Clay Shirky is fast becoming one of the top thinkers on the future of journalism and if you listen to a talk he gave at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, you will understand why. The Nieman Journalism Lab has an mp3 (here) and the transcript (here).
Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:
The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”
Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved– “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”
Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”
The immediate future is not good -“Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”
Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”
The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.
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Was just discussing this in another forum. Blogger and stat junkie Nate Silver has uncovered what appears to be a completely fraudulent political polling firm:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/strategic-vision-polls-exhibit-unusual.html
This is the kind of stuff we need more of since the newspapers won’t be doing it much longer.
Finally I read something that concisely synchs both what I am seeing in the marketplace with my own tendencies toward news packaging.
This of course points to the scary and exciting possibilities for non-profit organizations that might fill the vacuum left by traditional newspapers.
Now I am wondering how will the television news follow this trend?
From inside the newsroom walls you will hear…”Readers between the ages of 10-32 do not read a daily newspaper.”
The implementation of multi-media on newspaper sites came from what was perceived as interest by the readership and was going to save newspapers? Clicks are decreasing on many sites across the country. Is it less interest, or poor quality?
What does well is “hard news” raw video and if can get a calf and monkey in focus…your golden.
Still no strong ideas for revenue on the web?
Now the thought is less free web forcing readers back to a print publication where advertisers know what they are paying for or premium web subscriptions.
Why are we on the verge of seeing major magazines closing who now provide both a quality web and print product?
If you have ever been involved in readership focus groups, readers don’t know what the hell they like. They only know what they don’t like.
The Shirky interview raises some very valid points. I think the aggregation issue is really the key that undermines the long term viability of traditional news gathering organizations. Indiscreet alliances with advertisers and special interests can be reversed by implementing a different revenue model. But the way people gather and process information in the Internet era may not bode well for any single source of information looking forward.
When you think about the news business before Internet access became ubiquitous, people relied on journalists to gain vicarious access to world leaders and experts. Reporters did interviews, distilled the information and reported the results. That distillation process has always been a weak link, but in general the news organizations with the best reporters (e.g., the NYT) had the most credibility which had a direct impact on readership.
Now in a world of Tweets, blogs, Youtube videos, chat rooms and various other online resources people have somewhat more direct access to leaders and experts. I say “somewhat” because while many statements from leaders/experts are now available directly on line, much of the information is filtered. You get spin, not reporting. But you get spin from a much broader collection of sources — many of whom did not have a voice when we had to rely on a journalist to distill information for us. There has long been an adage in the news business that the real bias in reporting is not in the information that is presented, it is in what is left out. Now it is harder to leave stuff out.
Here’s where the issue of aggregation comes into play. Have many consumers of information become adept at distilling raw information to form their own opinions? You no longer have to rely on a reporter, a newspaper or a network to put things in perspective. In fact, we’ve learned that reporters, newspapers and networks probably never were that objective in presenting the facts anyway.
That really begs the question of whether people will ever be willing to pay for information — assuming the information is top-notch, reliable and timely? Or will people be happy to gather information from a multitude of free sources, some of known questionable authority, and form an opinion on their own?
I think there is a legitimate chicken/egg debate over whether readership/viewing habits declined because information providers entered into unholy alliances with advertisers; or whether information providers consorted with advertisers to cover the shortfall in revenue brought about by people turning to alternate sources of information. I tend to believe a broad-base change in approach to information gathering brought about by 24×7 access to the Internet is the root cause of the problems newspapers, magazines and networks are seeing today. Obviously there are other contributing factors (e.g., the economy, the impact of technology, etc.) . But I think the real issue is people just don’t value trusted sources of information as much as they once did.
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