Journalism is Dead; Long Live Journalism!
by Reilly Yeo
Managing director, OpenMedia.ca.
- First Posted: Jun 09 2009 16:01 PM
- Updated: almost 2 years ago
The digital media revolution isn't as scary as it seems to some, but nor does it hold easy solutions to the problems plaguing journalism.
When I first started my current job as an Online Community Facilitator, someone in his 60s said to me, “I understand why op-eds matter; I just don’t think that a blog matters.”
This shocked me. I thought it was obvious to everyone that traditional media was rapidly losing the competition with online media. If an op-ed matters, then a well-written blog matters (though on any given day I might argue that neither of them matters).
But the shift to digital culture has been so huge that it has opened up a massive generation gap – a point brought home to me again by the reaction of most of my over-40 colleagues and friends to the imminent demise of CanWest. The shock and anxiety they feel – even those who despise media concentration and everything CanWest stands for – puzzles me.
I guess this is because I can’t remember those halcyon days when newspapers were honest and true and exposed the corruption at the root of our society, creating a modern acropolis. I assume that those days existed, because lots of people (philosopher Jurgen Habermas, for instance) say they did. But for all of my adult life I’ve taken it for granted that if I wanted to know the “real story” about something, I would have to be savvy about cobbling it together myself from different sources. And if I was going to get part of it through a newspaper, I would have to wade through a lot more populist trash and partisan hackery than was often worth my time.
I haven’t touched a print newspaper in several years – and I’ve never, in my memory, touched a CanWest one. I also can’t remember the last time I saw a CanWest channel on TV, unless I was on the plane. I’m mostly outside the reach of that octopus, though there are two regular exceptions: local papers staring mockingly out of newspaper boxes in Vancouver; and the Full Comment section of The National Post online.
Why the National Post online? First, because it’s well-adapted to the online environment – it’s frequently updated with good use of RSS feeds and, most importantly, a total unleashing of the ego. Second, because I think it’s important to read things I (mostly) disagree with.
Where I do sympathize with anxiety about the end of traditional media is with the concern that, in the online environment, most people don’t read things that they disagree with. Or if they do, it’s so they can write angry, idiotic 140-character rants in reply. This is definitely a problem, but it’s not a problem traditional media somehow had under control before the Interweb came along and screwed everything up.
Traditional media has to experiment within the online environment. This is indisputable. CanWest will fail (sooner or later) not just because they placed profits before people, but because the new media environment demands innovation, and that’s something big institutions are really terrible at. Experiments like The REAL News, The Tyee, ProPublica and The Mark itself are promising. But if what we really want is media that improves the health of our society, the first question we need to answer isn’t “How do we get paid to do online what we were doing in print?” but rather “How do we use these new tools to convene diverse groups of people for meaningful conversations online?”
Comments
Re:Marks
“ A few scenarios 1) Government will bail out the newspapers, like they did with GM. Sound scary, big-brother-ish? Journalists will protest? No, I think many established journalists care about earning a paycheque more than spreading the 'truth'. The CBC will get a whole lot bigger, but there will be a whole lot of layoffs, kicking and screaming first. 2) "The Toronto Star, by Rogers Cable." Guess what, online news isn't free. It's part of the $100+ per month you pay in your Internet/Mobile phone bills. Online info costs about 10 TIMES MORE than a newspaper subscription! If the government doesn't prop the news up, the TELCO giants will officialize their de facto ownership, as it is clearly a big part of their oligopolistic cash cow. 3) 1) and 2) are mostly stop gap measures, I admit. Centrally organized news will die out. Bloggers will take up the slack and get more investigative (that's the a main source of uncensored insights anyway) 10 years from now, journalism will be taught in kindergarten.
Pat Tanzola
“ Ms Yeo makes good observations and makes them eloquently. However, the political, economic and technology drivers of change in our modern world lead us to this place. The closing question is a good one. How will evolving media enable critical political dialog? Ken White contends that newspapers in New York responded to political needs 110 years ago, later to be co-opted by advertising. Web 2.0 is still nascent, and is already heavily dependent on advertising revenues, likely muting political discussion and dissent. Let's temper the mythology of a "free press" and not over-emphasize the role of new media. Even in the good old days information sources were varied and conversations were not exclusively pursued on editorial pages. Correspondence, personal meetings, public debates, lectures, academic journals, books, plays, songs, and more informed an individual's opinions and world views. No matter what is happening at CanWest, Ms. Yeo is able to pursue these options online and off. The demise of the traditional 'fifth estate', may have fewer implications on anyone's access to investigative reports and information and far more implications for "social control". Mass media has shaped our culture and our politics. The eroding roles of major dailies and network TV leaves a hole among our political institutions and our commercial institutions. Some other institutions (governments, telco's, Sony, Google, Microsoft, and others) will have to determine if a diffused information universe serves their interests. The Chinese are intervening to manage the flow of information, and others may pursue more discreet strategies. New actors will have to battle hard to gain subscribers. Local, regional, and national journals, blogs and e-zines will have stiff competition. Whither The Mark?
Ross Gentleman
“ 1. A really big institution, the NY Times, is doing more innovation in the new media environment than many of the experiments you cite. 2. I'm not sure why the partisan rants (mostly) of The Tyee, for example, improve journalism. Nothing wrong with partisan rants, but they aren't the most useful type of journalism, to my mind. Digging deeply for significant facts is... where are the online media's "scoops." 3. Interesting that the 140-character media, Twitter, combined with Twitpic, are leading the coverage of the current Iranian crisis/revolution. 4. No, the question we need to answer is how do we figure out how good journalists can get the resources (which means being paid somehow) in order to do solid online journalism. If you've seen that answered, let me know. 5. Groups (diverse or otherwise) do not converse online; individuals do. That's one of the real limitations of the medium.
Neale Adams