The production and circulation of independent, quality news is a hallmark of democratic societies with a complex history of commercial practices, regulatory controls and technological innovation. The demise of the existing business model of the local and regional press and of broadcast news in the regions together with the struggle for survival of many national newspapers demands a critical consideration of what we want news for and how it can be delivered.
A recent study by Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research
Centre provides empirical evidence that challenges utopian visions of the internet as a brave new world with everyone connected to everyone else, a non-hierarchical network of voices with equal, open and global access. This latest ‘new’ world of ‘new’ media has not greatly expanded the news that we read or hear or changed mainstream news values and traditional news formats; neither has it connected a legion of bloggers to a mass audience. Rather, as the economic model for traditional news production stumbles and falls in the digital age, professional journalism has become the first casualty, the second, if we’re not careful, and pretty close behind will be the health of our democracy.
The research draws on over 170 interviews with a range of professionals from a cross section of mainstream news media, as well as news sources and new producers online including bloggers and people operating in the realm of alternative news; we added to this, 3 newsroom ethnographies and a content analysis of online news across mainstream news media, online alternative media, social networking sites and YouTube.
We looked at the role of structural factors such as commerce, finance and regulation along with the cultural complexities of journalism, journalistic subjectivities and working practices.
And we found an industry and a practice in trouble.
Newspaper circulation and readership levels are at an all time low; there has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets available including the advent of, and rapid increase in, free papers, the emergence of 24 hour news and the popularization of online and mobile platforms; a decline in advertising revenue alongside cuts in personnel. With regard to local and international news production, the lack of economies of scale means that it is increasingly commercially unviable.
The Newspaper Society notes that 101 local papers closed down between January and August 2009. In those that are surviving fewer people are doing more and more work. Now I know we may all say that about our jobs, but in journalism what we see is the perfect storm – a history of marketisation, deregulation and globalisation, throw new technologies in to the mix (bringing about yet more speed and space and more need to invest in technical infrastructure). These factors combined have had a negative impact on journalism for the public good and in the public interest.
The working context of news media has increased pressures in the newsroom to fill more space (through the expansion of online platforms), work at greater speed (to fill the requirements of 24 hour news and the immediacy of online communication) with fewer journalists in permanent positions and more job insecurity.
"In the old days you had to get up in the morning and read all the newspapers, listen to the Today Programme [.…] Now, in addition to all of that we also have to keep an eye on websites, blogs of others, just in case stories crop up [.…] As on the Internet what we have to contend with is hugely increased sources of information." (Political Newspaper Editor, National Mid-Market)
"... when you’re under those time constraints, the Internet is fabulous but it’s dangerous as well. And I think that, a lot of the time people get things wrong, particularly on 24-hour news channels, it’s because they’re relying on the Internet." (Political Editor, Commercial Broadcasting)
In this environment there is evidence of journalists being thrust into news production more akin to creative cannibalization than the craft of journalism – as they need to fill more space and to work at greater speed while also having improved access to stories and sources online – they talk less to their sources, are captured in desk-bound, cut and paste, administrative journalism. Ready-made fodder from tried and tested sources takes precedence over the sheer difficulty of dealing with the enormity of user generated content or the overload of online information leading to an homogenization of content as ever increasing commercial pressures add to the temptation to rely not just on news agencies but on all cheaper forms of news gathering.
Given the speed of work, and the sheer amount of traffic and noise that journalists are exposed to every day, it is less easy for ordinary citizens and non-elite sources to make direct contact with reporters in mainstream media. In order for journalists to pick out the important information from the ‘blizzard’ online they are forced to create systems of ‘filtration’ based on known hierarchies and established news values. With so little time at their disposal journalists tend to prioritise known, ‘safe’ sources. So mainstream news on-line has not expanded to include a broader diversity of voices or shifted focus according to information filtered through social media.
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And even though there is now a plethora of media outlets, and citizens and civil society can publish media content more easily than ever, there still is a dominance of a limited number of players that control news, information content and public debate. In other words mainstream news matters, maybe more than it ever has done – and most people, most of the time get most of their news from it. Furthermore the organisation of web search tends to send more users to the most popular sites in a winners take all pattern. It seems ever likely that the voices on the web will be dominated by the larger, more established news providers in a manner that, yet again, limits possibilities for increased pluralism.
