the net

			
13 May 2008

			
Will Newspapers Be First Against the Wall?

			
By Jason Wilson

						

																											

						
Recent discussions about the impact of technology on politics and the media have raised more questions than they've answered, writes Jason Wilson


			I've spent the last three weeks trying to come to grips with the future. 


My first sniff at the winds of change came at an academic conference called Politics:Web 2.0, held at Royal Holloway in the UK last month, which looked at the impact of new media technologies on politics, governance and the public sphere. Then, at the beginning of May, I listened in to Australian journalists talking to each other about their own prospects at MEAA's The Future of Journalism talkfest, held in Sydney at the ABC. 




After all that talking you'd think I'd be confident to say where we are headed, but I've come out of these events with a range of important questions unanswered. 




Prominent speakers at both conferences agreed on some central claims. One was that technology-led changes to politics and communications are not some remote prospect, but are upon us - the future, in effect, is now. 




Another was that politics and media "as usual" will not survive the revolutionary impact of these technologies, and that existing institutions must either adapt or decline. 




If there were differences across the two conferences, it was in their attitudes towards these changes. At P:W2, many spoke of participatory media platforms - blogs, social media and other platforms for user-generated content - as democratising, as promoting political participation, as stimulating and multiplying practices of citizenship, and as usefully busting the mainstream media's regressive monopoly on political speech. Some speakers at FoJ were less sanguine. 




At P:W2, Steven Coleman from the University of Leeds insisted that the appetite for citizen participation in policymaking had been decisively awakened in the Web 2.0 era, and that the system of government he calls "representative compromise" was in crisis. He argued that it would soon be eroded by more immediate, more responsive, web-powered forms of governance. Sternly, he warned that government tokenism or cynicism about participation would only exacerbate problems, increasing disengagement and disillusionment. 




Also speaking on governance at the conference, Rachel Gibson from the University of Manchester argued that politics was increasingly becoming a "trickle-up" rather than a top-down affair, again due to the enormous impact of the web on "cultures of participation", particularly among young people. She argued that the Web as an "environment" hosts an ever-greater proportion of our social and cultural life. Politics is, in a sense, being "amateurised". 




In these and other plenaries, we were told that major changes in the conduct of politics had already taken place. There was broad agreement that present participatory trends had a political significance at least equal to the introduction of television (or even the printing press), that political and media institutions needed urgently to change, and that all this meant that citizens were freer, more engaged and more empowered. As is so often the case in discussions of the future, the habits of the young were a particular focal point. Many papers I heard in the parallel sessions bought into this logic and tried to fill it out with examples of political bloggers or blogging politicians, campaigns spilling over onto social networking services and online political activism. 




All of these are significant up to a point, but are they actually changing election results or enlarging political participation, let alone influencing policy outcomes? And what is its relevance across political systems? 




There's no doubt that candidates like Barack Obama have galvanised the web-savvy elements of their base and enlarged their flow of small donations by boosting their online presence. But it's really the supply-chain of money and volunteer labour that's changed - any funds raised are inevitably spent on big-budget advertising campaigns in traditional media outlets. 




Mainstream "old" media is still the big focus of political parties' communication strategies. Kevin Rudd, for example, used online campaigning to accentuate rather than carry his message of change in the 2007 Australian Federal Election, focussing on old media advertising and face-to-face campaigning. Fair enough - international research (such as the Project for Excellence in Journalism surveys) shows that old media (television, newspapers and radio) are still far more important as "primary sources" for election news than online news outlets. 




There's no doubt that the audience for online news and political discussion is growing, but how many of them are simply omnivorous consumers of all forms of political information? Are online political forums really enhancing political participation, or just providing more options for those who are already information-rich? 




I'm inclined to return to the recommendations of my colleague Terry Flew in the face of the first wave of internet utopianism: that we focus on specific, situated and empirically grounded analysis rather than general claims about epochal change. P:W2 featured some really excellent papers involving social network mapping, the close analysis of campaign blogging, and reports on experiments in citizen journalism. But I felt that at some points there was too much of a focus on potential as opposed to analysis of what is. 




