The early Spring of 2009 is feeling like something of a turning point in the development of 21st century journalism. Jon Stewart was hailed by many as a latter-day Edward R Murrow for calling bullshit on CNBC, and the practice of business journalism generally, as the US and global economy careened into its present crisis. A few days later, Clay Shirky posted Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, a thoughtful analysis on where we are currently with regard to newspapers and the internet, which set many tongues tweeting. (His conclusion? We’re living in 1500.) Meanwhile, the recession is hastening in a matter of months what the internet started two decades ago, putting journalists out of work and either closing newspapers or forcing them into online-only operations.
All of this has coincided with a module I teach on media economics, and specifically that part of the unit where we look at precisely the issues addressed in Shirky’s piece. The last time I taught this unit, in 2007, the students merely tolerated the section on newspapers, finding it difficult to engage with compared to the sections on the music, film and TV industries. Who can blame them? To the average 22 year old, a newspaper is something their parents might use, like hair dye or an orthopaedic girdle. But now, in 2009, the carnage in the newspaper industry is such that the students are transfixed, and eager to attain a grasp of the underlying dynamics.
The issue is where the economics of the crisis in newspapers affects the quality or otherwise of the journalism available to the citizenry. The crux of Shirky’s critique is this:
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
What hasn’t stopped being a problem, however, is what that “something” is. The newspaper is a coincidence of corporate property rights, advertising revenue and viable audiences. The evidence that the accidental circumstances which gave rise to that coincidence were not only temporary, but are drawing to a close, is everywhere. I agree with Clay Shirky that nothing will necessarily replace the newspaper, and indeed that it is foolish to try and predict what other forms may take its place. However, the fact that journalism under corporate ownership has failed us so often for so long – with journalists in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and to the current economic crisis, often more akin to stenographers than seekers of truth – does not mean we should give no thought to what will replace it. On the contrary, as Robert McChesney argues forcefully in Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and The Future of Media, this task is one that urgently faces not just academics, policy elites and bloggers, but citizens in general.
There are those, especially within the newspaper business itself, who argue balefully that meaningful investigative reporting cannot survive without something like the current business model itself to sustain it – what Shirky dismisses as the “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” model. On the other hand, there are those – they seem to have been around for ever, even if it is only 15 years or so – who evangelise breathlessly for the democratic potential of so-called citizen journalism. As web technologies advance, as the web allows for (but doesn’t itself provide) greater degrees and varieties of participation, so the breathless excitement of the evangelists renews – bubbles, wars, recessions and stolen elections notwithstanding.
As ever, I will turn to the voice of reason, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks :
Since the end of the 1990s there has been significant criticism of this early conception of the democratizing effects of the Internet. One line of critique includes variants of the Babel objection: the concern that information overload will lead to fragmentation of discourse, polarization, and the loss of political community. A different and descriptively contradictory line of critique suggests that the Internet is, in fact, exhibiting concentration: Both infrastructure and, more fundamentally, patterns of attention are much less distributed than we thought. As a consequence, the Internet diverges from the mass media much less than we thought in the 1990s and significantly less than we might hope.
These sobering words aside, Benkler’s overall view is one of cautious, evidence-based optimism for the online public sphere. More recently, in a letter to The New Republic, he predicted its early features:
- Surviving elements of the old system, unchanged, such as the BBC and the New York Times;
- Small-scale commercial media (along the lines of Talking Points Memo);
- New, volunteer-driven party presses;
- Newly-effective nonprofits, like the Sunlight Foundation;
- Individuals in networks
We may also point to other phenomena that may prove important. As more and more media outlets, like The Guardian, make their API available, the scope for developers, activists, journalists and others to make use of such content in new and unpredictable ways increases exponentially. This is a trend which should be supported, and public institutions, government agencies and private corporations encouraged to join. The information that, in the 20th century, had to be dragged out of an organisation by the plucky journalist could, in the 21st, flow automatically across the internet if the public, legal and legislative pressure for it is in place. Then what about all those journalists being laid off? Are they all set to retire, or become florists? I don’t think so. Many will find new ways to put their talent, their contacts and their experience to good use. Rupert Murdoch’s loss could yet be the New Journalism’s gain.
Filed under: Journalism, Media economics, api, bbc, clay shirky, cnbc, corporate media, guardian, jim kramer, jon stewart, newspapers, robert w mcchesney, sunlight foundation, talking points memo, web, yochai benkler