In some newspapers, the combination of staff reductions and speeded up production schedules mean that only the most established senior, journalists, with the highest level of personal autonomy, have the luxury of leaving the office to talk to people, phoning a number of different people to verify information, or probing for alternative views or contradictions. But its not just the young journalists whose working practices have been transformed:
"They [journalists] don’t even try to talk to you, they just watch breaking news upstairs. I pass them every day when I come in, I pass one of the rooms and I see them watching telly and they’re banging away on the typewriters, all of them [.…] When I first came here [.…] it would be rare for that Lobby not to include some journalists, and sometimes it could be as many as ten or a dozen or twenty. Now, the only people you see in the Lobby are the fellas in the fancy breeches looking after the place [.…] I think it’s the advent of 24 hours news." (Labour MP)
What we’re left with is a contradiction between the transforming potential of new technologies and the stifling constraints of the free market.
The material conditions of contemporary journalism (particularly unprotected commercial practice) do not offer optimum space and resources to practice independent journalism in the public interest. On the contrary, job insecurity and commercial priorities place increasing limitations on journalists’ ability to do the journalism most of them want to do – to question, analyse and scrutinize.
What is the relationship between news media and democracy? A news media that can be relied upon to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power and facilitate and maintain deliberation is critical to a functioning democracy. In a world of one click communication and information overload protecting and enhancing a news media that can aim for this ethical horizon has actually become more important rather than less important. Without it we are left scrambling through the blogosphere, drowning in opinion, with no known serious fact-checking, no requirement to put stories in context, no real way of holding the writer gatherers to account. Where the well resourced and the already powerful are able to shout the loudest, twitter their way to the top of the pile while everyone else whispers in the wind.
How do we preserve it and should government have a role in media structures and behaviour? Any government that truly believes in the basic principles of democracy should be prepared to provide the means by which it can function. This means regulating news media to provide the freedom to operate in the public interest rather than purely for commercial gain. To ignore this is to accept that the market can be relied upon to deliver the conditions for deliberative democracy to flourish. Markets do not have democratic intent at their core. When markets fail or come under threat, ethical practice is swept aside in pursuit of financial stability.
How do we do it? My view is that we need to move towards a system of post-corporate, low profit or not-for-profit news supported by government funding that comes not from the Licence fee but from practices that are popular elsewhere in Europe such as industry levies and the charging of news aggregators that exploit news content.
Comments
Worrying analysis - lovely conclusion. Can we achieve this degree of support? I am concerned about the sensationalism of much so-called news and the trivialisation of news as in BBC Breakfast TV.
Opinion masqerading as fact and newspapers blatantly political in bias - perhaps this is part of the ownership/funding issue - someone with lots of money imposing a style on the news(paper) - is a great concern. Will all Government funding be unbiased - perhaps in Liberal democracies, but where else? I love Al Jazeera!
Worrying analysis - great conclusion. Can we achieve this? In any case, will it happen even in all liberal democracies, let alone others. I love Al Jazeera!
I am concerned about opinion masquerading as fact, political bias blatantly affecting newsworthiness and style - is accuracy being sacrificed to please the owner/funder? Aslo, the trivialisation of news as for example in BBC Breakfast TV?
"we need to move towards a system of post-corporate, low profit or not-for-profit news supported by government funding that comes not from the Licence fee but from practices that are popular elsewhere in Europe such as industry levies and the charging of news aggregators that exploit news content."
well, don't hurry too fast to Europe.
In France, does using "industry levies" mean that we would support our weapons industry, that owns at this moment 4 media groups representing 80% of what is paper-published over here. Superb and costly dancers convenient for dealing with people's opinion.
meanwhile, all our web models for news (RUE89 fouded by former LIBERATION journalists, MEDIAPART founded by former LE MONDE chief editor, AGORAVOX, CONTRINFO, BACKCHICH INFO, DEDEFENSA in Belgium etc.) are still seeking for "some" profitability, the sooner the better, but still pending 2 or 3 years after their "debuts".