Back in Australia at FoJ, Roy Greenslade - Guardian blogger, City University Professor and widely experienced newspaper journo - was a big drawcard. Although he constantly protested that he was "not a guru" and didn't have any special insights into the future, Greenslade predicted fairly confidently that in the not-too-distant future, most Western countries would be deprived of all their hard-copy newspapers except for a national journal of record, largely bought by those who were already "information-rich".  




In the future, journalism will be online and multimedia, knocked out by convergent newsrooms. Jay Rosen, Phil Meyer and Margaret Simons all agreed with these basic assertions. Greenslade was bold enough to tell a forum organised by Australia's journalists' union that journos would simply have to "work harder" to survive in the new environment.




It's no surprise that some journalists are alarmed by these claims and the underlying developments that make them credible. Some in the audience pointed out that they were already under considerable pressure, and that standards were being compromised by under-resourcing and time pressures, while others questioned the quality of citizen-led journalism. 




They might well have been further depressed by the enthusiasm of those at the upper echelons of media organisations for digitisation, further multiskilling, and harnessing user-generated content. Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, was particularly enthused by the possibilities for harnessing the creativity of the ABC's audience. Journalists at the gathering would have been aware of their own union's campaign against job cuts at the broadcaster. It might be hard for some to separate Scott's enthusiasms for cost-cutting and the participatory revolution. 




Time and again, conversation returned to money and jobs: who will pay for journalism in the future, and in particular, who will pay for "quality" journalism? As advertising revenues decline, and without the traditional patronage of the press barons, it's difficult to see how expensive, protracted forms of investigative journalism can survive. 




Eric Beecher reassured the audience the Crikey's model is profitable, and John Cokley from UQ urged more entrepreneurial behaviours on journalists, but it's hard to see how low-overhead internet newspapers or a galaxy of vulnerable sole traders could sustain regular, in-depth investigations - the kind that break stories on deeply concealed government corruption or corporate malfeasance. Despite several attempts, I never felt that anyone got to grips with this question. That's no surprise - it's frighteningly difficult. 




There was some cheer. Newspapers in Australia are still by and large very profitable, free newspapers appear to be delaying the demise of the medium, and senior spokespeople for media organisations at the event voiced their ongoing commitment to quality content. 




For this observer, it seemed that some of the gloom came from the "metrocentric", broadsheet/public service broadcasting emphases of the event. The "quality" media are themselves niche products in important ways, and last year's blogosphere/broadsheet bust-ups showed that some journalists are as concerned about their own authority as pundits being diminished as their bosses are about the bottom line. In a sense, it's the quality media that has the most to lose from the rise of an online commentariat. 




I wanted to hear much more about the impacts of user-generated content, digitisation and convergence in country newsrooms, trade publications and suburban freebies (I didn't even hear much mention of The Courier-Mail or West Australian). Together, such outlets are huge employers of journalists, and I imagine that there are success stories outside the golden triangle of Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra, where editors and journalists have grasped new media opportunities with pluck and imagination. At times I felt I was eavesdropping on the venting of metropolitan neuroses. 




Together the conferences underscored a range of questions rather than answering them. If we really do need quality journalism, how is it going to be financed? How can we ensure that participatory new media platforms fulfill the promises made of them? In the face of widespread change, how can we retain the social goods that arise both from journalism and democratic institutions? How can we ensure that the benefits of participatory culture are distributed widely and fairly? What does media change mean for the relationship between media and politics? What are the best ways for finding all of this out? 




On the last question, at least, we are making a start. 


						

	
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					niccolo 14/05/08 3:54PM

					

						
Actually, I think its the other way around: successful media conglomerates will upgrade print news rooms to be multimedia news rooms at the centre of their corporate multi-platform content creation. 


