As onlookers watch the slow death of the newspaper, a new book by author George Brock looks at a hopeful future for news and journalism in digital and social media.
Discussed in this article: Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age by George Brock. Buy at Kogan Page USA or Amazon.
Newspaper. What does the word even mean anymore?
I get much of my news from BBC podcasts on my smartphone, NPR on my trusty AM/FM radio, and I don’t own a TV.
My daily news diet comes from Twitter, which is my morning and evening paper. Many of the links I come across are to news stories from The New York Times, but I only occasionally click on those because I don’t have a subscription and get tired of being told I have used up my monthly quota. Via Twitter, I read blogs and news stories in mainstream media but don’t much care about the brand. Wired. Washington Post. Fast Company. Whatever. Paper does not come into my life much, save for hard copies of The New Republic, The New Yorker, and so on.
Why Newspapers Are Dying
There is a newspaper in my town, but it seems to be used mainly by elderly folks who peruse the obituaries and parents who follow high school sports, and who needs a print version (plus access to one of the world’s clunkiest web sites) of stuff like that for $202.80 a year?
Plus, if I need to look at classified ads, there is Craigslist.
My local paper doesn’t even serve the function it served for me when I was 12 or so, as providing me with my first job — delivering newspapers on my bike. Adults in cars do that now.
I know an academic who subscribes to our local paper mainly to support local news—even though the paper is actually owned by an out-of-town corporation. I suppose if you have a compelling need to know which of your neighbors has been arrested for drunk driving or an act of vandalism, $202.80 a year is a small price to pay.
Speaking of small, the paper itself has shrunk so much in size and number of pages that it doesn’t even fill the windows of the self-service bins in which it vended to people who buy copies that way — a visual encapsulation of the slow death of the newspaper.
The Newspaper Crisis Is Here, and No One Cares
Newspapers are in crisis. Does anybody care? Does it matter?
The academic and former journalist George Brock does. His book chronicles the history and state of what we usually refer to as “mainstream journalism.” Though the picture he paints of the future of many once securely entrenched media giants and practices is a gloomy one (and he is admirably frank about his own missteps as new media came into its own), he sees the future as fairly bright for the provision of news — even if it might not take the form of what we have been tutored to think of as “journalism,” which he points out is fairly new in that the supposedly unbiased, objective took form only around the early and mid 20th century.
Much of the book is UK-focused, but that is just as well. We Americans need to understand how British media types operate. There is such a thing as overkill, though: there is an entire chapter about the Leveson inquiry, and much of it does not really have much to do with digital media, which is the supposed focus of the book.
The New York Times announcing the Armistice with Germany. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As someone who does not make her living as a journalist but who follows the news and loves writing, I must admit I read certain passages in Brock with a happy glow of schadenfreude. Brock writes, for example, “…the era in which technology, capital and self-confidence allowed journalists to operate as a club closed to outside inspection is over.” So much for the better in terms of accountability to the public and diversity. Those of us who grew up in regions that were pretty much ignored by the New York/Washington media establishment, who are female, or who are not white can only say of the growth of new media and social media, “Hurray!! About time, too!”
Brock has little time for elitist posturing and self-appointed agenda setters in the ranks of mainstream journalists, saying, “Journalism should ask what people need to know, but it must also take account what they want to know.” And sometimes that can be a little on the prurient side.
It really is not until the fourth chapter (the first three chapters are mostly a potted history of journalism in Britain, the U.S. with occasional references to Japan, France, the Netherlands, etc. but forget about most of the rest of the world including Canada) that the book starts to take off. Brock has an endearing way of noting his own inability to really grasp what was happening to journalism in the age of the Web. He writes, “…many people — myself and many journalists included — treated the internet as a new publishing system. It was faster and cheaper, but did people really want to read on computer screens what they could get on paper?”
