Future Journalism
September 1, 2006 by Dave Earley
Filed under Media, News
There were two pieces in The Australian’s Media section yesterday (August 31) on the death of newspapers and, by extension, journalism.
One was an article reprinted from The Economist (which appeared there August 24) on the demise of print newspapers, the other a response by Mark Day titled ‘Journalism’s Shaky Future’ (or ‘Future of journalism strikes at the depths’, if you turn the page in the print edition).
I probably shouldn’t start this post with the most pedantic of all my points, but I will, since it was in the second paragraph of the Mark Day piece and I think, while it is a simple mistake, could be the basis of a misunderstanding about what the internet actually does or is.
Type the words “death of newspapers” into the Google search engine and you’ll get 52.7 million references.
No, you won’t. You’ll get a much less impressive 26,800 references. Often when people refer to the number of Google hits as an indicator of popularity or pervasiveness, they have forgotten to put the quotations around the search. 26,800 is the number of Google results on the phrase, “death of newspapers”. The search is made a phrase by the presence of the quotation marks around it. Without them, 61.1 million is, by my search, the number of Google hits you’ll get on the three unrelated words death, of, and newspapers. A small point but if you’re going to quote anything, be they results, numbers, or interviewee’s words, get them right. That’s basic journalism, is it not?
I’ve been guilty of getting quotes wrong in the past (with as-yet-unknown consequences for my employability in the future as a journalist – in the News Empire specifically, but possibly elsewhere), but a seasoned journalist should be expected to get it right. As an aside, the phrase “death of journalism” yields 13,600 results in Google, the three unrelated words death, of and journalism, a whopping 33.9 million results.
Now I’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on.
Mark Day pointed out that, while at the PANPA Conference there was much talk of readers and advertisers moving to the internet,
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.
Mark Day is right, but misguided. Soft news, gossip and the like are increasingly pervasive and disturbingly so, but it is by no means simply an ‘online’ trend. Even The Australian has been guilty of it, running half-page pictures of Kid Rock and Pamela Lee-Anderson(-Rock?) in their world news section, for example. From memory there were several items during a single week, including the one just mentioned, that made me wonder why I was reading gossip magazine material in the world news section of a publication I respect.
Yes, the internet might foster the uptake of this ‘pop-news’, but newspapers should be careful about throwing stones. Far be it from me to call out, “Admit defeat! Newspapers are dead!” They’re not, but as I said two weeks ago, they must adapt.
One of the key points in Mark Day’s “death of journalism” piece is his reference to the ‘flow-on’ effect of the profit squeeze on newspapers.
If newspapers can no longer afford to underwrite the best journalism, it has a flow-on effect. Breakfast radio [...] would be lost without the stories produced by newspapers.
[...]
[As would] evening television news services [... and] internet news services.
Internet news services shouldn’t be experiencing a flow-on effect from newspapers, they should be the primary source. This is because they are not separate entities. Internet news services are, in the main, traditional media outlets cutting and pasting onto a web page the same information they have already themselves presented elsewhere. So it will make not a bit of difference whether you read the articles I linked to above in print, or online – they are the same.
What this comes down to is an issue of timeliness. Why did Mark Day’s response to the Economist article take a full seven days to be printed? Was it held back from both the internet and any print editions of the paper in that time period just so it could appear in the Media section on Thursday morning? There is no good reason for news outlets not to break stories on their internet service first, and let the newspaper experience the flow-on effect.
The majority of people who read news online get it from a major traditional media outlet – the websites belonging to newspapers and TV and radio stations – not an alternative media source. As such, denigrating the serious online news the majority of people read is denigrating the same traditional news Mark Day is defending. It is backward to think of the internet presence of a newspaper as simply a ‘flow-on’ of the print edition. It shouldn’t be about cutting and pasting a story onto the internet, it should be about thinking outside of the traditional news cycle ‘box’, and also breaking news outside of it.
The question of when news will go online should be of no particular concern. That it has already started the migration, and continues to do so, is no reason for journalists to fear a downgrade in quality. Admittedly there may be fewer jobs, but not less quality, because attracting consumers is not simply a matter of pandering to populist trash. Consumers know what they want, and it will still be good copy and informative news. They just might not want the Wealth, Business, Sport, National, International, Healthy Living, Cars, Employment, Racing Guide and, dare I say it, Media liftouts to go with it.