Independent NPO and sites that interfere with news work at a micro level on a benevolent basis, gain no profit at all, and do not expect anything from our governement. they rely on donations, annual memberships, and various stuff like merchandising and so on.
the idea to develop referencing with news agregators is brilliant and promising, but still "in limbo" for the type of news system that you are calling for here in France. The langage barrier confronted to the unsufficient number of inhabitants per langage to build a core population slows any idea of dev/ we are currently fixing it through DAILYMOTION that allows multiple langage subtitling, but it represents a huge organisation/coordination for simple associations struggling for life). In my "NPO" we often release videos through DAILYMOTION, GOOGLE and so on... Our last one got a fairly big success -the demystifying of a French TVprogram full of mistakes- with 200 000 views within 4 weeks, but the documentary got 4M viewers on TV, and we got less than 100€ from our spreading/buzzing effort. well well well... we should put M. JAckson online instead of our researches... which alludes to another issue, isn't it?
And yes, we love Al Jazeera, but how many Europeans have a look at it?
TY for this promising survey. BR (reopen911.info)
There is a real disconnect here. I agree with what Natalie Fenton says and think the data reported by Goldsmiths Leverhulme makes sense. Yet I still hope the present mainstream media go broke soon so the type of media that Fenton describes can replace them.
In the United States over half the population considers the journalistic products of the”mainstream media" an abomination in the eyes of men (and women too). The media, with a couple of notable exceptions, are a monoculture that acts as if their words are reality and not an accurate report on what reality is. Study after study, some of uncertain quality, some representing the best that humanity can produce now, show clear, statistically significant patterns of bias both in what they published and in what stories are essentially censored or repressed. For the politically correct, 'never is heard a disparaging word and the skies are not cloudy all day'.
For the politically incorrect (Conservatives, Christians, Republicans, Israelis, Capitalists, Military and special places for George Bush and his Jewish neocon advisors), an unrelenting wall of slander and suppression of contrary news. Even when strong evidence appears that original accusations are untrue, the mainstream media continue to press the original accusations (think of the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby four-year story).
Letters to the mainstream media, petitions, ongoing responses to surveys, are ignored without comment. Any criticism of liberal political correctness is denounced using the by now habitual set of putdowns: conservative, ignorant, racist, sexist, Jewish, illiterate, all ad-hominem arguments and not addressing the issues raised. In public, the politically correct act as if saying the same thing louder actually strengthens the argument. In summary, the media in the US are a decadent monoculture refusing to reform and provide the services people want from news sources.
The Russians had a proverb that sounds better in the original but even in English addresses the current media issues. "In the news there is no truth and in the truth there is no news". There is value in the news media and some people will continue to pay for that value. Coverage of the news is not one of the values of modern news media. In fact, many if not most people would not accept free copies of over 90% of the news media in the US (or the UK for that matter).
Following Lenin, "what is to be done"? The answer is found in what people in this rapidly globalizing world need. Specifically, an accurate representation of what is happening in the world and clear eyed interpretation of events that have value in interpreting and predicting events. Good journalism has value a hundred years later. Modern day politically correct journalism has no information value the day it is published: one reads the story, reads the author, and knows what the article will conclude.
Somehow, many many people feel betrayed by our present day media. Both external studies and internal self-reporting report that nearly 95% of the Media are liberal and politically Democratic. I couldn't get anyone to accept a bet on which US Presidential candidate would be endorsed by the top ten news outlets even when I offered 100/1 odds (all the people I spoke with knew the news outlets would all support the same candidate). The election was decided by a ten percent margin but the main news outlets were unanimous in their advocacy. These arguments are the tip of the iceberg.
The key issue is not to get the public to appreciate the value of free and independent journalism. They do. It is not to get government support of existing journalistic outlets (it will never get public support). It is to regain a politically and intellectually free, independent, and diverse group of news media. Western societies really need them now.
But don't you think that the new generation newspaper journalists are bound to follow the 24*7 channels just to save temselves from the disgrace of 'missing a news'? In this era of 24hours channel there is always a rush for 'creating' news rather than looking for it. For they are always in a hurry of breaking news. And if you have to break news throughout the day then there is no other viable option other than creating it. And the journalists in the newspaper who still can afford to enjoy the luxury (though apparently) of spending the day looking for actual news are always chased by the blackspot of not getting a news that thier colleagues in the TV channels have already 'BROKEN'. Thus they spend the time following news channels and websites.
Tupor:
You neglect to separate syntax from semantics. The facts, or the news stories, syntax, often precedes as you say. Yet the meaning of the facts in relation to other facts, semantics, and the political,economic, military, financial and related contexts is far more valuable to news consumers who live with eight hours sleep and maybe one or two hours/day for the news. One can write a thousand page treatise on one day of a struggle but people will much prefer a narrative description of what happened and what it means to the rest of what is going on in our world.