Those of us who don’t bother with newspapers and subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines can only nod in agreement at this, “It may one day in the future seem odd that societies had a large group of well-paid professionals whose job it was to select and provide the words and images that people looked at in order to know the world beyond what they could see and hear with their own eyes and ears.” For all the talk of the need for “curation,” these are sobering words for those who want careers in journalism these days.
The Honest Reporter in Our Living Room
Brock sums up the way we used to get our news, “People in the second half of the 20th century made appointments with news media: a nightly habit of watching the main television news being the commonest.” And even now, the arrival of the newspaper on Sunday morning keeps many people contented for much of the day. But that generation is dying off, and the papers are getting thinner and thinner as ads disappear and staffs are cut. In my Oregon hometown, for example, the local newspaper is selling its building and the statewide newspaper (The Oregonian) is paring back home delivery. Our appointments with newspapers are being cancelled by the newspapers themselves.
And what is happening in my small Oregon town is echoed throughout the U.S. and abroad. As Brock says, “When people speak of the economic crisis that threatens news, they usually speak of famous, national titles. The threat to local papers is larger and more immediate.” But as I look back on it, did my local paper ever really improve my community? Does it matter if it dies? Not particularly. That is probably true of most small daily papers. Nostalgia for the idea of a local paper is not the same thing as hard-headed analysis of its societal value.
For those that suggest that business models based on reader loyalty alone will save newspapers as ad revenue shrivels, Brock replies, “Asking readers and viewers to pay for news journalism directly and the cost it takes to produce [it] did not work. And it never has.” And even those of us who love crowdfunding know that can go only so far.
Brock, as an insider, knows all too well the sense of entitlement that suffuses the journalism profession, saying, “in the main journalists are convinced or easily persuaded that what they do is so good or important that someone should pay them to do it.” He drily adds, “This feeling does not equate to a business model.”
One could also argue that many journalists have jobs at all because of the very technologies that have costs the jobs of many of their peers. Brock notes that, “The majority of new tools coming into use to manage abundant data have not been invented in buildings occupied by journalists.” Want to be a journalist? Study computer or information science.
Just What is a Newspaper, Anyway?
As I asked above, what does the word “newspaper” mean anymore? Brock says, “The term ‘newspaper’ is now awkwardly stretched to cover print, tablet editions, mobile-compatible output and millions of pages in the online archive.” The same could be said of the word “magazine.”
Brock’s discussion of the pros and cons of paywalls alone is worth the price of his book. In a nutshell: still too early to tell what works in that line.
One glaring error in Brock’s book is that he attributes the publication in 1998 and its later retraction of a now utterly discredited article by the British physician Andrew Wakefield to the British Medical Journal. It was The Lancet that published both the article and the retraction. This is a major mistake given how crucial credibility is for medical journals.
Given that I am writing this article for a niche website, I loved this passage, “Since there is no space constraint on the web, long-form writing may flower. Much long-form will continue to appear in print, but there will also be sites specializing in writing of length and depth outside of academic journals. A few such sites for a general readership already exist.” Amen, brother!
The concluding chapter of the book “Clues to the Future” could have used a discussion of crowdfunding for certain journalism projects (see, for example, the Journalism category on Kickstarter).
And it would have been nice if Brock had at least mentioned the rise in the last few years of the mostly online-only news sites on the right such as Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Townhall, and The Blaze. How are they funded (schlocky ads seem to be a major source of revenue for many of them) and how do they fit into Brock’s schema? They are not notable for any love of objectivity, but they appear to be surviving. These sites are an understudied phenomenon, perhaps because their readers are mostly angry white males and that is not a favored demographic of journalism professors.
As a non-journalist who has reveled in the flowering of substantive writing by non-journalists since the Web began to disrupt the media world, I got a little bored with Brock’s paeans to journalism as a profession (he himself points out that think tanks and advocacy organizations are often just as effective as journalists in exposing and righting injustices).
All journalists and certainly journalism students should read this book. And bloggers and technologists interested in the media biz should, too.
Related articles
The post Death by 1,000 Clicks: How the News Industry Lost its Way in the Digital Age appeared first on Critical Margins.