Indeed, according to telecommunications industry analyst Pau Budde, newspapers are actually doing better in the digital age than TV. 


Also, newspaper production has been online since the mid-80s when Murdoch drove anti-union efficiency gains throughout News Corp and the wider industry using the Cybergraphic (digital, distributed, wires, copy, layout, editing) and News Man (a global news printing system) production systems. 


Famously smashing the Fleet St unions under Thatcher by setting-up a modern news paper production system at Wapping using technology and experts sourced from Australia. 


Multi-media news room or news room of the future projects have been a kind of rolling pet project of news IT departments since computerisation began. Many of the senior IT people in news come from early Cybergraphics days. 


The Cybergraphics system uses a kind of markup, akin to HTML, and so the migration from print to web is actually a marginal change, not a quantum leap. Rueters and others  have been pushing an XML standard called NewsML, a multi-media converged news interchange language. 


Quality journalism products rarely makes money; national mastheads are subsidised by more popular and profitable papers which make money from larger circulation, advertising and sideline products like mobile phone competitions etc Nationwide News = The Australian + The Daily Telegraph, News International = The Times of London + The Sun +The News of The World, soon  News Corp = The Wall Street Journal + The New York Post. 


A PBS Frontline documentary, News War, explores the fact that the ads that supported quality investigative reporting, through intra-company or in-paper advertising-to-editorial subsidies, are now being captured online by Yahoo and Google. The search engines are becoming advertising corporations. 


Google alone owns close to 70% of GLOBAL internet advertising (includes the purchase of DoubleClick). Google (and Yahoo etc) essentially have a parasitic relationship with content makers and providers. They contribute relatively nothing from their search and display internet ads to editorial. Only the tiny amounts web publishers make from Google Ads. Clearly, there is plenty of money in internet advertising, but practically nothing is reaching the content makers. Clearly, anti-trust or other legal actions against Google could focus on somekind of redresing this imablance. 


The other major theme in PBS’s News War, is that the logic of global capital markets and corporate profits makes news organisations simply another production system, another kind of factory, producing just another product. The important democratic function of news is irrelevant at best, or a dangerous distraction at worst. There is some talk of placing news papers etc into Trusts or other non or less profit entities a la The Guardian. 


Corporate media love citizen journalism because, like sports, reality TV and game shows, the quality is low, the volume high, and evem with some basic editing, they are very cheap to make and contain some weak but popular democratic elements. Rueters and others outsource news editing to India, which still costs, wouldnt it be great, if readers did it ? 


There are lots of books and studies about the collapse or hyper-commercialisation of corporate news rooms, and the rise of a outsourced news production (bloggers etc), but almost nothing about the economics of news or media. All of this knowledge has been captured by an increasingly concentrated group of corporate executives and managers and embedded within market making news corporations. 


No doubt only the whacky, the brave or the marginal mentioned or even thought about the best yet work on the realities of corporate news media: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media. Last year in Windsor, Canada, a conference was held: 20 Years of Propaganda. Herman and Chomsky talked about updating the book to include the Internet. 


But, these topics are outside of the range of politie acceptable discussion. Ownership, corporatisation and control are replaced with citizen journalism, convergance and pluralism.

					



					niccolo 14/05/08 4:07PM

					

						
As to Internet-based participatory democracy, Obama Barrack is looking to extend his master of netroots activism via such platforms by fellow Harvard alumni as Facebook into the US government. Essentially a social network mass-muedia manufacturing of consent, again, outsourced to the corporate sector. http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/#transparent-democracy

					



					rafael 14/05/08 6:20PM

					

						
in a city like canberra  the "candy times " could wipe out advertisers off the tv if they dropped a free paper on the front lawn every morn.


would an advertiser try and work out which station to use or use letter box "cattle dogs" if the paper has the town covered


with a blanket coverage advertising would go up.only 14% revenue is gained from selling it