Why is our news today a mile wide and an inch deep, on the face of it a huge offering but actually very shallow? Stephen Jukes, former global Head of News at Reuters, examines the shrinkage in traditional news in Britain and beyond.
TO ASSERT THAT Britain’s regional and local press is in crisis because of the recession is to state the obvious.
But in fact, the reasons behind the crisis sweeping through newspaper titles and broadcasting alike are far more complex. We are witnessing the convergence of a series of deep rooted changes which are fundamentally reshaping today’s creative media industry. It is a mix of technological revolution, new economics and recession or, to use what has become a journalistic cliché, a perfect storm.
That storm has its origin in global trends that have been gathering pace over the past decade.
Instant communications technology has brought far reaching change which makes the Internet revolution of the 1990s look tame by comparison. Today’s generation of media consumer is, to use a phrase I will examine in detail later, a “digital native”. This means that social networking and user generated content is now the norm. News is no longer the prerogative of the chosen few journalists, it is now in the public domain. Put simply, the media are no longer in control of their destiny.
New technology has also ushered in new business models. In short, New Media equals New Economics. And while media organisations grapple with this and the still unresolved conundrum of how to make money in New Media, recession has brought the regional and local industry to its knees.Together, these trends have combined to create an unprecedented crisis that is creating lasting structural change in the industry. The greatest threat is that we are seeing less and less original reporting, a homogenised news agenda which focuses on image and sensation and a consolidation in ownership which drastically reduces the plurality of the news offering.
Of course, it is true that the digital revolution has brought new tools which are being used for the generation of news, not least mobile phone images, blogs and – the latest innovation – Twitter. But this material often does not stand up to scrutiny as news and it is no means certain that it will compensate for the growing deficit in traditional reporting.
The technological revolution
It seems incredible to think that when I started in journalism thirty years ago that I was using a typewriter, ‘sandwiches’ of paper and carbon paper which subeditors would ‘cut and paste’ into shape. By the mid-1980s, as a Reuters foreign correspondent in the Middle East covering amongst other things the Iran-Iraq war, I was struggling to master what Fleet Street was calling ‘new technology’. In my case, this was a Radio Shack Tandy 100, complete with acoustic coupler. Given a good phone line, and a bit of luck, stories could be transmitted back to London, followed of course by a phone call to see if the text had actually landed somewhere. But if the phone receiver happened to be the wrong shape and didn’t fit into the coupler, it simply wouldn’t work!
By 1989, communications were slightly more advanced but when the Berlin Wall came down we had no mobile phones to compare with today. It was a matter of holding normal telephone lines open and hoping that you could find one! But soon after that the pace started to pick up – the 1991 war against Iraq put CNN on the map, by 1996 America Online was starting to make a name for itself, and in 1988 the Drudge Report broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (although it has to be said only because Newsweek decided not to run with the story).
But the pace would quicken still further in the last eight years. The 2003 Gulf War saw television correspondents reporting live from the battle front by video phone; and then something else changed — the ability for everyone to take and transmit images ushered in the age of user generated content or the ‘citizen journalist’. When bombers struck the London transport system on July 7, 2005, film crews couldn’t gain access to the Underground tunnels. But passengers caught up in the bombing took pictures with their mobile phones and sent them in their hundreds to the BBC and other news organisations. The same was true when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; or when the Asian tsunami wreaked its havoc on Boxing Day 2004.
The mobile phone, in the hands of a digitally literate population, suddenly changed the relationship between the media and consumers of news. Under the old model, foreign correspondents would tell the public what they needed to know, when they ‘needed’ to know it (i.e. when it suited them). Today, consumers of news pull down what they need, when they need it and how they need it. Sometimes, as in the examples above, they have actually contributed to the news gathering.
These are today’s digital natives, a term popularised by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 2005. There he set out the dilemma facing his generation of “digital immigrants”, none other than the owners, movers and shakers of the established media organisations.
“The peculiar challenge then is for us ‘digital immigrants’ to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience of dealing with,” said Murdoch.While immigrants often succeed in learning the language of their adopted country, they often retain an accent. In the digital world, the immigrant’s accent manifests itself differently but no less clearly. How often have I caught myself printing out an email to read, or ploughing through the instruction booklet of a digital camera that a digital native would simply switch on and use!
