that blogging has yet to fill the void. But I think that eventually an advertising model will allow a wide variety of blogs to function semi-professionally.
I know that in 2008 Daily Kos commissioned a lot of its own polls, including a daily presidential tracking poll.
This is an issue close to my heart. I agree that printed newspapers are dying, but I don’t think quality journalism as we have known it can continue to exist. The transition to the net has already happened for IT magazines, A Because computer users are more likely to use the net, B Because computer software can now be more easily distributed by the net rather than CD/DVD/Floppy Disk. I have the March 1995 issue of MacFormat magazine. The headline article is a dozen A4 pages of insightful and heavily researched journalism which looks at the place of artificial life in science, art and popular culture and includes high res images from film, games and cutting edge research. Included on this disk is a range of related software demos SimCity, and freeware Alife software.
Articles like this are absent from most of the IT websites you can find these days. Most of the IT journalism on the web today is in the form of rewritten press releases. New Product! New Technology! Stories like these have always been the bread and butter of IT journalism, but in the age of the net reflective and researched writing is mostly dead. I would hate to see the same happen to mainstream news.
People used to read newspapers to get other people’s views and opinions. Now you can go online and seek opinions that match your own. The Telegraph may be full of redneck pandering hate speech, but it is moderate compared to some of the stuff out on the web. How are people’s prejudices going to be challenged if all they read is stuff written by people like themselves? How are insular people going to discover the rest of the world if all they read about is on special interest sites. If there is no benchmark mainstream media in a traditional format, how do we distinguish cranks, conspiracy theorists and ignorant opinion from informed journalism. How does an investigative journalist who blogs, defend themselves from litigation without the support of a major media masthead? Must they publish anonymously and therefore have no identity or reputation or credibility?