[Reader-list] The future of journalism

[Rana Dasgupta]

Interesting article from the Economist on the future role (if any) of 
traditional journalism in circulating fact and opinion, and some of the 
alternative forms and business models that might supplement or supplant 
it.  And the change in the ethos of information and news that this would 
imply.

R


The future of journalism

Yesterday's papers
Apr 21st 2005 | LONDON, NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO
 From The Economist print edition

Is Rupert Murdoch right to predict the end of newspapers as we now know 
them?

“I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with 
our readers,” Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the 
world's largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper 
Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, 
are ditching their newspapers. Today's teens, twenty- and 
thirty-somethings “don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to 
tell them what's important,” Mr Murdoch said, “and they certainly don't 
want news presented as gospel.” And yet, he went on, “as an industry, 
many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.”

The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said 
it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business 
officially woke up to the new realities of the internet age. Talking at 
times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian 
old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as 
his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their 
audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where 
“bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and 
editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and 
reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”.

Mr Murdoch's argument begins with the fact that newspapers worldwide 
have been—and seem destined to keep on—losing readers, and with them 
advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of 
Newspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in 
Japan. In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; 
today only half do so. Philip Meyer, author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: 
Saving Journalism in the Information Age” (University of Missouri 
Press), says that if the trend continues, the last newspaper reader will 
recycle his final paper copy in April 2040.

The decline of newspapers predates the internet. But the 
second—broadband—generation of the internet is not only accelerating it 
but is also changing the business in a way that the previous rivals to 
newspapers—radio and TV—never did. Older people, whom Mr Murdoch calls 
“digital immigrants”, may not have noticed, but young “digital natives” 
increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, 
and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for “web logs”, these are 
online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post. 
Whereas 56% of Americans haven't heard of blogs, and only 3% read them 
daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online 
Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA 
Today/Gallup.

Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools 
that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages 
that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants, 
may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for 
instance, wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing 
dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and 
surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers. Photoblogs are 
becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting (a conjunction 
of iPod, Apple's iconic audio player, and broadcasting) lets both 
professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download 
and listen to.

It is tempting, but wrong, for the traditional mainstream media (which 
includes The Economist) to belittle this sort of thing. It is true, for 
instance, that the vast majority of blogs are not worth reading and, in 
fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in traditional 
newspapers). On the other hand, bloggers play an increasingly prominent 
part in the wider media drama—witness their role in America's 
presidential election last year. The most popular bloggers now get as 
much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most newspapers. Many 
bloggers are windbags, but some are world experts in their field. 
Matthew Hindman, a political scientist at Arizona State University, 
found that the top bloggers are more likely than top newspaper 
columnists to have gone to a top university, and far more likely to have 
an advanced degree, such as a doctorate.

Another dangerous cliché is to consider bloggers intrinsically parasitic 
on (and thus, ultimately, no threat to) the traditional news business. 
True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that 
originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, 
mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that 
bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose 
political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, 
often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or 
Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of 
the word.

“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own 
content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging 
global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in 
San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (O'Reilly, 2004), a book 
about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in 
South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” 
says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already 
has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them 
volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by 
some 50 permanent staff.

With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also 
likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. 
Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to 
their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog 
clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of 
specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their 
content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to 
their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, an 
OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in 
tips from readers, though most of the site's revenues come from advertising.

The tone in these new media is radically different. For today's digital 
natives, says Mr Gillmor, it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, 
they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue. They are at 
once less likely to write a traditional letter to the editor, and more 
likely to post a response on the web—and then to carry on the 
discussion. A letters page pre-selected by an editor makes no sense to 
them; spotting the best responses using the spontaneous voting systems 
of the internet does.

Even if established media groups—such as Mr Murdoch's—start to respond 
better to these changes, can they profit from them? Mr Murdoch says that 
some media firms, at least, will be able to navigate the transition as 
advertising revenue switches from print-based to electronic media. 
Indeed, this is one area where news providers can use technology to 
their advantage, by providing more targeted audiences for advertisers, 
both by interest group and location. He also thinks that video clips, 
which his firm can conveniently provide, will be crucial ingredients of 
online news.

But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and 
subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large 
a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of 
news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is 
shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the 
audience itself. Newspapers, Mr Murdoch implies, must learn to 
understand their role as providers of news independent of the old medium 
of distribution, the paper.