While Murdoch was pondering the generation gap and its consequences, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was spelling out how technology had fundamentally shifted the balance of power away from the media organisations. In his parting shot at the media in June 2007, Blair spoke of “a radical change in the nature of communication.” The Media, he said, were no longer the masters of this change but its victims. He went on to bemoan the impact of web-based news, blogs and 24-hour news channels to draw the conclusion that standards were unravelling. He spoke of a “Media that increasingly, and to a dangerous degree, is driven by impact.”
“Impact,” he said, “is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed.”
More news? Or less?
So did Blair call it right? Certainly he didn’t pull his punches but nor did he really address the idea that there may be some sort of trade-off between new and old media. Clearly, instant communication is driven by image, is emotionally charged and does tend to be superficial. It caters for a short attention span and often shuns the less sensational, analytical story. On the other hand, it is certainly true that new media has brought a wealth of content we would never have otherwise seen.
There are two key questions here.
Firstly, to what extent is this user generated content news? Does it stack up when judged by traditional news values of being fair, objective and free from bias?
Secondly, does this user generated content stand alone or is it, at best, complementary to a traditional feed of news about a specific subject?
Assuming video captured on mobile phones or otherwise is genuine, and has not been doctored, it is reasonable to suggest that footage of the Asian tsunami uploaded to YouTube does pass the test of being free from bias. It simply shows what happened and offers no comment. Another strong example is the video footage of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson who died during clashes with the police at G20 demonstrations in London earlier this year. Had it not been for a U.S. investment banker, who filmed Tomlinson, the public would never have known that he was struck on the leg and pushed to the ground by a police officer. The case was taken up by The Guardian and quickly became mainstream news. Arguably this had a profound impact on the British public’s perception of policing, shattering the cosy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ image of the friendly neighbourhood bobby.
On top of this feed of complementary news material, comes the latest technological innovation that is Twitter. By the end of June this year there were already 45 million users worldwide. News of the U.S. Airways jet’s miraculous crash landing on the River Hudson was captured by Twitter, as Janis Krum, on a ferry close to the scene ‘twittered’: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up people. Crazy.” It has become so pervasive as a medium that it seems to be almost backward not to twitter from a meeting. So much so that the Editor of Reuters, David Schlesinger, felt it necessary to remind his reporters about basic ground rules for using the new medium.
But here it is clear that we are talking about a communication medium that may not be just about news in its traditional sense. It seems that Iranian opposition figures, frustrated by the outcome of June’s re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used Twitter to coordinate demonstrations and rallies. That in itself is a story but it serves to remind us that not all communication is news in its own right.
New economics and old-style recession
The other main factor in play is economics, both new-style and old-style. These economic forces seem to be working against the plurality and diversity of news and are combining to create the crisis in the regional and local press. The whole thrust of New Media economics is to gather the news once and produce it — and sell it — multiple times across multiple platforms. In practical terms, this means that journalists, especially on regional and local newspapers, are multi-tasking, writing a story, taking still pictures and shooting video. And then editing the package, uploading it to the website… and so it goes on. It is a classic triumph of form over content. Journalists are almost chained to the production desk, becoming factory-style processors of content rather than generators of news. So there is less and less time to gather original news.
In addition to that, the actual number of journalists is shrinking as the industry consolidates worldwide. This trend had been gathering pace over the past decade and is particularly marked in America where Disney, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner and News Corp dominate the landscape, supplemented of course by Microsoft and Google.In the UK, the same consolidation has swept through the newspaper industry. In 1992, some 200 companies owned newspapers. By 2005, 10 companies owned 74 per cent of the British regional press.
The recession has given this trend added impetus as advertising revenues plunge and organisations seek to reduce costs. In Britain, the picture in broadcasting is one of crisis. ITV has cut its news regions to eight from 17 and laid off 1,000 jobs last year. Channel Four has mounted a vigorous campaign for public finance while also shedding staff. In the middle of all this, the BBC is clearly on the back foot, defending its state funding from a series of attacks, not least in the government’s Digital Britain report. The fortunes of regional and local newspapers are even more dire. Sixty titles closed last year and well over 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Overall sales declined by seven per cent and advertising revenue fell by 15.8 per cent.
With hindsight, it is clear that newspapers made two fundamental strategic errors.