The modern media tends (but not always) to present syntacticly correct pictures of one viewpoint of a story. They often miss the context of apply the politically correct world view to everything much as "to a hammer everything looks like a nail".
In the TV Station where I work as a copy editor en news programme coordinator we always criticize the new generation of "Copy-Paste" Journalists, that are increasealy growing in number on TV, Radio and Digital Newspapers. As you and your readers say, the hurry to "break the news" lead us to get the maximun amount of fresh information about to anything that could catch our viewers attention, without taking good care if is a real fact, to check the origin of news, and to make shure it is not a creation of amateur "videojournalists" who take their "news" to youtube, and then our media just "copy-paste" and aired and promote them just like the invention of fire, without concerns on the video quality, because "relevance of information worths it".
Months ago, all of my country media informed about a gigant serpent that had swallow a man on a far country small town. Everybody was talking about, and many people told to have seen the animal sorrounding their villages. Some newspapers ant tv channels even use archive footage to show how the "man eater" anaconda should look like. But some weeks later we all fall into reality. It was a lie, a "fairy tale" created to fool our most intelectual and experienced news managers, and our millions of viewers and readers. The anonymous storytellers, obviously, got the success they wanted, and we all learn a lesson that still is a remmemoration of our naiveness and how dependant we are of the sources of information running on the internet and supposed indendent digital media.
Now everytime somebody tell us about a suspicius information, we say: "be carefull no to buy another man-eater anaconda".
So bureaucrats get to commission the news? How exactly is that independent?
Expect lots of articles about Fighting Obesity and Climate Change, and doing your recycling. A Government with a large majority (Thatcher, Blair) should be able to silence dissent for years at a time.
And do I hear OpenDemocracy trying to climb aboard this Gravy Train?
In response to the question: So bureaucrats get to commission the news? How exactly is that independent?
Currently, in the UK we have a situation where the production of news is increasingly commercially unviable and those commercial news enterprises that remain are straining at the seams. This is not independent either – it is entirely dependent on the market. If you want a news industry that functions for the public good and in the public interest, that is freed to some extent, from commercial imperatives, you have to pay for it. This does not mean that bureaucrats get to commission the news but it may mean that an independent regulator ensures that certain criteria are met before funding is released. These critieria could include a requirement to meet pre-established standards of transparency in news reporting.
To emphasize original news content over news aggregation and pure distribution all news organizations could be required to be accountable for their own coverage and be seen to embrace transparency in their news gathering activities and, wherever possible, declare the source of their information to encourage original, investigative reporting and limit cannibalization and over-reliance on news agencies - particularly important for overseas coverage.
So what I’m saying is that there are values at the heart of news making that desperately need protecting if we are to preserve the relationship between news and democracy.
I can also start on 21k a year. Although I worry that I am 'selling out' and could be highly successful in journalism. Is such a big gap in pay such a big deal?Finally, there are lots of power hungry people in an organisation like the police. I have seen people become unstuck in all sorts of ways, and believe me it is scary.
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2222539
Independent, in-depth journalism was never financially viable, but when our news came bundled together with sport and entertainment publishers could effectively cross-subsidise it. A small minority would read it, but it was deemed worth supporting for its prestige value. Online, however, readers and advertisers alike are attracted to individual stories, not to news outlets as a whole, and that is what undermines the old model.
State support would be one solution. Another model for supporting independent, in-depth journalism, recognising that it will always be a minority genre (even if its democratic value might be disproprtionately greater because it has an important opinion-leading role), is to appeal directly to readers for donations or sponsorship. Some online news outlets have made a go of it: Montpellier Journal in France (http://www.montpellier-journal.fr), Britské listy, a widely-respected 'independent' voice in Czech journalism (http://www.blisty.cz/) which also has an English-language supplement (http://www.czechfocus.cz/), not to mention ... Open Democracy;-)
On a larger scale, and pre-dating the Internet, Le Monde Diplomatique (with a worldwide paper circulation of 2.5 million in 27 languages) has long been part-owned by its readers through the association Les Amis du Monde Diplomatique, a sort of readers' club with local branches that hold regular meetings.
The one thing that quality journalism has going for it is reader loyalty and the sense of 'ownership' people feel towards a brand, as a space for a mode of communication they value.
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