Firstly, newspapers believed that they could protect advertising revenue — their lifeblood — by setting up web sites. But advertisers, instead of simply transferring their business loyally across to the newspaper site found they had far more effective ways of doing business. In short, those small ads migrated to specialist web sites, for car sales and the like, which are able to draw on a far wider market and offer customers greater choice. UK newspaper advertising revenue is expected to fall further still this year, by some estimates by up to 21 per cent.
Secondly, newspapers believed that news would have a monetary value on the web. This too was wrong. So far only a handful of newspapers, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, have managed to charge customers for news. This is, to use the jargon, ‘value added’ specialist financial news, out of the mainstream commoditised pool of what is general news and widely available for free. Murdoch is now attempting to turn back the clock after 15 years of free news, stating what is frankly the obvious, namely that the current economic model is not sustainable.”Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch stated recently.
But many media commentators believe that even Murdoch will not get his way this time. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest newspaper publisher, posed the obvious question: “Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?”
Shrinking news
The impact then of new and old economics is hugely damaging. Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, last year broke the taboo that dog doesn’t eat dog by writing a scathing book about the state of the media. Entitled Flat Earth News, the book sets out Davies’s central argument that less and less original news is being generated. Partly because of cost cutting, and partly because of the need for speed, fewer stories are being written, fewer stories are being checked and increasingly newspapers are falling back on agency copy (within the UK principally from the Press Association) and public relations material.
“The profession (of journalism) has become damaged to the point where most of its members are no longer able to do their job,” he writes. “They work in structures which positively prevent them discovering the truth.”
This damning verdict on the media is supported by academic research that Davies commissioned at Cardiff University. Their researchers examined the news sections of five mainstream newspapers, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Mail. They found that 60 per cent of stories were wholly or partly made up copy either taken from the Press Association of from public relations agencies. A further 20 per cent of stories contained clear elements from these sources. In fact, the researchers were only able to state with any certainty that 12 per cent of the copy was original and generated by a newspaper’s own staff.
That shocking finding illustrates the extent to which the content of today’s newspapers has been reduced to a commodity and become infiltrated by PR. There is also another threat to newspapers in the form of a wave of alternative players now emerging — online only newspapers such as The Huffington Post, local council newspapers (proliferating at a rapid rate), community websites and blogs of all flavours and persuasions.
But does this proliferation of new media, much as Twitter or mobile phone pictures, compensate for the shrinkage in traditionally generated news?
In my view it does not. Not least this is because so often, these new media outlets do not offer news that passes the most basic tests of objectivity and freedom from bias. The journalist Henry Porter, who writes in the Observer, put it very succinctly in a recent article for the paper:
“All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an inquest or badgering local bobbies, democracy and accountability in Britain would not be possible…”
…the web might give you the cinema times but it won’t tell you which planning official is in bed with a supermarket chain.”
The impact of the digital revolution is now being subjected to increasing scrutiny and was the subject of a recent analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A paper written by Andrew Currah, an Oxford lecturer specialising in the digital economy, reached an alarming conclusion:”
Increasing commercial pressure, driven by the inherent characteristics of the digital revolution, is undermining the business models that pay for news,” Currah wrote in his study, ‘What’s Happening to our News’ earlier this year.
“…this threatens to hollow out the craft of journalism and adversely impact the quality and availability of independent factual journalism in Britain.”
Change is here to stay
So where does this leave us all? Certainly the industry is still very much in state of flux or, to return to the original analogy, the storm is still raging. But I think it is safe to say that the changes we have already witnessed are here to stay.
There is a clear danger that our news today is a mile wide and an inch deep, on the face of it a huge offering but actually very shallow. Technology and economics have combined to reduce the amount of traditional news gathering. Regional news appears to be most at threat but the same processes are narrowing the scope of reporting at a national and international level.
Without doubt, technology has brought us news we would never have seen before. YouTube, Flickr and Twitter are new tools which clearly can play a role in newsgathering and do have the potential for significant social and democratic impact alongside more traditional notions of journalism. But these new tools are not at the moment fully compensating for the shrinkage in traditional news.The one clear lesson is that news in no longer the prerogative of a chosen few journalists but of the many. And the new media landscape will undoubtedly see the profession of journalism and the community of others who are generating content — of all types — working far more closely together.
Stephen Jukes, formerly the global Head of News at Reuters, is Dean, Media School, Bournemouth University. He can be reached at sjukes@bournemouth.ac.uk
